Ted Cruz grumbled about the “stupid and unfair” interview he had with Tucker Carlson, whose “irrelevant gotcha” question regarding the Israel-Iran conflict generated plenty of anti-Cruz reaction.
On the Friday episode of his podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz, the hawkish Texas senator downplayed telling the ex-Fox News host he didn’t know the population of Iran. At the same time, Cruz claimed the correct answer—about 90 million—was actually what he was going to say when Carlson asked, but didn’t.
“I thought about it for a second, and realized I didn’t actually know the exact population of Iran, and so I just said, ‘I don’t know.’ And he did the sort of classic Tucker: ‘What!? How can you not know that!?’” Cruz said, imitating Carlson.
Carlson was “vibrating and looking as if I had, you know, admitted to… committing treason or something,” Cruz continued. “And I just said, ‘Look, I don’t memorize population tables.’ And he comes in with great, great joy and says—and I asked him, I said, ‘What’s the population of Iran?’ He says, ’92 million!’”
“Actually, according to the Google searches afterwards, it’s 89 million, so he was off 3 million, which I think is funny because I assume he Google searched it right before the interview so he could do his little gotcha,” Cruz went on.
The exact number varies depending on the source and the last time it was updated. The CIA estimated the population at 88.4 million last year, while United Nations data obtained by Worldometer has it as 92.4 million as of this month.
In any event, Cruz claimed he really was going to say 90 million anyway.
“I’ll confess this may not be terribly credible, but the truth of the matter is: In my head, what I was going to say if I was guessing was 90 million, so I actually felt pretty good,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Huh, all right, pretty damn close.’ But I said, ‘Look, what difference does it make if it’s 90 million, or 80 million, or 100 million?’”
“And the reason I didn’t want to posit a guess is because stupid and unfair interviews—you play gotchas on this,“ he went on, arguing that the exact population wasn’t important to the discussion.
“At the end of the day, what I was talking about—which is the Ayatollah, a theocratic radical lunatic who chants ‘Death to America’ and is trying to develop a nuclear weapon—the threat of that is not remotely different whether Iran has a population of 80 million, 90 million, or 100 million.”
“So it was an irrelevant gotcha, but that little clip, what Tucker did is he released it a day before the whole interview,” Cruz said. “So he picked—out of two hours—he thought that was the best 60 seconds ‘cause he did get me to say the words ‘I don’t know,’ and he felt very gleeful on that.”
Cruz maintained that he was still glad he agreed to the interview because he wanted to make clear that “Donald Trump is right and Tucker Carlson is wrong on Israel and Iran.”
Still, the discussion could have been much better.
“When he doesn’t like what you’re saying, he interrupts. He gets snarky. He insults you,” Cruz said. “That’s fine. I mean, he decided he wanted this interview to be the two of us screaming at each other, so that’s what it ended up being.”
“There’s a reason he wanted to start with that clip, and that clip went viral, and that’s fine,” Cruz said. “But there’s a reason he wanted to start with that clip, because the rest of the interview, Tucker’s positions on Israel were very clear. He didn’t want to stand with Israel. He was… deeply opposed to Israel, and he was deeply opposed to President Trump’s policy. And, in fact, he had been in writing and vocally attacking President Trump, and he didn’t want to talk about that in terms of putting it out there.”
Last week, Carlson said Trump was “complicit” in Israel’s attack on Iran, further heightening tension within the GOP over the right course of action in the Middle East.
The post Ted Cruz Sings the Blues About Tucker Carlson’s ‘Gotcha’ Interview appeared first on The Daily Beast.
