November 3, 2025

CBS News and 60 Minutes have been flushed down the Trump toilet. By Hal M. Brown

This story made HuffPost’s top of the page:

It was also a main story in Salon:

RawStory covered some of the social media reaction:

Popular Substacker Robert Hubel wrote about it:

If Trump hadn’t been his usual self and done at least a modified limited mea culpa on the question about his pardon for the cryptocurrency crook he might have skated on this.

All these stories made the news, it appears because someone at Daily Beast read the transcript. Oddly, nobody at 60 Minutes thought to censor the transcript which they put on their website.

This gave ammunition to Chuck Schumer. Here’s his tweet:

This was picked up by various media, for example:

This is from Who, What, Why:

I like this line:

There is plenty more we could say about the interview. Some of it is disturbing, and some is amusing, for example, that Trump still doesn’t seem to understand the difference between asylum seekers and mental patients in insane asylums.

I skimmed the 60 Minutes transcript (as of this writing it is still here).

Trump speachified endlessly in response to all of O’Donnell’s questions. He batted off her attempts to pin him down on his lies, deceptions, and the just plain authoritarian, nasty, and evil things he’d been doing.

Consider just this one exchange:

NORAH O’DONNELL: --and you succeeded on that. Illegal crossings at the Southern border are at a 55-year low. Want to ask you about this. More recently, 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?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No. I think they haven’t gone far enough because we’ve been held back by the-- by the judges, by the liberal judges that were put in by Biden and by Obama. We’ve been held--
NORAH O’DONNELL: You’re okay with those tactics?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yeah, because you have to get the people out. You know, you have to look at the people. Many of them are murderers. Many of them are people that were thrown outta their countries because they were, you know, criminals. Many of them are people from jails and prisons. Many of them are people from frankly mental institutions. I feel badly about that, but they’re released from insane asylums. You know why? Because they’re killers.
NORAH O’DONNELL: Well, you promised in your campaign that you were going to deport the worst of the worst, violent criminals--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: That’s what I’m-- oh we’re doin’ that--
NORAH O’DONNELL: --rapists.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, that’s what we’re doing--
NORAH O’DONNELL: But a lot of the people that your administration has arrested and deported aren’t violent criminals. Landscapers, nannies, construction workers--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Oh, no, no, landscapers who are criminals--
NORAH O’DONNELL: --farmworkers.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Now, look, look.
NORAH O’DONNELL: The family of US service members--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I need landscapers and I need farmers more than anybody, okay.
NORAH O’DONNELL: But was it your in--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We-- and we want to-- we focus on the bad ones, and we’ve gotten tremendous numbers of bad people. Don’t forget.
NORAH O’DONNELL: The-- there--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: When you have over 11,000 murderers released into our country, over 11,000, 50% of which have murdered more than one person, we gotta get ‘em outta here.
NORAH O’DONNELL: Is it your intent to deport people who do not have a criminal record?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We have to start off with a policy, and the policy has to be you came into the country illegally, you’re gonna go out. However, you’ve also seen, you’re gonna go out. We’re gonna work with you, and you’re gonna come back into our country legally. Because we have a lotta good people. We have some great people. But, you know, the problem we have, and people don’t like talking about-- these are very--
NORAH O’DONNELL: But there isn’t--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --wait. These are very smart countries. Their leaders are very smart. They’re very street-wise. They might not have gone to the finest schools, but they’re very street-wise. They want-- they don’t want, they have good people. They want people that are bad out.
So they, what do they do? They open their jails. They let ‘em out. They get rid of their drug dealers. They let ‘em out. But you know who else they get out? The people that are on welfare that aren’t working. In other words, they have people that just don’t work. They don’t want people that just don’t work, so they put them into our country.
NORAH O’DONNELL: But if someone has been in this--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And we’ve accepted all of these people because of Biden’s open border policy where people would walk in totally unchecked and unvetted, murderers and everybody else.
NORAH O’DONNELL: When will you declare mission accomplished on immigration?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, it takes a long time, because, you know, probably I say 25 million people were let into our country. A lotta people say it was 10 million people. But whether it was ten or-- I believe I’m much closer to the right number. Of the 25, many of them should not be here. Many of them.
But we’re-- we’re cleaning up our cities. You know, I campaigned on crime, but I’ve done a much better job on crime than I thought. You know, the crime numbers are way down, even though we have a lot more people in our country that really shouldn’t be here. And many of them are stone-cold hard criminals. When I look at D.C. now, you can walk down the middle of the street. You can have your daughter who’s ten years old meet you at the park. She’s gonna be okay.

Just on the brutality of some of the ICE enforcement, she should have shown videos of some of the worst examples and demanded Trump justify what his agents did.

In his justifications she could have said “it sounds like you’re expressing the belief of Niccolò Machiavelli and saying that the end always justifies the means no matter what the means are.” This might have thrown him off since I doubt he knows who Machiavelli was, or what the phrase means:

The end justifies the means is a paraphrase of Niccolò Machiavelli. It means that if a goal is morally important enough, any method of getting it is acceptable. The idea is very old, but it was not meant to allow people to be cruel or mean if they do not need to be. It was part of a political philosophy (way of thinking) called consequentialism. The basic idea is that doing something can be judged by what happens because of it. All modern forms of consequentialism have to prevent tyrants(absolute rulers) from using this idea for evil. (Wikipedia)

She could also have said something to the effect of “what would you say to a devout Christian who told you that your immigration enforcement would be something Jesus would be preaching against?” She could have quoted the Bible to him.

She also could have tried to pin him down with a similar line of questioning about blowing up boats and executing low level people he says are drug smugglers who are only poor fisherman trying to make money to feed their families.

I suppose she felt she HAD to do the interview. She was incredibly niave or shamelessly overconfident if she thought she could best Trump.

I can’t see how she could have handled it better unless she was willing to get up and walk out saying he was a fucking liar, a cruel man, and someone hellbent on being a dictator. Of course she’d have lost her job and Trump would probably have put a hit on her, but at least she’d have come away with some self-respect.

Basically, Trump with this one glitch aside, won another battle in his effort to control the media.

Addendum: Fox News had only complements about the 60 Minutes interview and thought enough of this part to put it in their headline: