The Most Disastrous Donald Trump Interviews In History

U.S. presidents have faced off with some formidable adversaries over the country's history, but in the last decade or so, they have faced none more formidable than the English language. After eight years under President Barack Obama, one of the most eloquent men to ever hold the office, the contrast was glaring when he was followed by Donald Trump and then Joe Biden, two guys who have been known to wrestle with their words, to put it politely. To put it more accurately, they have been known to get treated by their words much like the Hulk treated Loki at the end of "The Avengers."

The similarity between the two ends, though, with that superficial observation. While Joe Biden has humorously referred to himself as a "gaffe machine," Donald Trump has insisted that he is a "very stable genius" while consistently and flagrantly serving up word salads topped off with arrogance dressing and croutons of falsehood. In interviews, Trump seemingly can't help but make whatever controversy he happens to be embroiled in at the time seem far worse, even in the friendliest environments — and while this tendency might not matter much to his dedicated supporters, it has kept the jaws of everyone else on the floor since the moment he declared his candidacy for the presidency in 2015. Here is the worst of the worst — the most disastrous interviews Trump has ever taken part in.

In July 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was battering America with hundreds of deaths per day with no end in sight, Donald Trump appeared on "Fox News Sunday" for a conversation with Chris Wallace, who is known to be no softball interviewer. After suggesting — incredibly — that the COVID numbers wouldn't be so high if we just didn't test as much (via Rev), Trump produced cherry-picked data (picked apart in voiceover by Wallace) to erroneously state that the U.S. had the lowest mortality rate from the disease in the world. He pushed back on Wallace's assertion, backed by data, that new cases were hovering around 75,000 per day, before appearing to acknowledge those numbers by uttering perhaps the five most callous words of his presidency: "It is what it is."

Later in the interview, he stated flatly that Joe Biden was planning to "defund the police" if elected (which was not true, again pointed out by Wallace in voiceover), downplayed the recent, horrific spate of killings of unarmed Black people by police, and offered a chilling glimpse into the future by refusing to say whether he would accept a peaceful transfer of power if he were to lose the 2020 election. Trump also bragged about how he "aced" a recent cognitive test — a test that Wallace had also taken after he heard Trump had passed it. "It's not the hardest test," Wallace deadpanned. "[There's] a picture and it says, 'What's that?' And it's an elephant."

For all of the stones that Donald Trump likes to throw at Joe Biden over the question of the latter's mental acuity, it often seems as though he doesn't realize or care that his own mangling of the English language and demonstrable lack of knowledge on certain topics constitutes a pretty fragile glass house. Case in point: Trump's July 22, 2020, interview with Fox News, during which he somehow managed to turn a softball question about Biden's mental fitness into a glaring question mark regarding his own.

Interviewer Marc Siegel related that he had seen a lot of recent speculation about Trump's mental health, then teed up the not-so-obvious question with respect to said speculation: "What do you think should come out ... regarding Vice President Biden?" (via Factbase). Ignoring the easy layup, Trump regaled Siegel with a story about how he had requested a cognitive test from his doctor, describing the final series of questions as being very difficult. "You will go person, woman, man, camera, TV. So, they say, could you repeat that? So, I said, yes. So, it's person, woman, man, camera, TV. Okay, that's very good. If you get it in order, you get extra points." Siegel then sat in near silence as Trump, at length, praised himself for his sterling performance on this test. Needless to say, pundits were flummoxed; The New Yorker observed that Trump's mental acuity "is one of the hardest things for journalists to write about — or would be, except that he himself keeps bringing it up."

In mid-2019, Donald Trump was sitting down with a quartet of Time magazine reporters for a fairly wide-ranging interview that, for a time, was going reasonably well. Trump handled some pretty routine questions about issues in the Middle East and the border situation, navigating the queries with just one huge, glaring falsehood. (He claimed that he "inherited" the policy of separating families at the border from his predecessor, Barack Obama, which was in no way true.) In the middle of a discussion about who he thought his Democratic challenger might be in 2020, Trump inexplicably decided to show the assembled journos what he said was a handwritten letter from North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un — and that's when things started to get weird.

