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An ‘exhausted’ Trump says no to another interview

2024 US Presidential ElectionAn ‘exhausted’ Trump says no to another interview

By Eugene Daniels

Recently, it’s become something of a pattern: Donald Trump is scheduled for an interview with a neutral media outlet, the date nears and then … things fall apart.

It happened just this week to planned Trump sit-downs with NBC in Philadelphia and CNBC’s “Squawk Box” — and that’s on the heels of him backing out of a “60 Minutes” episode earlier this month.

Why does this keep happening? Another outlet was recently given an explanation by Trump’s team for why their own interview wasn’t coming to fruition: exhaustion.

The Trump campaign had spent weeks in conversations with The Shade Room, a site that draws a largely young and Black audience — a demographic where Trump has been making inroads. It hosted an interview with Kamala Harris just last week.

But no interview has materialized. As Shade Room staff began feeling that feet were being dragged inside Trump’s campaign, they pressed earlier this week to set a date for a sit-down.

In response, a Trump adviser told Shade Room producers that Trump was “exhausted and refusing [some] interviews but that could change” at any time, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

Trump-supporting rapper Waka Flocka Flame was offered up as an alternative, those two people say.

Trump national press secretary Karoline Leavitt, while making clear she wasn’t part of the back-and-forth for the Shade Room interview, said last night that the idea that Trump was exhausted “is unequivocally false.”

“President Trump is running laps around Kamala Harris on the campaign trail,” Leavitt said. “And has done media interviews every day this week. He has more energy and a harder work ethic than anyone in politics.”

While Trump’s team notes that their candidate has constantly done interviews, they have been mainly with friendly hosts or on friendly networks of late.

As for the one contentious interview he did this week, with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait, Trump later complained that he was “hoodwinked to go on that,” learning about his interlocutor only after committing to a Chicago Economic Club event.

“President Trump has never backed down from any interview,” Leavitt added. “This is a man who held a CNN town hall in the middle of the Republican primary, for goodness’ sake.”

This article was originally published in POLITICO.

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