Fox News hosts hailed 60 Minutes’ tightly condensed sitdown with Donald Trump as a victory for the president.
Greg Gutfeld saw the half-hour interview between Trump and CBS News star Norah O’Donnell as the president’s way of getting payback from a network he has long accused of favoring his rival Kamala Harris.
“I didn’t see that as an interview. I saw it as a victim-offender mediation,” he said on The Five. “That’s restorative justice. Trump’s vibe is all of us regarding legacy in traditional media: He’s reversing the charges. We all feel this way. Now, when the media shows up, they have to be on their toes, not you.”
O’Donnell’s 90-minute conversation with Trump was edited for TV, leaving out a testy exchange over the pardon of a crypto billionaire and the president’s pointed swipes about the massive payout he got from the network’s parent company, Paramount, over the Harris interview debacle.
A full transcript of the interview published by CBS showed Trump getting upset when O’Donnell pressed him about “the appearance of corruption” in his pardon of Changpeng Zhao, whose crypto empire has ties to Trump family businesses despite the president claiming not to know him.
“I’d rather not have you ask the question. But I let you ask it,” he snapped. “I coulda walked away. I didn’t have to answer this question.”
In another instance, Trump bragged that Paramount paid him “a lotta money” to settle his long-standing grievance over a 60 Minutes interview with Harris last year, which the president claimed was edited to make her appear more favorable to voters.
Neither interaction, however, made it to the final broadcast.
“The media is like that lazy, terrible student jock that blew off four years of classes—from ‘20 to ‘24—so now they’re back. They’ve lost all privileges, all benefits. They’re in the doghouse,” Gutfeld claimed, later adding that Fox was “exempt” from his critique because it didn’t report on “hoaxes” such as Russian interference in the 2016 elections and Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“They’re under house arrest,” he said of the media. “They have to do a lot to get us to trust them again. We’re hurt, you know.”
Emily Compagno gave the interview an “A Plus.”
“He was coming out of the gate, charging out and demonstrating what leadership looks like. It was such a calm confidence,” she said. “So to me, it was almost like a victory lap. But he was sort of coming out there on his own terms as a power flex. I mean, saying on their own network, yeah, you had to pay me a lot of money.”
Conservative British pundit Piers Morgan similarly said he was struck by how enjoyable the interview turned out.
“Not only was it enjoyable to watch—unusual for a Trump mainstream media encounter, normally very acrimonious, very adversarial—I thought it was mutually robust, but also it had a civil tone to it. I thought everyone was the winner from that interview. That’s how presidential interviews ought to be conducted,” he said.
Morgan knows a thing or two about presidential interviews: in 2022, Trump told the British journalist’s TV crew to “turn the camera off” and called him “very dishonest” during a heated sitdown. Trump later accused Morgan of “deceptively” editing their conversation to stir publicity.
The Daily Beast has reached out to CBS News for comment.
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