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60 Minutes went ahead with its election special tonight featuring interviews with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, but none from Donald Trump and JD Vance.
According to the show, Trump backed out of the interview last week. Trump’s campaign claimed that it was never officially set.
But at the start of tonight’s broadcast, Scott Pelley told viewers that Trump was to have done the interview on Thursday at Mar-A-Lago, and that the show had agreed to meet Trump at his Butler, PA rally, which happened last weekend. He also said that Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, sent a text that read, “I’m working without advance team to see logistically is Butler would work, in addition to the sit down.”
“Days later, Cheung called to say, ‘The president said, ‘Yes.'”
Then the Trump campaign backed out a week ago, Pelley said, and offered “shifting explanations.”
He said that the campaign complained that the network would factcheck the interview. Later, Pelley said, the campaign told them that Trump “needed an apology for his interview in 2020.”
Four years ago, Trump cut short a contentious interview with 60 Minutes and its correspondent Lesley Stahl.
“Trump claims correspondent Lesley Stahl said in that in that interview that Hunter Biden’s controversial laptop came from Russia. She never said that,” Pelley said.
“Trump has said his opponent doesn’t do interviews because she can’t handle them. He had previously declined another debate with Harris. So tonight may have been the largest audience for the candidates between now and Election Day,” Pelley noted.
60 Minutes went first with its Harris interview, in which Bill Whitaker asked the vice president about issues like Israel, the economy and the border, sometimes pressing her multiple times for an answer.
While noting that the number of border crossings have decreased significantly since President Joe Biden cracked down on asylum seekers, Whitaker asked, “If that’s the right answer now, why didn’t your administration take those steps in 2021?”
Harris noted that Trump killed a bipartisan border security bill earlier this year, but Whitaker then asked, “There was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration. As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?”
“It’s a longstanding problem,” Harris said. “And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.”
Whitaker continued to press her, and Harris eventually answered, “We need Congress to be able to act to actually fix the problem.”
The CBS newsmagazine also traveled with Harris on the campaign trail, and the segment featured a brief interview with her and Liz Cheney.
“Would you ever have thought that you’d be campaigning with Kamala Harris?” Whitaker asked.
Cheney answered, “I hope that if you had said to me four years ago, ‘Our constitution is going to be under threat and it’s gonna be crucial for the parties to come together– and to support Vice President Harris because she’ll defend the rule of law’ — I know I would’ve said, ‘That’s exactly what I’ll do.'”
Whitaker also sat down with Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz. He said during last week’s vice presidential debate that he can be a “knucklehead” at times, as he was asked about his claims that he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests in China in 1989. In fact, Walz said that he was there in August, after they had ended.
“I think folks know who I am,” Walz said. “And I think they know the difference between someone expressing emotion, telling a story, getting a date wrong by–you–rather than a pathological liar like Donald Trump.”
Whitaker said, “But I think it comes down to the question of whether—whether you can be trusted to tell the truth.”
“I think I can. I will own up to being a knucklehead at times, but the folks closest to me know that I keep my word,” Walz answered.
Whitaker also offered Harris the change to comment on Trump’s absence from the show.
He said to her, “You are sitting here with us. The Trump campaign canceled an interview that they had agreed to, to participate in this broadcast. What do you make of that?”
She said, “If he is not gonna give your viewers the ability to have a meaningful, thoughtful conversation, question and answer with you, then watch his rallies. You’re gonna hear conversations that are about himself and all of his personal grievances. And what you will not hear is anything about you, the listener.”
