Jessica Harper Uncanceled

This was a strange affair: it was like AI had imagined a Tucker Carlson interview with Donald Trump. Or it was like a three-hour interview that had been edited by an intern, and an intern who didn’t like Donald Trump.

Don’t get me wrong – I was transfixed and I like both of them but it was terribly scattershot and told us next to nothing. The public would have benefited from him participating in the debate involving the other Republican candidates.

And so the Donald spent a surprising amount of time talking about esoteric subjects such as dishwashers, windmills, the Panama Canal, death by mosquitoes and the difficulties of walking across sand.

I don’t remember them touching on the economy at all – in fact, nothing was explored in depth. This was like a gentle chat with an uncle who’d lost his wife and you didn’t want to stress him out too much.

Carlson kicked off by reminding the ex president that he’d said there were people taking part in the other debate who shouldn’t be running for president, and challenged him to name them. 

“I call him Ada Hutchinson,” obliged Trump. “It’s Asa but I call him Ada.”

“Why do you call him Ada?”

“I could tell you but I don’t want to get into trouble.”

Pah, another time, then. I bet it’s funny. I want to know now. Maybe I’ll Google it.

Then, out of the blue, Carlson brought up the death of Jeffrey Epstein and accused former attorney general Bill Barr of lying.

“He said he killed himself and they were going to do this investigation,” said Carlson. “They never did the investigation. It’s never been public and they hid it… Clearly Barr knew but why would Bill Barr be covering up the death of Jeffrey Epstein?”

Wow, Bill Barr “covering up the death of Epstein” is a sentence so libellous that my fingers are trembling. My journalism teacher is turning in his grave. Libel aside, he’d probably ask why we’re wasting several minutes discussing the death of Jeffrey Epstein in a 48-minute interview about the biggest job in the world.

Trump knocks the Epstein issue into the long grass but Carlson was hellbent on making some massive headlines around the world and tries another tack.

“Why wouldn’t they try to kill you?”

Maybe Trump will dial things down a bit, I thought. Maybe he’ll tell Tucker to chill.

“They’re savage animals,” he responded. Hmm maybe not just yet. “They are people that are sick.”

Soon he was after Biden: “You see him in the beach where he can’t lift a chair. You know, those chairs are meant to be light, right? Like two ounces… He can’t walk through sand. Sand is not that easy to walk through. I think he looks horrible at the beach.” (Note to self: don’t connect with Trump on Facebook, there are loads of pictures of me struggling over sand, often with a margharita in my hand).

If not Biden, the old Sand Struggler, then, who? He doesn’t think Kamala would be picked. “She speaks in rhyme, it’s weird… ‘The bus will go here and then the bus will go there, because that’s what buses do’.”

She’s right, of course, but it’s not much of a transport policy.

Then he lamented the state of San Francisco and LA (“very sad”) but said: “Republican-run cities are doing very nicely because they arrest people when you have crimes”. 

Hurrah, that’s what we want to hear, a tiny bit of policy. Good to get away from Carlson’s sensationalist line of questioning.

“What next, don’t they have to kill you now?” said Tucker. Arrgh. He’s back. Now he was chasing a “They will kill me, says Trump” headline.

Trump sidestepped it again and talked about the Chinese building “military installations in Cuba”. and said the Chinese now own the Panama Canal. 

“We lost 35,000 people building the Panama Canal to mosquitos. Jimmy Carter gave it away for one dollar and now China controls it. We can’t let them control it.” I wasn’t expecting that either, I’ll be honest.

Then he hit out at “electric cars and windmills, made in China”. If people want to buy gas-fuelled cars, they should be allowed to, he says. Hmmm isn’t the problem that we can’t just burn through every resource on the planet like spoilt toddlers and leave nothing for anyone else? The public debate might at least have put his views on this on the record. Call me old fashioned but, you know, some actual policy would have been good, so I know what I’m voting for.

Will there be a civil war, asked Tucker at the end, in a last attempt at maximising the global media pick-up of this interview. Did the former pres think we were heading towards “open conflict”? 

He said he didn’t know but added: “There’s a level of passion I’ve never seen and hatred that I’ve never seen and that’s probably a bad combination”.

Watch the full interview here