The Globe Interview: President Donald J Trump

The Nevada Globe (TNG), had the opportunity for a one-on-one interview with former President Donald J. Trump during his first 2024 presidential campaign stop in Las Vegas. As we sat down, he inquired about another obligation with his staff for the UFC Unfiltered podcast with Jim Norton and Matt Serra. The staff confirmed and Trump replied, “I think they want to this run by 6:30. What time is it?” He then turned to me and said, “Do you have anywhere to go?” To which I replied, “No” and we walked down the hall for the UFC interview.

President Trump x @UFC Unfiltered#UFC290 pic.twitter.com/4g76WlWYuv

— Steven Cheung (@TheStevenCheung) July 8, 2023

After the UFC spot, we made our way back to our original room for an exclusive conversation that lasted approximately 22 minutes, despite a scheduled 10-minute interview, and President Trump landed some punches.

TNG: I’ve listened and watched many interviews, and I have yet to find an answer to this personal question: ” What is your favorite childhood memory and how do you carry that with you?

President Trump:

Well, I had great parents, I think, just growing up. I grew up in Queens, New York, and I had great parents…very supportive, both very different type of people…but they got along.

They were married for many, many years, decades, many decades. And, I think just the fact that I really grew up with strong loving parents…and if that happens, it’s a big… it’s a big advantage.

That doesn’t happen to a lot of people and they oftentimes suffer a lot.

But if that happens, it’s a tremendous advantage. Really a tremendous advantage.

TNG: What do you think that they would be saying to you now as you’re going through another campaign and this legal persecution, if you will?

President Trump:

It is persecution. It is. I call it election interference, more than anything else.

These are terrible people, disgusting people.

My father would be angry at these people. My mother would be– she’d feel a little remorse for me, because, you know, it’s very unfair.

It’s a total…this witch hunt has been going on from the beginning–from the time I came down the escalator, and it has been proven to all be false.

Everything has been proven to be false.

If you look, every single thing that they’ve done, from Russia, Russia, Russia…it has all turned out to be a hoax.

That’s what Democrats are good at is just these hoaxes.

They’re not good at policy. They’re not good at, frankly, many things.

All Democrats do is disinformation and hoaxes.

But, I think that it has been an amazing period of time.

We had an amazing presidency.

We’re leading in the polls by a lot, tremendously. We’re way up above everybody, including Biden.

But with the Republicans–we are way up over, I call him Sanctimonious—because I got him elected. But, he’s doing poorly. I don’t think he’ll do well because he has got no personality and we’re doing great.

We’ll see what happens. I think we have a really very good chance of winning it and bringing the country back by making America great again.

We were energy independent. We had tax cuts, we had regulation cuts at a level that never seen before.

We had no wars. I didn’t start wars, but I finished wars. We beat Isis.

Everything we did worked out incredibly well, and we had to do it through the guise of these witch hunts all the time. Constantly,

Adam Schiff… Shifty Shiff…and all of these people that are sick. They’re psychos.

It was an amazing period of time, and I think the reason we’re doing well now is they see how badly it is and how bad it was.

There’s more spirit now.

I got more votes than any sitting president in history in 2020, and there’s more spirit now than there was in 2016 or in 2020. I think a lot of that is because of the fact that they see how bad, just how bad they’re doing.

They’re destroying our country.

TNG: So with the indictments, we actually saw your polling numbers go up. How do you explain that phenomenon?

President Trump:

Because people are very smart. The public is actually very smart and they’ve studied it, and they saw it’s a hoax.

It’s all a big hoax.

Biden has boxes all over. Nobody does anything about it.

I come under the Presidential Records Act which allows me… it’s perfect for explaining exactly what this is all about. It gives the full authority and power to the President.

Biden doesn’t come under that act because he wasn’t the president when he took all of these documents. But I was, and they don’t mention that. The fake news doesn’t cover it.  But the people understand it. You’ve heard me speak about it. The people understand it.

I come under the Presidential Records Act which isn’t criminal, nothing.

It’s not criminal and everything I did was absolutely fine. But, it’s a very important, very important distinction when you look…when you look at the fact that one person is targeted, and the other person gets away with murder.

Look at all the money that Biden has stolen from China.

He takes money.

He take bribes.

Call it whatever you want.

But, we have a compromised president.

They paid him millions and millions of dollars through Hunter.

And, Ukraine. Money comes in, and from other countries money comes in–it comes pouring in, and the fake news doesn’t want to even cover it.

I think the Republican congress is doing a great job. Jamie Comer is doing great. Jim Jordan is doing great.

But, the fake news doesn’t want to cover it. And, yet, this is the biggest story probably in the history of our country.

This is 100 times bigger than Watergate, but they don’t want to cover it, because they want to shield the Democrat.

And, I think it’s really showing how sick the press is. It’s sick, it’s corrupt. It’s as corrupt as anything I’ve ever seen. And it’s not only what they talk about, it’s what they don’t talk about.

