Side-by-Side: The 60 Minutes Trump Interview the World Wasn’t Shown

If you watched CBS’ interview of President Donald Trump and 60 minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, you’d be given the impression he sat down for around 10 minutes and then “stormed off” when things got testy.

When 60 Minutes and Lesley Stahl are too tough for you, you ain’t all that tough. If you got to walk out of a 60 Minutes interview, then you’re never going to stand up to a dictator.
Barack Obama, 10/24/20

The White House wisely shot their own video of the interview which actually lasted close to 40 minutes and what was left out would have given the public a totally different impression of the president’s demeanor and displayed Stahl’s avoidance and/or defense of topics inconvenient to Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Here is an exclusive side-by-side presentation of the interview with President Trump and Lesley Stahl.


Note: There are a few spots where the audio is out of sync. Because of varying bit and frame rates on the original sources, making these as tight as possible is meticulous, challenging and not exact science. It explains why Bob is the only video editor who takes the time to do these.

The President of the United States is a busy man. Not many people are given a couple of hours (set up, interview, tear down) of valuable White House time. 60 Minutes is a television “news” magazine that has set times for segments to allow for commercial breaks. The Sunday, October 25th episodic was divided between Stahl interviews with President Trump and Vice President Pence, and Norah O’Donnell interviews with Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris. Each segment would be shot and edited down for time so of course, much of the interviews would not be aired.

However as a matter of import, that’s also why television has what they call “specials” and this would have been a golden opportunity for all of the interviews to be run uninterrupted. What most Americans didn’t see and hear in the Trump interview was Stahl’s whining and defense of Joe Biden which could have been professionally and politically problematic.

Maybe that was the plan all along.

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