Axios reports:
President Trump sat down for a lengthy interview with Lesley Stahl on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” discussing a wide variety of topics from climate change to foreign policy to the Mueller investigation.
Trump was discursive — and often combative — while defending some of his administration’s most controversial policies, including family separation at the border. He ended one particularly tense exchange with Stahl by reminding her, “Lesley, it’s okay. In the meantime, I’m president — and you’re not.”
The Hill reports:
“What about the forced separation of children from their migrant children?” correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Trump on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” “Well, that was the same as the Obama law,” Trump said. “You know, Obama had the same thing.”
Trump and his allies have often pointed to former President Obama’s immigration policy when pressed on family separations, claiming the same happened under Trump’s predecessor. PolitiFact has rated this “false,” with experts saying families were rarely separated under Obama while thousands of children were separated from their parents under Trump.
“Are you going to go back to that?” Stahl asked. Trump declined to say yes or no, replying, “Well, we’re looking at a lot of things. Really what we want to do is change the immigration laws.”
The Washington Post reports:
President Trump said he believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin “probably” has been involved in assassinations and poisonings, but he appeared to dismiss the gravity of those actions, noting that they have not taken place in the United States.
“Probably he is, yeah. Probably,” Trump told CBS’s Lesley Stahl when asked during an interview on “60 Minutes” whether he thinks Putin is involved “in assassinations, in poisonings.” “But I rely on them; it’s not in our country,” Trump added.
The Associated Press reports:
President Donald Trump is backing off his claim that climate change is a hoax but says he doesn’t know if it’s manmade and suggests that the climate will “change back again.”
“I think something’s happening. Something’s changing and it’ll change back again,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a hoax. I think there’s probably a difference. But I don’t know that it’s manmade. I will say this: I don’t want to give trillions and trillions of dollars. I don’t want to lose millions and millions of jobs.”
“They say that we had hurricanes that were far worse than what we just had with Michael,” said Trump, who identified “they” as “people” after being pressed by “60 Minutes” correspondent Leslie Stahl. She asked, “What about the scientists who say it’s worse than ever?” the president replied, “You’d have to show me the scientists because they have a very big political agenda.”