They won’t talk about things, and that came out with the judge’s opinion the other day where he said you couldn’t talk through Facebook and Twitter and all of these different places because you’re giving them false information…the FBI, the DOJ, et cetera, the government, the Democrats.

So it’s big stuff. I mean, it’s big stuff.

It, at some point, it must explode. It must absolutely explode.

TNG: In the decision, the judge referred to the government as the “Ministry of Truth” in reference to Orwell’s 1984, and with that, we now know that there was election interference via massive censorship during the 2020 election cycle. Now that the judge has rendered this decision, how do you think this is going to impact the 2024 election?

President Trump:

I think it impacts it greatly because people realize…look, you had True The Vote where they found hundreds of thousands of votes. They stuffed it, right? Catherine Englebrecht. She is a fantastic woman.

They stuffed the ballot boxes.

We have it on tape and people don’t want to talk about it.

You have so many other things, but now you have a judge who made a statement, it’s a very powerful statement. Brilliant judge, brilliant man, highly respected.

But even before that, you had the 51 intelligence officers saying that it was Russian disinformation, and they knew it wasn’t.

And, even before that you had Twitter, Facebook and you had FBI Twitter.

The FBI Twitter thing was unbelievable.

The FBI Facebook and the DOJ Facebook, all of these scandals, and the pollster said it made a 17 point difference. 17 points… and just with a quarter of a point…

Look, the election was rigged. It was a rigged election.

We have no borders in our country and we have rigged elections. You can’t have a country like that.

It’s one of the reasons I am running and I’m doing it, and I think it’s one of the reasons we’re doing so well.

People see what happened, but this, the judge’s decision, the recent judge’s decision, from two days ago, was amazing.

TNG: So, how do you win in 2024 if the system, in your words, is rigged?

TRUMP:

You have to swamp them.

They’re cheaters.

They cheat. They lie. They’re horrible.

I wouldn’t have said this two years ago.

Who would have ever thought a thing like this was possible?

But, they’re cheaters, and you have to hope the courts get tougher because they see a lot of it.

They don’t want to get involved because they’re afraid, or something.

Bill Barr was a stiff.

He was afraid of being impeached. He was petrified of being impeached.

He was just a stiff.

And now, you see with this stuff coming up, but it should happen now. I mean, Garland should do something about what’s taking place.

So, I’m actually surprised, more than anybody, at Garland because he sees this massive corruption. I’m surprised that he allows it to go on. I really am.

I had a lot of respect for him. He was a liberal man and that’s fine. But, I’m surprised that he allowed it to go on, and allows it to go on, at a level that the country has never seen before.

And it’s fully exposed…although new stuff is coming out which blows everything else away… but it is so exposed, and yet the press doesn’t pick it up. It won’t pick it up.

They know about it. They agree. They don’t want to write it.

It’s somewhat hard to have a scandal if they’re not gonna write about it.

But, the public sees it. It’s a good thing. That is what is so positive about the internet.

You see things that you wouldn’t normally see. It also gives you defense, you know, Truth is doing fantastically well.

By having Truth, I have defense, because I’m allowed to say things that normally wouldn’t…people won’t pick it up because they don’t want to pick it up for political reasons.

TNG: So, a lot of this that we’ve talked about is about the swamp. Yet, your 2016 chant was “drain the swamp.” But, for whatever reason, you couldn’t do it or you didn’t do it. So the question is, did you realize how deep, wide and vast the swamp was when you started in 2016?

President Trump:

It is such a good question.

I put a lot of great people in.

We rebuilt our military.

We had the Biggest tax cuts in history. The biggest regulation cuts in history.

No wars.

We beat ISIS.

We did an amazing job.

We had no inflation.

We were energy independent.

But some of the people, and we mostly had great people, but nobody wants to write about great people.

They want to write about the Bill Bars and the people that didn’t do their job. Because, they were cowards.

Bill Barr was a coward.

Bill Barr was afraid of being impeached, and I understand that they were talking about impeaching him.

They didn’t even know why, but they were talking, and he didn’t want to be impeached.

But, we were doing a great job with draining the swamp.

Don’t forget, I fired Comey. Comey had a long term contract.

I fired Comey very early.

You know, somebody said, “oh, you should have done it sooner”, but I did it very early.

I mean, it was one of the early things in the administration. That was a great thing to do.

If I didn’t do that…and a lot of people criticized me for doing it… but if I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t be talking to you right now about the presidency.

Because that was a coup, in a sense.

Those were people that had reports written on them, like the Horowitz report, the IG. He wrote such a terrible report on Comey.

It was so breathtakingly horrible that when you read it, even the New York Times said “this is unbelievable.”

But, I fired a lot of people.

But, the swamp is deep, it’s deep and we got stopped a little bit by COVID.

When COVID came in, we had, as an example, the greatest economy in the history of our country.

