CBS announced Tuesday that
Donald Trump backed out of an interview on “60 Minutes” after previously agreeing to it, a characterization of events that the former president’s campaign has disputed.
The network said that Trump and Vice President
Kamala Harris each agreed to be interviewed for a special Monday episode about the election — and that Harris’s interview was moving forward with correspondent Bill Whitaker.
Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter.
“After initially accepting 60 Minutes’ request for an interview with Scott Pelley, former president Trump’s campaign has decided not to participate,” the show
said on X. “Pelley will address this Monday evening.”
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called the show’s announcement “fake news,” saying there were “initial discussions [about an interview], but nothing was ever scheduled or locked in.”
ADVERTISING
“They also insisted on doing live fact checking, which is unprecedented,” Cheung
said on X.
🏛️
Follow Politics
Trump has been known to take an adversarial tone with the mainstream media, particularly during one-on-one interviews, and has shown little restraint from walking out on journalists in the past.
During the 2020 election, he cut short
an interview with “60 minutes” after growing frustrated with questions asked by one of its reporters, Lesley Stahl. He later retaliated by
posting unedited video of the interview on social media before it was set to air, a move that CBS called “unprecedented” and a violation of an agreement with the network.
In 2022, Trump also hung up several minutes early during
an interview on NPR’s “Morning Edition” when he was asked about his false claims that suggested the 2020 election was rigged. He similarly walked out during
a White House briefing during the early days of the covid pandemic, when a CNN journalist asked him why he complimented a doctor who had claimed that medicine was being made using DNA from aliens.
This past July, he abruptly left the room during an interview with reporters at the National Association for Black Journalists convention in Chicago, later posting on Truth Social that “the questions were rude and nasty.”
Trump, campaigning Tuesday evening in Milwaukee, said he would “love to do” the “60 Minutes” show, but wants an apology for the Stahl interview in 2020.
“I’ve asked them for an apology,” Trump said. “Let’s see if they do it.”
Real-time fact-checking by the media has been a point of contention throughout the election season. Trump and his supporters complained after the moderators at last month’s ABC debate sought to address his false and misleading claims, including that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets.
For Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, CBS is
broadcasting a QR code on the screen that viewers can scan to read real-time fact-checking.
CBS is expected to air its “60 Minutes” prime time election special on Oct. 7 at 8 p.m. Eastern time. Harris will speak with network correspondent Whitaker, and CBS said in a statement that its invitation to Trump still stands.
