Trump’s 60 Minutes Interview Was So Much Crazier Than We Realized
CBS edited large chunks out of the segment, and it was still bonkers.

Bari Weiss’s 60 Minutes edited its latest interview with Donald Trump to make the octogenarian’s responses appear much more sane than they actually were.
During one exchange between Trump and host Ross Douthat on the topic of Ukraine, the staff at 60 Minutes decided to trim several sections of Trump’s response that included false claims or total fabrications.
“There’s still a war going on. What’s the biggest obstacle to peace?” asked Douthat.
“It was the hatred between [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskiy and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” Trump said in the version of the program that aired Sunday.
But much more was left on the cutting room floor, according to an unedited version published Decoding Fox News founder Juliet Jeske.
“I believe that we’re very close to making a deal,” Trump said. “And I think it—two things, if I were president, because as you know, well you’re not going to admit it, it was rigged. That’s why I did it a third time. If I was president that war would have never started.”
During another portion of the interview, 60 Minutes cut Trump’s answer when he attempted to puff himself up as tough on Russia and soft on Ukraine: “Look what I did to them as an example. I gave them the anti-tank busters, right?”
“I’ve given them, in fact there’s an old statement, that [Barack] Obama gave them sheets, and I gave them anti-tank busters, okay? That’s what I gave them,” Trump said.
“But now it’s Europe supplying weapons, not us?” asked Douthat.
No, it’s us. We’re supplying the weapons, Europe is paying for them,” Trump answered. “Here’s the difference: [Joe] Biden gave them $350 billion worth of cash and weapons. I gave them nothing.”
It’s not unusual for news programs to edit interviews before they go live on-air. But there is a deep irony that Trump seems perfectly content to have his answers edited for time and clarity, little more than two years after he went on a rampage against CBS News for doing the same to Kamala Harris while she was on the 2024 campaign trail.
At the time, Trump insisted that the network had selectively edited Harris’s answers to a question regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump sued the network for $10 billion after the interview, claiming that the different clips were tantamount to “election interference” and merited CBS losing its broadcast license. CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, settled the lawsuit for $16 million the following year.
But Trump’s campaign against 60 Minutes initiated its reputational descent. In the months that followed the settlement, Paramount Global merged with Skydance, allowing CBS News to be taken over by David Ellison, the son of Trump’s good friend Larry Ellison.
The younger Ellison thereafter appointed Free Press founder Weiss to run the CBS newsroom, despite the fact that she had zero qualifications to do so. Weiss has since dismantled large portions of CBS, including 60 Minutes, forcing out dozens of highly esteemed anchors, correspondents, and producers in the process, and replacing them with the likes of Douthat, a former conservative columnist for The New York Times.
Weiss’s indisputably negative impact on CBS News was made apparent last week during Election Night, when the network’s ratings finished dead last among all major broadcasters and cable networks, according to Nielsen data obtained by media reporter Brain Stelter.