COVID came in and we had to fight that battle too. So, we had a lot of battles going.

We did an incredible job with COVID. Never got the credit for COVID.

You know, this came in as a brand new situation that nobody saw coming.

It came in from China…came in from Wuhan, the Wuhan labs.

I said that right from the beginning.

We closed it up to China, and we didn’t want that, but we saved a lot of lives by doing that.

But we were very focused on the last part, but we got rid of a lot of the swamp.

But, you take a look at Comey as an example. I mean, he was going to be there for years. That was one of the best firings ever.

People that said you shouldn’t have done it, now say it “was the single one of the greatest moves you made” because they were looking to do numbers.

So it was, it was very bad.

And when I fired him, that’s when we found out about the insurance policy. That’s when we found Strzok and Paige and this one and that one.

I mean, it was so deep, but we did a great job. But then, we had a rigged election, and now we’re doing it and we’re leading by much more than we’ve ever led before because people loved the job we were doing.

We had a great economy. We had the greatest economy in history, and one of the reasons is is that we were is so energy independent.

We were going to be energy dominant.

We were soon going to start paying off debt.

We were going to make so much money with energy. “Liquid Gold” I call it.

We were going to be supplying oil and gas to Europe, instead of Russia.

I ended the pipeline. Remember, I’m the one that ended the Nord 2 pipeline.

When Biden came in, he approved it.

I was rough on Russia, but I got along very well with Putin and that’s a positive thing, not a negative thing.

So, we were getting rid of a lot of people. But then, COVID came.

We had to focus on that, but we did and we had great people, Bob Lighthizer did a great job. We had some really great people. We did great on trade. We did incredibly on the economy.

TNG: So let’s talk Nevada. Governor Lombardo lost Clark County by six points. He lost Washoe county by two points. Yet, he still won the governorship. Additionally, he’s recently signed legislation that awards $25 million to the Culinary Union. The Nevada GOP believes that that money is going to be used for ballot harvesting. Proponents claim it’s going to be used for a “capital improvement project” that hasn’t been identified. A GOP presidential candidate hasn’t won Nevada since 2004. You lost Nevada twice. How do you win Nevada?

President Trump:

I think I won the last time. I think I won both times by a lot.

This is a state that is disgraceful.

You know, we sued on the basis of …they robbed the vote at a level.

We had a lawsuit that was so good and the judge didn’t want to see it. He didn’t even want to see it.

We had a lawsuit that was, in my opinion, conclusive.

But, you know, we have guys like Laxalt. Laxalt was a very weak candidate. He was pathetic.

You know, I helped Laxalt do the best he could. I guess his grandfather was strong. His father was good. But, I guess the chain got weaker and weaker.

But, Adam Laxalt is a stiff and he didn’t do the job. He was a lawyer. He was working for a lot of different people on trying to do the vote thing, but he wasn’t the right guy.

We have great people working now. We have great lawyers working.

They used COVID to cheat the last time. They used COVID to cheat.

But, we think we have a great team in place to stop it.

(We are then asked to wrap the interview due to an event at Calvary Chapel for NVGOP volunteers)

TNG: Nevada has unlimited ballot harvesting….

President Trump:

It’s a disgrace. I think it’s a disgrace. It’s, it’s not a good thing, but the Republicans are going to do it now.

You have to understand. I come here and I campaign. You have other people running elections.

The last time I did a great job in campaigning, but I didn’t know I had to be running every voting booth in the country.

Some states do a great job. This is a state that, I have no doubt, if you take a look at the litigation…but, Adam was not a good attorney and didn’t do a good job. I thought he was actually a terrible attorney and he didn’t do a good job. He wasn’t able to do anything with the litigation, but this is a state we did very well in.

I don’t believe this is a Democrat state. I think this is a Republican state.

I endorsed the governor. I like the governor. He was able to win. So we’re proud of him for doing that.

TNG: Thanks to the press, everyone now knows you like two scoops of ice cream. As a reporter, I like scoops. Any scoop on your vice presidential pick?

President Trump:

No, not yet. But, I’ll let you know, I’m watching.

With that, President Trump instructed his staff to make sure that “we do this again” and invited TNG to join the presidential motorcade to Calvary Chapel where the former president addressed a crowd of volunteers and elected officials for approximately one hour. He then headed to UFC 290 where he was escorted into the T-Mobile Arena by long-time supporter Dana White, shaking hands with the fans and chatting with Mel Gibson, Joe Rogan, Roger Stone, and various celebrities.

Although his 24-hour visit to Las Vegas was packed with back-to-back events, and having endured a never-ending stream of lawsuits and hostility, the former President showed no signs of physical or mental wear in his ongoing battle against President Biden, the press, and his political opponents. As President Trump’s swings at his opponents, Nevada remains a swing state. In order to carry Nevada, President Trump will have to land some blows and dominate the rurals in order to, in his words, “swamp the cheaters.”