Donald Trump‘s wide-ranging 60 Minutes interview did not include one moment, when he praised the new owners of CBS parent Paramount and the “great new leader” put in charge of the news division, Bari Weiss.
“I see good things happening in the news,” Trump said. “I really do. And I think one of the best things to happen is this show and new ownership, CBS and new ownership. I think it’s the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.”
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The interview was his first with 60 Minutes in five years, and the first since suing CBS over the way that the show edited an October 2024 interview with Kamala Harris. CBS parent Paramount Global settled the lawsuit for $16 million, even though it previously said that it was baseless and many legal experts saw it as dubious. That settlement was widely seen as a way to remove a hurdle to obtaining the Trump administration’s regulatory approval for Skydance’s purchase of Paramount, something that happened a couple of weeks later.
Since then, CBS under new owner David Ellison has made a series of moves that have been seen as efforts to shift the news division rightward, and perhaps appease the White House. That has included the hiring of an ombudsman from a rightward think tank. Last month, Ellison tapped Bari Weiss, founder of the center right opinion site Free Press, as the editor-in-chief of the news division.
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Trump said, “I don’t know her [Weiss], but I hear she’s a great person. But 60 Minutes was forced to pay me — a lot of money because they took her [Harris’] answer out that was so bad, it was election-changing, two nights before the election. And they put a new answer in. And they paid me a lot of money for that. You can’t have fake news. You’ve gotta have legit news.”
Although Trump’s comments on CBS News and Weiss didn’t air during the broadcast, Norah O’Donnell, who conducted the interview, told viewers of the Paramount settlement, but noted it “did not include an apology or an admission of wrongdoing.”
The Harris interview aired October 7, weeks before the election. The show aired the first part of her answer to a question on a Face the Nation preview a day earlier, and the second part of the answer on the 60 Minutes broadcast — editing techniques common across the networks.
The irony is that Trump’s CBS sit-down itself was heavily edited, given that an extended version posted online lasted 73 minutes, but only about 28 minutes aired. When CBS settled with Trump, the network said that the show would also publish the unedited transcript of complete interviews with presidential candidates, which it did in the president’s case. “Network edits, you say? Lawsuit time,” Meidas Touch, the anti-Trump publisher, riffed after the interview.
Weiss’ hire has put a new level of scrutiny on the news division, and O’Donnell’s interview with Trump is likely to be picked apart for what was left in and what was left out, and for questions asked and those not addressed. O’Donnell pressed him on issues like the government shutdown, Venezuela and China, as well as his recent pardon of the founder of the crypto marketplace Binance, Changpeng Zhao.
“I don’t know who he is,” Trump said of the man he pardoned.
She also pressed him on the ICE raids that have seen so many social media videos of masked agents hauling off parents in front of their children.
O’Donnell asked, “Americans have been watching videos of ICE tackling a young mother, tear gas being used in a Chicago residential neighborhood, and the smashing of car windows. Have some of these raids gone too far?”
“No. I think they haven’t gone far enough because we’ve been held back by the judges, by the liberal judges that were put in by Biden and by Obama,” Trump said.
Also covered for a bit on the broadcast was what is likely to be a major issue of Tuesday’s off-year elections: The high cost of living, as inflation has gone up, not down, this year. Trump told O’Donnell that she was “wrong” that grocery prices have gone up. He also claimed that the economy was doing great, that 401(k)s have doubled, even as his treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said earlier Sunday that some sectors of the economy are in recession.
At least in the broadcast portion, there were no major blowups, as there was when Trump last sat down with the show, in 2020 with Lesley Stahl.
O’Donnell faced the same problem that any other journalist granted a sit-down with Trump faces: As he fires off dubious claims and falsities, the interview risks getting bogged down in fact checking. Instead, she generally picked her battles, pressing the president on critical points, but letting other claims slide, as when he said that he had “solved eight wars.”
O’Donnell had some tense back and forths with Trump, as she tried to hold him to claims that he and the GOP have a healthcare plan alternative to Obamacare, something that even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has questioned.
Trump at times went into default mode, which is to say that he blamed Joe Biden or Barack Obama. When it came to the rising cost of health insurance premiums, at the center of the Democrats’ demands to end the government shutdown, Trump pledged that “all they have to do is let the country open and we’ll fix it.”
“Mr. President, with all due respect, you’ve been talking about fixing the healthcare insurance plan since 2015,” O’Donnell said.
Trump continued on, insisting there was a fix.
“But where is that plan?” O’Donnell asked.
Trump never answered.
O’Donnell also questioned the Trump administration’s prosecution of opponents, including James Comey, Letitia James and John Bolton.
“Did you instruct the Department of Justice to go after them?”
“Not in any way, shape or form,” Trump said. “You don’t have to instruct them because they were so dirty.”
The show aired Trump’s Truth Social post from September, when he addressed his attorney general, Pam Bondi, directly, and said that Comey and James were “guilty as hell” and “justice must be served now.” Comey was indicted five days later, and James later in the month.
“Is this retribution?” O’Donnell asked.
“Oh, it’s the opposite. I think I’ve been very mild-mannered.”
State sponsored television.
All about the Benjamins
Time to sue CBS.
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I’ve lost all interest in and respect for ’60 Minutes’. The kid-glove handling of Trump is a disservice to the audience. These people are hacks.