Yesterday, Stephen A. Smith sat down with President Trump at the White House and tried to put him on the spot on Iran, black voters, Obama and Stephen Miller.
Trump had an answer every time.
At one point he literally pulled out a LIST and started rattling off his accomplishments one by one.
“Read the list!”
Then Smith asked him to imagine running against Obama, and Trump casually called the former president overrated right to his face.
“I think he’s highly overrated. Yeah.”
The media’s line today is that Trump “wouldn’t take accountability.”
Watch the tape and decide for yourself.
Smith got this interview out of a White House dinner he went to as Bill Maher’s guest, and he didn’t waste it.
He opened by hitting Trump on the midterms...the Senate seats, the 40-plus House seats, Alaska still not called, the 32% approval number from Reuters. Trump told him he wasn’t on the ballot.
Keep in mind, this is a guy who spent the past year batting down talk of a 2028 run of his own. He’s no Trump guy.
Then it came to Iran.
Nine months into the conflict, the Strait of Hormuz is basically shut down and Qatar is trying to broker something, so Smith asked him straight out if he would have already taken out the IRGC had the Gulf countries not been holding him back.
It was big.
SMITH: “If it wasn’t for the other nations, particularly in the Middle East that don’t want you to do that, would you have already taken them out?”
TRUMP: “Yes. I would. I would have, yeah.”
SMITH: “And by taking them out that means what?”
TRUMP: “Going further than I went.”
That’s an important moment right there.
He would have gone further. The Gulf countries asked him not to, and he listened.
You get the sense that this was something Trump went against his own better judgment on, choosing to listen to others rather than act on his instincts.
Smith kept pushing on Iran, and the decisions the president made when dealing with the radical mullahs.
Trump told him he’s been making “deals” his whole life, and when it came to the lunatics in Iran, he knew EXACTLY who he was dealing with.
TRUMP: “I know my customer.”
“You know, my whole thing in life is deals...”
“My whole life has been a big deal.”
“And, I know people...”
“And I will tell you, these are very vicious people, they’re very violent people.”
“They were trying to get a nuclear weapon to use it and I bombed the HELL out of their sites.”
Not exactly diplomat-speak, but it was honest.
He calls them vicious and violent people and he still wants the deal, because that’s what he does. He makes deals.
Then Smith got to black Americans. Trump told Smith that the black community has been the single biggest “beneficiary” of what he’s done as president.
He seemed skeptical when Trump started listing the policies his administration delivered. So Trump pulled out an actual piece of paper with a list of policies and started rattling off his accomplishments one by one.