Defending his debunked claims, Trump tells Time: ‘I’m president, and you’re not’
President Donald Trump defended his statements on voter fraud and wiretapping in a wide-ranging interview with Time published Thursday that focused on the commander-in-chief’s handling of truth and falsehoods.
“I’m a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right,” the president told the magazine’s Washington bureau chief, Michael Scherer, according to the published transcript. “When everyone said I wasn’t going to win the election, I said well I think I would.”
Trump began the interview by saying he “predicted a lot of things,” pointing to his statements on Sweden and NATO, among others, as evidence that he was proven right. (The Washington Post points out in an analysis of the interview that Trump’s repeated claims on those two subjects are false.)
The president also continued to stick by his statements that the Obama administration wiretapped Trump Tower, saying he didn’t think FBI Director James Comey’s public denunciation of those claims took away his own credibility. Instead, the president jumped on statements made earlier Wednesday by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes that communications between the presidential transition team may have been picked up by U.S. intelligence officials who were monitoring other targets.
When Trump was pressed by Scherer about the threat to his credibility and his relationship with the intelligence community, the president said he ‘inherited a mess.”
“Hey look, in the mean time, I guess, I can’t be doing so badly, because I’m president, and you’re not,” Trump said.
Read the full transcript of the interview here.
