“That’s why I could never hit him, because he was so nice to me,” former president Donald Trump told Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night about…
…California Governor Gavin Newsom?
It was a wide-ranging, 30-minute interview with Trump, covering everything from his indictment last week to the war in Ukraine and Presidentish Joe Biden’s bungled bugout from Afghanistan. And Trump’s unexpected kindness to Newsom certainly got people on the Right talking.
“I’m really disappointed in Trump over his kissing up to Gavin Newsom,” my friend and Townhall colleague Kurt Schlichter tweeted Wednesday morning. “This leftist monster is A-OK because he’s been nice to Trump? Conservative @GovRonDeSantis is awful because he has not been nice lately?”
But that’s not quite what happened if you watch the entire clip and not just the (barely) edited version that’s been making the rounds on social media. It wasn’t entirely the love-fest viewers of the shorter clip might have thought.
In reference to the 2024 presidential election, Trump began by calling Newsom “a very ambitious guy” who has “done a terrible job with the state” of California.
“I used to get along great with him, you know, when I was president,” Trump then told Carlson. “I had a little… you know, got along really good, Gavin, well.”
Carlson looked a little shocked when he interjected with: “You got along with Gavin Newsom?”
“I did, I really did. He was always very nice to me, said the greatest things. He would say things like, ‘He’s doing a great job.'”
“About you?” Carlson asked, again sounding shocked.
“That’s why I could never hit him, because he was so nice to me.”
And it’s true. CalMatters reported in the early days of the COVID pandemic that Newsom said that “We’ve developed very strong relationships with our federal partners,” in the Trump administration. That earned Newsom praise from several conservatives, including Fox News’ Tomi Lahren. She tweeted at the time, “You could have easily taken cheap shots like many other Democrats but you didn’t and I have a lot of respect for that.”
But, the former president warned Carlson about the Democrat who was so “nice” to him: “He’s just laying in wait.”
Here’s the full clip from about 24 minutes into Tuesday night’s interview:
Still, I know exactly what Kurt meant when he asked on Twitter this morning, “What the hell? Has Trump learned nothing at all?”
Because there’s definitely something to that, even after you’ve seen the whole clip. Trump is at his best when he’s taking it to the Democrats. But Newsom, just like celebrity medical spokesmodel Anthony “Doctor” Fauci and many other swamp-dwellers before him, has “cracked the code,” as another Twitter user put it:
Many of Trumps adversaries have cracked the code to defeat him.
Be publicly flattering / loyal to Trump and you can then actively work against him from behind the scenes to derail his agenda. https://t.co/RcA64ybfon
— Kevin McKeever (@bankofkev) April 12, 2023
There are only two things that really concern me about having Trump at the top of the ticket in 2024. The first is his continuing weakness with independent voters, at least in some polls. The other is, if he is reelected, that he’ll go back to appointing and hiring the same kind of swamp-dwellers who hamstrung his first administration.
More recent polls have me less concerned about the former, but his Carlson interview does make you wonder if he’s learned the hard lesson about the latter.
In either case, here’s what ought to be the big takeaway from this report: Before you start ranting on social media about the latest outrage about what this guy said or that gal said…
…watch the whole clip and not just the excerpt.
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