President Donald Trump's sit-down interview on Fox News on Thursday was ridiculed by a CNN host who said it wasn't journalism, but an "infomercial."
CNN played a clip from Trump's interview with Fox News' Harris Faulkner in which he held printed copies of news reports with headlines favorable to him. Trump was named the third person in a room when his former lawyer Michael Cohen met with the publisher of the National Enquirer about hush payments and ways to suppress stories about Trump and his relationships with women.
"I don't think we made a payment to that tabloid," Trump told Faulkner and handed her the copies. "Look, 'Trump didn't violate campaign finance laws and neither did the president' … 'Michael Cohen plead guilty to something that's not even a crime.'"
CNN host S.E. Cupp criticized the setup of the one-on-one interview.
"Can we just say for the record that was not an interview? It was an infomercial," Cupp said. "You know, allowing the president to provide his evidence, see look what this paper says, and look what this person says, to ask the president what he feels about his approval numbers."
Cupp reiterated: "I watched the whole interview it wasn't journalism—that was an infomercial."
"So I'm not sure that we really learned much about the investigation or China or tariffs or anything that's going on in that orbit," she continued, "Because all we heard was what Trump wanted to say and what Fox wanted us to hear, so I don't put a whole lot of stock in what the questions asked and what the answers were."
Cupp said Trump is "trying to rewrite and spin this story which is very unbecoming" and that he knows he will not get real pushback from a friendly audience on whether or not he made the tabloid, "a.k.a. one of his best friends."
American Media Inc. (AMI), owner of the Enquirer, stated that the tabloid's publisher David Pecker "offered to help deal with negative stories about that presidential candidate's relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided."
Trump was pursuing the Republican nomination for the 2016 presidential election.
Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison earlier this week for lying to Congress about a Trump Organization real estate proposal in Russia.
Trump's exclusive interview with Fox News was unsurprising given the network consistently covers him in a favorable fashion.
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