In an interview recorded a day earlier that Fox News delayed broadcasting until Thursday, Donald Trump used the “I” word. Asked by Fox reporter Ainsley Earhardt whether Democrats would impeach Trump “to win back control of Congress”—a question that itself seemed to flip the order of potential events—Trump provided a response that seems very close to the last fallback position of someone caught in a crime.
Trump: You know, I guess it says something like high crimes and all. I don't know how you can impeach somebody who has done a great job, …
If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash, I think everybody would be very poor.
Trump then pointed to his head and said “Because without this thinking, you would see numbers that you wouldn’t believe.”
Considering that the stock market just marked a ten-year period of increases, eight years of which happened without Trump on hand, it’s hard to argue that the market would automatically go into reverse if Trump were once again off the stage. And someone might remind Trump that a lot of people are already “very poor,” because the top one percent controls a record amount of that stock wealth. But that someone would not be found on Fox News.
Asked to give himself a grade, Trump naturally responded "I give myself an A+” which is assumed and “I don't think any president has ever done what I have done,” which is true if Trump is talking about his record-setting pace of corruption and disaster.
Trump based his grade primarily on “Soon to be two unbelievable Supreme Court justices.” So Trump’s greatest accomplishment remains something that was handed to him by Mitch McConnell. However, it wasn’t his only accomplishment. Trump also claimed that he “did a lot of things,” citing “I got rid of regulations” and claiming that he had created 48,000 jobs by approving “the pipelines.” Which is nearly double the 28,000 Trump claimed the last time he brought up approving Keystone XL, and 47,950 more than experts believe were really created.
Much of Trump’s interview was studded with claims about how terrible things would have been if “Hillary and the Democrats gotten in.” Trump insisted that there would have been “negative growth,” even though the pace of job creation has actually dropped from the levels under President Obama since Trump took office.
Trump, and Fox, also took time out for xenophobia, spending their time being relieved that one of the nation’s 17,000 annual homicides was committed by an immigrant at just the right time to provide some distraction from the Cohen and Manafort verdicts.
During his interview Trump continued to claim that the payments by Michael Cohen did not “come out of the campaign” and continued his bizarre claim that Cohen pled guilty to things that were “not a crime.”