Former US President Donald Trump used a recorded interview with Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News anchor, to repeat false accusations about the elections, criticize Democratic President Joe Biden and attack Republican opponents who were in the party’s debate simultaneously without being questioned.
The conversation aired on the presenter’s profile on X, former Twitter, on Wednesday night (23), shortly before the start of the first debate between candidates in the Republican Party primaries, held in the state of Wisconsin and broadcast on Fox News. , in which Trump refused to participate on the grounds that the Americans “already knew him”.
The former president is isolated leader of the polls as a pre-candidate of the party to the Presidency and also wants to avoid being attacked by other candidates, especially in the midst of four criminal cases in which he is accused.
He called opponent Asa Hutchinson “weak and pathetic” and said Chris Christie has only an 8% approval rating in New Jersey and is running solely on the basis of insults against him. Trump mentioned only in passing Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who is closest to the former president in the polls.
Fox News tried to publicly and privately convince Trump to attend the event. During the conversations, however, the former president had already signaled to people close to him that he would follow through with his plan to publish the interview with Carlson.
The presenter, by the way, was the star of the channel, audience leader in prime time and one of the most controversial figures of the American right. Embroiled in a multimillion-dollar libel suit over false allegations of voter fraud, he left network television, which still pays his contract and with which Carlson has been at war ever since he left.
The election fraud charge is something Trump has been doing since the end of the plea in 2020 when he lost to Joe Biden-he again attacked the plea in the interview with Carlson, who agreed with the interviewee. In January 2021, the invasion of the Capitol that followed the electoral dispute motivated one of four cases in which the former president is accused of, among other charges, conspiracy to defraud the US and attempting to obstruct an official procedure.
This Thursday (24), the spotlight should turn to Trump again. He announced that he will turn himself in to Georgia Justice on that date, part of the most recent criminal case he is the subject of. In the indictment, the former president and allies would have organized to change the result of the election in Georgia, a state where the republican lost by a difference of just 0.02 percentage points.
In a leaked phone call, according to the indictment, he asks a state official to “find” about 12,000 votes, the number needed to reverse the state’s scoreboard. The prosecution built its case on the basis of legislation used to combat organized crime known as Rico (“Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations”).
This Wednesday, former Trump lawyer and former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani appeared at a prison unit in Atlanta to be formally accused by Justice of trying to reverse the result of the 2020 elections in favor of the Republican in the state. Other allies, such as Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell, also turned themselves in.
“Maybe there are more indictments, I don’t know, these people are crazy,” Trump said in a question from Carlson about the accusations he has leveled not having a negative effect on the Republican primary polls.