One of the reporters attempted to take a photo of the letter, but was stopped by then-press secretary Sarah Sanders. The interview then continued as normal — but when it turned to questions about the investigation that was then being conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller, the reporter's previous transgression suddenly came back into play. "Well, you can go to prison instead," Trump said. "I didn't give [the letter] to you to take photographs of it." The reporter was understandably taken aback, and Trump launched into a round of complaining about Time's supposed shoddy treatment of him. Trump's threat made headlines, with The Washington Post pointing out that his former FBI director, James Comey, had once revealed that Trump had previously mused about the possibility of tossing unfriendly reporters in the clink for a few days.

Of the many legal issues that Donald Trump has been presented with in the aftermath of his presidency, one of the more serious would have to be his retention of classified documents, some of them sensitive in the extreme, which were discovered by the FBI during a raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022. Trump's excuses for retaining the docs, in defiance of multiple requests by the feds to return them, are as numerous as they are baffling, but none so much as the one he offered to Fox News' Bret Baier during an interview that aired on June 19, 2023.

When Trump basically complained that the National Archive did not ask him nicely to return the material, Baier pointed out that they did ask, quite nicely, before taking the unprecedented step of going to the Department of Justice for a subpoena. "Why not just hand them over then?" he asked. Trump's response was stupefying: "I wanted to go through the boxes and get all my personal things out." he said. Asked what kind of things he meant, he casually suggested that "many things ... golf shorts, clothing, pants, shoes," were all mixed up with the highly sensitive, classified documents (via Vox). Observers from all over the political spectrum were aghast; speaking with Rolling Stone, former White House lawyer Ty Cobb said, "It was a disaster, if you are his lawyer ... they will be able to use what he said to assist them in proving the former president's intent as to virtually all the charges in the Mar-a-Lago indictment."

Donald Trump's conversation with Fox News' Brian Kilmeade in June 2020 should have been a breeze — the network was a cheerleader for Trump throughout his entire presidency, and Kilmeade was framing his questions such that Trump basically just had to repeat what was being said to him using different phrasing. Trump, though, couldn't help but pontificate — and despite Kilmeade's best efforts, the interview swiftly turned into a word salad buffet.

In the most glaring example, Kilmeade noted that a recent poll had shown that Black respondents trusted the police far less than their white neighbors, and asked Trump how to "attack that problem." Trump responded with a rambling diatribe about how great the economy was before "the plague [came] in from China" and how awesome everything had been for Black voters on his watch. In his words: "We had the best numbers for African-American on employment and unemployment in history ... not only African-American, but the African-American numbers were great." Pressed on the law enforcement aspect, Trump said they "have to get better" before launching into a description of a speech he had made: "Maybe even almost half of the speech ... was devoted exactly to that ...  no matter what you do, it's never going to be good enough. But the people understand it." As it turned out, not many did; on MSNBC following the interview, Chris Hayes pointed out that the easiest way for Trump's opponents to point out how incoherent he can be is to simply let him talk (via Rolling Stone).

In the middle of his tenure in 2019, Donald Trump sat down with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News and made a startling admission, considering that at the time, the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was still ongoing. Stephanopoulos asked the president whether he would accept dirt on potential Democratic challengers in the 2020 election if it were to be offered by a foreign rival, which obviously should have prompted the strongest negative response Trump could muster. Instead, he said this: "I think you might want to listen, there isn't anything wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country ... [and said] 'we have information on your opponent' — oh, I think I'd want to hear it."

The blowback to these remarks was so strong that, just a couple days later, Trump made a half-hearted attempt to clarify them during a call-in to his old buddies at "Fox & Friends." "Nobody's gonna present me with anything bad ... [and if they did], you have to look at it, because if you don't look at it, you won't know it's bad, but, of course, you give it to the FBI ... of course you do that — you couldn't have that happen with our country, and everybody understands that and I thought it was made clear" (via The Washington Post). Not exactly — in fact, pretty much the only thing that Donald Trump has ever made clear in his many, many interviews is that clarity is not his strong suit.