The Most Alarming Answer From Trump’s Interview With Time

This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.

“You’ll have to speak to the individual states.” —Donald Trump, responding to the question of whether state governments should be allowed to monitor women’s pregnancies to know if they’ve had abortions

On April 12, former President Donald Trump sat for an interview with Time. That interview, which ran with some follow-up questions from this past Saturday, was published on Tuesday, and it included a number of alarming tidbits from Trump, many of which reaffirmed his earlier extreme positions or took them further.

But perhaps the most shocking response dealt with a hypothetical posed by the reporter, Eric Cortellessa. Relatively early in the conversation, Cortellessa pushed Trump to take a stance on a federal abortion ban. Trump refused, insisting that his views on abortion did not matter—that he was leaving it up to the states to decide, and that was that. Even as Cortellessa insisted that it was “important to voters” to know where he stands, Trump didn’t budge, even when asked how he felt about women being punished for having abortions. Cortellessa then raised the prospect of a surveillance state keeping tabs on women and their reproductive systems:

Trump’s refusal to take a stance on such a sinister possibility shows he remains just as concerned about disappointing his white evangelical base as he is about alienating more moderate voters. But he may have underestimated just how radical this nonstance really was, and just how unsettling it may seem to voters.

That ended up being a theme of the more than hourlong interview: Trump dodged so many questions by railing about his victimhood, boasting about his victories, or just straight-out lying, but when he did give a direct response, it showed a man who had learned no lessons from his 2020 loss or his ongoing legal challenges. The Trump of the interview was just as extreme as ever.

On the topic of immigration, for example, he dismissed concerns about deploying the military against noncombatant, noncriminal migrants by saying it was necessary to do “whatever it takes” to handle the “invasion of our country.” He vowed to give police protection from prosecution as long as they’re “doing their job,” to “give the police back the power and respect that they deserve.”

There were others. Here are some highlights:

Asked if he would fire a U.S. attorney who didn’t prosecute someone under his orders, Trump said, “It depends on the situation, honestly.” He also implied that if the Supreme Court case on the matter of presidential immunity didn’t go Trump’s way, Joe Biden would be prosecuted for his “many crimes.”

He said he would consider pardoning all the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, implying that many of them had been tricked into storming the Capitol: “You see it on tape, the police are ushering them in.”

When asked if he would restrict hiring to people who believe the 2020 election was stolen, he said he “wouldn’t feel good” about anyone who thought (accurately) that Biden won.

Trump said, perhaps predictably, that he would send in the National Guard to deal with student protesters.

Asked if he agreed that anti-white racism was worse than anti-Black racism, he said, somewhat evasively, “If you look right now, there’s absolutely a bias against white and that’s a problem.”

He criticized Benjamin Netanyahu for failing to prevent the events of Oct. 7, but his main critiques of the country’s military actions had to do with its poor handling of “public relations.”

And finally, when asked what would happen if he didn’t win the election, Trump didn’t commit to a peaceful defeat: “And if we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.”

Trump also lied a fair bit, as he typically does in interviews. He insisted that his Manhattan trial was “not even a criminal case.” (It is.) He insisted that the only person who died on Jan. 6 was Ashli Babbitt. (She wasn’t.) He once again denied that he had ever written on TruthSocial that he might have to “terminate” parts of the U.S. Constitution. (He did.)

But if a presidential candidate being open to placing a significant portion of its population’s bodies under biological surveillance bodes poorly for a liberal democracy, Trump at least said some less strictly autocratic things, as well. He said he would comply with a Supreme Court order. He didn’t quite say that he would not prosecute Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, but he did say “we are going to have great retribution through success.” And he said he would retire after a second term, rather than trying to overturn the 22^nd Amendment. He did not address just how grim it was that the interviewer felt he needed to push him on basic questions of operating in a democracy.