ROSS DOUTHAT & CBS NEWS: CONTEMPTIBLE CRAVEN TRUMP SANE-WASHING EPISODE OF THE DAY
How CBS & Ross Douthat Turned Trump’s Rambling Into Primetime Semi-Coherence; or, The Sane-Washing of Donald Trump, One Edit at a Time. Ross Douthat fronts CBS’s Trump normalization project, and gets paid for it:
Ross Douthat does not have to be the front man for this.
But he chooses to do so.
Presumably it makes him some money. Presumably it advances the cause of normalizing Trump, and he approves of that cause, as having long-term follow-on effects of making the Republicans he has been shilling for seem less contemptible and unpatriotic than they have been, and still are:
Decoding Fox News: Trump’s CBS 60 Minutes Interview: What Aired and What Was Cut - 11/8/26 TRANSCRIPT ONLY <https://substack.com/home/post/p-224122220>: ‘
Sunday November 8, 2026: President Donald J. Trump was interviewed by Ross Douthat on CBS “60 Minutes”…. For the purpose of this transcript I simply indicate what was included and what was cut from the broadcast version. The interview was heavily edited… purposefully remov[ing] some of Trump’s exaggerations and fabrications involving the U.S. economy, immigration, and his false claims about the 2020 election. In other cases the network clipped Trump’s excessively long answers. His rambling and incoherent responses are sometimes reduced to a quick soundbite.
NOT INCLUDED Indicates sections that were cut from the broadcast version.
BROADCAST Indicates what sections remained in the CBS primetime version….
NOT INCLUDED
Douthat: Mr. president, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. We’re going to start with the midterms
BROADCAST
Douthat: Two years ago. You won a big. Some might say historic victory. Just now the Republican Party in the midterms suffered a big some might say historic defeat. Give me your political analysis of what just happened.
Trump: Well, number one, I was not on the ballot, but I campaigned hard for some people, and I think I was on the ballot. It would have been a much different situation because you saw the level of popularity and love. There was love with massive rallies.
NOT INCLUDED
Trump: Nobody’s ever seen rallies like that for midterms, and there wasn’t one room that didn’t have thousands of people outside couldn’t get in.
BROADCAST
Trump: So, you had to transfer those voters, however, to candidates that they didn’t like. But there’s something beyond that. They didn’t like the war. They didn’t like the fact that gasoline went up because I had it down at a low
NOT INCLUDED
Trump: in Iowa. It was $1.85 a gallon, $1.85 a gallon. And when you look at $1.85 and you go up to three and a half, four dollars still lower than Biden, lower than Obama. But the war was blamed for that. And they didn’t like the war. I think mostly for that reason, because I think everyone agrees that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon and they will never have a nuclear weapon. They won’t have that.
BROADCAST
Trump: But and there’s a great dislike, incredibly, for Israel.
NOT INCLUDED
Trump: There seems to be a dislike for Israel. So, you have that. You have the war itself. You have the gas prices. And I think those are the primary reasons. And, you know, MAGA and I always I want to keep out of wars. I’ve settled eight wars. I settled eight wars, I mean India, Pakistan would have been a nuclear war. I got it settled before it got going. They had 11 planes shot down. They were ready to go. The prime minister of Pakistan said Trump saved 30 to 50 million lives. I settled a lot of wars there Azerbaijan.
Douthat: Let’s go. Let’s go through those then, one by one.
BROADCAST
Douthat: Start with the candidates. Right. You said it was tough to transfer your own appeal to candidates, but in a lot of cases, you picked the candidates. You endorsed Ken Paxton in Texas. He had a tough time. You endorsed Darline Graham
Trump: Coryn would have lost also. Darline, I did that in honor of a man named Lindsey, who was a friend of mine
NOT INCLUDED
Trump: who was a good politician, good guy. He was a very good guy.
BROADCAST
Trump: And she fought hard. She fought hard. She really did.
Douthat: She she she lost a very Republican state to a very liberal challenger.
Trump: I won South Carolina by the highest vote in history by far. I won Texas by the highest vote in history by far. I won Florida who, by the way, I did endorse. And he’s going to be a great governor and a great senator. I endorsed both of them, and had I not endorsed him, they wouldn’t have won.
NOT INCLUDED
Trump: Because there was a wave. You know, I also brought a lot of people to a lot closer to victory. If you look at Ohio, he was Jon Husted was a good guy, but he was 15 down. He ended up losing by a point, maybe less than a point. It was almost one. But I don’t make excuses for that. I won Ohio by the most votes in history to. You’re only talking.
Douthat: Why didn’t it transfer?
BROADCAST
Douthat: You were out on the trail and. You said vote like I’m on the ballot. And people didn’t? Or did they? Did they vote because they were mad at you about?
Trump: I think they didn’t vote. Really? I think they didn’t vote. I think in some cases they didn’t like the candidates and that’s, you know, their prerogative.
NOT INCLUDED
Trump: Look, three times they’ve not necessarily listened to me. The two other times I didn’t go as much out as I did. This time I went all out. I did, I think 30 rallies in like 28 days or something. And there were massive rallies and they were very good and they loved me. I mean, you saw the it was like unbelievable. But there’s maybe.
Douthat: There’s no question that part of the country loves you. But as you said, there’s another part of the country. I think that just by your own description, Wright was unhappy with the war in Iran. Yeah, I’m happy with the economy. Talk about the economy for a moment. You handed me the jobs numbers that just came out a couple of days after the election. They’re very good job numbers, low unemployment rate. That’s been true throughout your second term.
BROADCAST
Douthat: But in poll after poll, people say they’re unhappy with this economy in a way they weren’t in the first term. Cost of living, inflation and so on. Is that all just the Iran war?
NOT INCLUDED
Douthat: Or are there other things that haven’t been fixed?
BROADCAST
Trump: Well, it’s not really the Iran war because the numbers are phenomenal.
NOT INCLUDED
Trump: The numbers that we have are historically good numbers.
BROADCAST
Trump: I think it was bad messaging maybe by me, but I would talk about it all the time. So, I don’t know how much can I talk about it. Look, the press doesn’t. Cover it. The press doesn’t cover positive news for Republicans. They don’t cover certainly positive news for me. So, I have to do it myself. I have to get it out there.
NOT INCLUDED
Trump: One of the reasons I did rallies was to do that, but I would talk about how good
BROADCAST
Trump: We have historically good numbers. We have the highest stock market in history.
NOT INCLUDED
Trump: Now, we lost yesterday because of the election, $3 trillion. The market lost almost 2000 points because of the Democrats. They got in and the world said, I don’t want to invest with these people because they look what happened in France. They look what happened in Italy and all over the world. And they say this is the same ideology, but we have had let’s go the day before yesterday, right before where the election, you know, when we’re talking about now, a day before the election, we picked up $25 trillion in worth in the worth of our, in value. Nobody’s ever done that before…
And on, and on, and on, and on, and on.
It is a good grift, on many levels, I suppose: