Fox News "Hannity" - Transcript Interview with Donald Trump

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

HANNITY: All right. The president is on the line, just for kicks and giggles.

I want Leo Terrell, lifelong Democrat, I want you to tell the president in 30 seconds why you're voting for him and for the first time ever, right, for a Republican ever.

TERRELL: Yes, President Trump, I want you to listen to me. Give me call me later on. The first time ever in my entire life as a Republican, I'm voting for you. Now, maintain what you're doing in these Democratic cities, and I will go to those networks and battle those guys for you. You're going to win in November, I guarantee it. I'm out there with you 24/7.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP (via telephone): -- very much. And you have come a long way, Leo. I have to tell you.

(LAUGHTER)

TRUMP: I've been watching you, and I've always respected even on the other side.

(CROSSTALK)

TERRELL: I'm here, I'm here. I'm here, I'm here now. I'm here right now! I'm here.

TRUMP: I appreciate it, I do. I will do that.

TERRELL: Thank you. Thank you.

TRUMP: Thanks, Leo. Really great.

HANNITY: All right. Leo, Geraldo, thank you, Dan Bongino.

All right. I think that might have been the funniest we've had.

Mr. President, sir, thank you so much for joining us. I know it's been a busy number of days here for you.

A lot of news to get to. I want to spend a lot of time on the violence, the safety, security of our cities.

TRUMP: Yes.

HANNITY: I want to talk about COVID a lot.

Let's start with some breaking news, and that is that you earlier today decided to pull back on the convention in Jacksonville. You gave a reason. Can you give us the reasons again in more detail?

TRUMP: Well, it's really the China virus. Call it COVID. Call it any one of a lot of different names.

But we're setting an example. We don't want to have people so close together. We have had such enthusiasm. Everybody wanted to go there. We went to North Carolina. We wanted to do it there. It was all set. We were going to build a beautiful facility. And it got hit hard. And the governor then, really, he could have treated us better, Democrat governor.

But we are actually opening up there. And then we will make -- we will make our ways. It won't be your typical convention. I can say that, but it's going to be very safe.

And I thought I had an obligation not to have large numbers, massive numbers of people crowded into a room.

HANNITY: I have been told, Mr. President, from sources of mine -- you can confirm if you like -- I guess maybe I'm not surprised, that you're entertaining ideas that I have heard tonight that would be pretty spectacular.

Would you give us any insight into what they are?

TRUMP: Well, we have some ideas, but it'll have to be different than your typical convention.

We have just great enthusiasm in the party. I don't think we have ever had it, even more so than 2016. And you see what's going on with the polls.

Since -- it's funny. Since I did a -- I made a speech at Mount Rushmore. And since that time, it's been really something. There's been -- I mean, before that, really. You have all of these fake, these suppression polls, and just like 2016, when they put out these phony polls, the media.

But I will tell you what. It's -- that the enthusiasm this party has and that they have for their president, because we're keeping our cities safe. We want to go in. We can't understand.

I heard you talking with the group. Really, that's a group of -- a great group of three people. But I heard you talking about the cities and the safeties of the cities.

I have offered them all, every one of them -- and there's 10 of them. We're offering all of them, let us go in. We will clean it up. We will clean it up.

Now, in Portland, we had to do it because that was -- that's -- they're anarchists. That's even -- that's a level that people haven't seen, but they're anarchists.

And they were going wild for 51 days. And we went in. And they have done a great job. They were going to rip down the courthouse, a big federal courthouse, gorgeous federal courthouse.

So, we went in. And we have been very, very strong. And we have this Mayor Whalen (sic), who I think is also -- he's also the police commissioner, as I understand it, in Portland.

HANNITY: Wheeler, yes.

TRUMP: Mayor Wheeler.

And he's -- he made a fool out of himself last -- he wanted to be among the people. So, he went into the crowd. And they knocked the hell out of him. That was the end of him. So, it was pretty, pretty pathetic.

But we want to go in and help the cities. We want to help Chicago. We want to help all of them. Detroit's having problems. A very good police chief in Detroit, but they have problems.

We will go into all of the cities, any of the cities. We're ready. We will put in 50,000, 60,000 people that really know what they're doing. And they're strong. They're tough. And we could solve these problems so fast.

But, as you know, we have to be invited in.

HANNITY: Mr. President, I want to ask you about that.

TRUMP: At some point, we're going to have to do something that's much stronger than being invited in. But we have to be invited in.

Go ahead, Sean.

HANNITY: The acting DHS chief, Chad Wolf, there are statutory reasons and justification to protect federal buildings. That is what has been happening, when you talk about 100 agents.

We now have 15 mayors. We see this rise in homicides and shootings. One day right here on this program a couple of nights ago, 15 people shot in Chicago, last weekend, 70 people shot, 12 dead, a 10-year-old, 11-year-old shot.

You spoke to Horace Lorenzo Anderson Sr. I know you invited him to the White House. He lost his 19-year-old son. We lost an 8-year-old little girl in the CHAZ Autonomous Zone in Atlanta, a 1-year-old in Brooklyn, a 7-year- old little beautiful young girl in Chicago.

And they -- the one thing that all of these cities have in common, they have been run by liberal Democratic mayors, liberal Democratic governors for decades.

TRUMP: Right.

HANNITY: What do you say to the people? Most people would argue, you don't have a chance of winning New York, or Illinois, or California, or Washington state.

TRUMP: Well, you're right.

They're run by very liberal people, you could say radical left in some cases, in some cases, just liberal Democrats. And they're not taking care of their police. They're not respecting the police. The police do an incredible job. It's a very tough job. It's a very dangerous job.

And these mayors and, by the way, governors and senators and congressmen, Democrat congressmen, they want to pass stuff to make the police -- they want to take all of their power away. And you will have a bad situation, where you will have a bad cop, a very bad cop. And they have no idea the problem they cause.

But you have 99 percent great people that work hard and get paid not nearly enough. And the job they do is incredible. And these people are just taking all of their respect. They're taking their guts out. And it's a shame. It's a shame.

And the police, they could do the job. In Seattle, they could. They knew that we were coming in. And they went in just before we got there. So, we were all set to move. But if we weren't going to go in, if they thought that we weren't coming in, it would still be bad.

But those police can do the job. But the mayor and everybody tells them not to do it. The governor, they say not to do it. And it's a philosophy.

And let me tell you, if Joe Biden ever got in, the whole country would be like that. We have a lot of great cities. We have a lot of very safe cities, great places, great states that don't have any problems. And they look at the things that they see in Chicago, and they look at what they're witnessing in Portland and all of these different places, and they can't believe what's going on.

But we have -- we have great places. But we have some instances that nobody's ever seen.

I spoke with the mayor of Chicago, Mayor Lightfoot, and had a great talk. But within minutes after that talk -- you just reported it tonight -- a couple of more people were shot. Young, very young children were shot.

HANNITY: Sad. So sad.

TRUMP: And it's a shame. It's a shame.

And we could solve it. If they invited us in, we'd go in with 50,000, 75,000 people. We would be able to solve it, like you wouldn't believe, and quick. But they just don't want to ask, maybe for political reasons. But they don't want to ask. It's a disgrace.

HANNITY: Let me ask you, Mr. President.

I know a lot has been made over Joe Biden and his comments that he made. I know he's now backed off it. And he says, well, I said it before the other way. I don't know if he's just not remembering what maybe somebody else wrote in "USA Today," for example, but he did say police have now become the enemy, when they're supposed to help people.

And then a follow-up was, would you support re-appropriating the money? And he said yes, now, not using the term. Democrats seem to be walking back the term defund. But reallocation is the word he used. Well, that would be the same thing.

Let me play it, so to remind our audience what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, D-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Surplus military equipment for law enforcement, they don't need that.

The last thing you need is an up-armored Humvee coming into a neighborhood. It's like the military invading. They don't know anybody. They become the enemy. They're supposed to be protecting these people.

So, my generic point is that...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But can we agree that we can redirect some of the funding?

BIDEN: Yes, absolutely.

One of the things that we also need to be doing is fundamentally changing the way -- and I have been pushing it for years -- changing the way we deal with our prison system.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HANNITY: Mr. President, I can remind people, you're the one that did criminal justice reform. Biden, as vice president, Barack, they did not. You did police reform. They did not.

You also set record after record low unemployment. They added 13 million more Americans to food stamps, eight million more in poverty, and the lowest labor participation rates since the '70s. You set record low after record low for every demographic group.

And we got Opportunity Zones, your biggest commitment in terms of money and length of time to historically black colleges. They didn't do any of those things.

Your answer to what Joe Biden -- now he's now -- he's adopting the position of the, yes, police are the enemies, he's never said a good word, Bolshevik Bernie's economic agenda, AOC's New Green Deal agenda. He's pledging trillions of taxpayer dollars.

And add to that, let's see, Beto O'Rourke and Pelosi, Schumer and Biden, 125 years in the swamp. Your reaction to his team?

TRUMP: Well, it's all true.

But one of the things you mentioned and he mentioned was the surplus military equipment. And when I came in, as soon as I came in, I distributed to all of the police departments all over the nation. We had hundreds of millions of dollars of -- sometimes new, but it was never going to be used.

It was sitting in warehouses all over the U.S. And I delivered it all to police, free of charge, all to police. It was just growing dust. It was just -- just sitting there, just, I guess, paying rent or whatever they were doing in all these massive warehouses.

And I got it all out to the police. And they were so thankful. And, you know, a lot of it was protective equipment. And they didn't want to do it, because they thought the police looked too strong, that it was sending a wrong signal to the police.

But it was really protecting the police. And there was offensive capability, but there was a lot of protective capability. And it was really amazing to me, what -- that they wouldn't deliver it, they wouldn't -- they wouldn't do it.

And I -- and I have gotten notes. I have gotten so many notes from the heads of the police departments, and even from the cops, just the guys on the beat, thanking me for all of the equipment that we send out. And we were never going to use it. It was growing old and growing dusty.

So, that's a whole different way of thinking, but -- and when he -- when you talk about the Bernie Sanders thing, I think what Joe Biden -- and I don't think it was him. I think it was radical left people that are totally controlling him, like a puppet. I don't think it's him. I don't think he knows even what we're talking about.

But when we talk about Biden, he's got a manifesto that he agreed to -- I call it a manifesto -- with Bernie Sanders for open borders and things that you wouldn't even believe. I mean, these are left-wing at a level that I don't think Bernie ever talked about to the same extent.

You would think there's a negotiation, that Bernie would be brought to the right a little bit. I think Bernie went further left, and Biden agreed to all of this stuff.

HANNITY: Let me ask you.

Sir, I have been in talk radio for 33 years, believe it or not, since I began that journey. I have been blessed to work here at Fox. I'm now in my 25th year here. Politics is a passion of mine.

Usually, you have candidates -- you're probably an exception -- what you say -- what you said in 2016 is what you did. You...

TRUMP: Yes.

HANNITY: In many ways, people haven't figured out you're very predictable, in the sense that, if you say it, you mean it, in my view.

But, usually, people run to the base for the primary, and then they run to the center. Joe Biden has adopted Bolshevik Bernie's radical socialism, AOC's New Green Deal. We're talking about trillions of dollars he's now committing to both those things, redistribution, higher taxes.

Then I mentioned Beto O'Rourke, and then Schumer, Pelosi and Biden have had 20 -- 125 years.

Why, in this case, do you believe he's going harder left than any candidate I have ever seen in my lifetime, for sure?

TRUMP: Because I think he's afraid of the people on his left.

I think that, when -- these are very radicalized people. I mean, he's gone so far. He's given Bernie everything. Bernie can't even believe it. I heard Bernie's going around saying, I can't believe what we got.

And this was a negotiation that was done very quickly.

And, today, I saw President Obama with him. And remember this. I wouldn't be there if it weren't for those two. If they did a good job, I wouldn't -- you know, I ran. I ran against what they did. And I won.

And nobody campaigned harder than President Obama. Somebody said, oh, Obama's coming, and I said, that's OK, we beat him the last time. I think he campaigned harder than Hillary Clinton did, if you want to know the truth. Remember I would always talk about here comes Air Force One? Obama was all over the place.

But the fact is, Biden and Obama, I'm here, I'm in the White House because of them. If they did a good job -- people forget, but if they did a good job, and except for the China virus that came in, we were setting every record you could set for unemployment, for the stock market, every single record you could imagine.

And then what we did, we rebuilt the military. We got rid of regulations at a level that no administration even in eight years or in one case, more than that, no administration has come close. And we've appointed -- you know, we will have almost, it could even be more, but almost 300 federal judges appointed by the end of my first term. That's a record. Nobody's ever done anything like that. And two Supreme Court judges, great ones.

HANNITY: All right. Let me go to Joe Biden. I argue, and I've watched this and witnessed this my whole professional life, I think that the job you have, I believe, regardless of who is president, is the hardest job in the world. You have a lot of burdens on your shoulder, anybody that is president. And I think when they asked Reagan in 1984 in that question whether or not he had the mental alertness, the strength, the stamina to do the job, it was a fair question.

He answered it in one line in the second debate against Mondale. Let me play some of the greatest hits of Biden and then Biden from yesterday. And I want your take on what is going on with Joe Biden. Let's play it first.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(PHONE RINGING)

BIDEN: The scale, the scale of the loss is staggering. I don't know whose phone that is. But the scale of the loss is staggering.

It has been two months since Congress gave them that money.

Introduce me?

(INAUDIBLE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK. Yes, sir.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Am I on?

BIDEN: Good evening.

Thanks so much for tuning in.

Look, tomorrow is Super Thursday -- Tuesday, and I want to thank you all.

I'll tell you all, I'm rushing ahead, aren't I?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, all men and women created by -- you know the thing.

My name is Joe Biden and I'm a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate. Look me over, you like what you see, help out.

Do you agree with me? Go to Joe 30330.

We choose truth over facts.

Play the radio, make sure the television -- excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the phone -- make sure that kids hear words.

Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.

Donald Trump does pose an extra threat (ph) to this -- it's not hypothetical.

Why in God's name should someone who is clipping coupons in the stock market make -- in fact, pay a lower tax rate than someone who, in fact, is, like I said, a schoolteacher and a firefighter?

I'm sorry, I'm confused who I am talking to here. But anyway, whoever it is...

And I had a nurse that -- nurses at Walter Reed Hospital who would bend down and whisper in my ear, go home and get me pillows. They would make sure they would actually -- probably nothing ever taught in -- you can't do it in the COVID time, but they would actually breathe in my nostrils to make me move.

Wearing a mask is now a political statement? This is more patriotic. Why do you wear the mask? So you don't make somebody else sick. Sick. What is with this guy?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Steve (ph), that's our time.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HANNITY: Mr. President, I'm not a doctor, I won't play one. I don't see -- I think Joe Biden has aged dramatically since he has left office. He doesn't seem very alert. They seem to be protecting him and hiding him. We now have interviews that are being shut off by handlers. What is your reaction, sir?

TRUMP: Well, in all fairness, I know people that are 90, 91, 92 that are sharp as a tack. Bernie Marcus, as an example, Home Depot, and others I know, numerous. But you know, I just -- it's hard to comment on somebody. He is an opponent. You have to be very sharp. I'm dealing with the heads of these countries. And every one of them is a world-class chess player. And if you are not 100 percent on your game, if you are not 100 percent sharp- plus, you've got a problem.

I looked -- I looked at what we have in this country. I came in and I guessed it from before, but after I saw what was going on with horrible trade deals, horrible military deals, money being spent, it was being sent out like water. You see what I have done with NATO, $140 billion, but really much more than that. It increases every year where countries are now paying for what we are doing. It was so unfair.

So many different things, I could go -- and you don't have enough time. I could go all night with it. But you have to be on your game. You have to be sharp. And you have to be tough. And if you are not, these guys are going to take you to the cleaner.

And they will take you to the cleaners like you have never seen before. It is so easy. And he wasn't -- he wasn't the best in his heyday.

Let's not kid ourselves. Everybody knows that. Everybody knows that. Senators will tell you that in his best he wasn't. But I see the statements he is making now. And I don't think he has much of a clue.

HANNITY: Mr. President, when you spoke about canceling the convention in Jacksonville, you were very passionate about it today. And you said the timing is not right. And we knew there would be flare-ups. This virus is the worst since 1918. And you said today, I have to protect the American people. That is what I have always done. That is what I always will be -- will do, that's what I'm about. We can make this work easily.

And you also reminded people the importance of masks. People say you haven't been as outspoken as maybe you should have been on masks. But there were people telling us, well-known experts, not to wear masks in March for crying out loud, and socially distancing.

And the CDC just released last week that if people wear the masks, this thing could be gone in four to six weeks. And what can you add about therapeutics and what can you add about a potential vaccine? You mentioned Pfizer today.

TRUMP: Well, you know, at the beginning, many people, many very respected people, I won't mention names, but many respected people were saying don't wear a mask, that they're bad. You touch your face too much, and you get your hands near your eyes and your nose and they are bad.

And then all of a sudden, it was a big thing to get masks because I'm all for it. Look, whatever is going to help, if it was a five percent chance, a two percent chance, wear it. And I will wear it. I wore it at Walter Reed Hospital the other day.

I went to the hospital. I visited soldiers that have been so badly injured in Iraq. And it is terrible, in Afghanistan -- I saw one that was so badly injured in Afghanistan.

And, you know, we are largely -- we're down to a very small force in both places. We were serving as policemen over there. And we can police our own country, especially when you look at Chicago and you look at what is happening around our country. And, you know, we have done a lot. We have done a lot.

But you have to -- we have to do -- we have to get our country back. We have to get rid of this horrible plague that hit us and it hit us hard. But it didn't just hit us. It hit the whole world, Sean.

The whole world was hit. China allowed it to escape to Europe and to the whole world, including us. And they are suffering. There's tremendous -- you know, you don't see that too much in the news, but you have countries that are going through relatively what we are doing plus-plus-plus. It is horrible.

And we make ventilators because we have become -- we have become the best in the world for the ventilators. We're making thousands a month. We are sending supplies all over. And we are in -- we are in great shape from the standpoint. But we have this thing that is very, very contagious. Nobody has ever seen anything like it. Very, very highly contagious.

But if you take a look at a map, we have large sections of the country that are in great shape. And we are going to win. And we are going to win sooner rather than later. I will say this on the vaccines, we are doing well. We have the greatest companies in the world, including we are dealing with other nations. We are working very closely.

And therapeutically, therapeutics are, I think, going to be fantastic. Frankly, I would like to have that first because you could go into the hospitals, give somebody a shot or do whatever you have to do, and they would get better right away. But we are doing very well therapeutically. And we are doing very, very well with vaccines.

HANNITY: Well, we know new studies have come out, and I had Dr. Oz on my radio show this week, that hydroxychloroquine, used early with azithromycin and zinc, and you took a lot of heat over it, mortality rate cut in half according to the Ford study. He mentioned a local hospital, retrospective study in New York.

Let me add, you tweeted out tonight: baseball is back. By the way, poor Dr. Fauci -- and I really do believe and people I think try to divide both of you, that he has tried his best. Dr. Birx has tried her best. All of the models and experts in many, many ways were so wrong. The one thing that remained consistent is the most vulnerable, the elderly, those with compromised conditions or immune systems and pre-existing conditions.

So I ask you, you know, where are we with the vaccine, the therapeutics? How soon? And do you want every American, if they can't socially distance, to wear the mask? I selfishly want baseball and football to open so we can go. And I also want to protect grandmas and grandpas.

TRUMP: I would like to see everybody, if they can't spread, if they can't have -- be socially distant, then I think they should probably put it on. And even if it's -- let's say it's a 50 percent chance or 25, because, again, people -- these same experts were saying, don't wear it, at one point. Now they're saying wear it. So let's go with them. What difference does it make?

So let's say they're right and let's say there's a 50 percent chance or 25 percent chance, you're not going to lose with it. You're not going to lose with it. So do it.

But, again, as I said, I really think you're going to have some answers very, very soon on therapeutics and also on vaccines. These companies, I'm dealing with them directly, I'm getting reports directly. They are very far advanced. They've already started testing. And what I have done is through the FDA, Dr. Hahn, and some great people, we have ramped it up to a level that nobody has ever seen speed like this.

We could be two or three years out before we are doing what we are doing. We are already testing. We are actually doing the testing for vaccines and for therapeutics. That would have happened in a normal administration, I will say that that would have happened in two and three years from now.

So we are way, way advanced. And I think you are going to have some very good answers very soon. They're going to come up with the answer.

HANNITY: Mr. President, you are asking the American people in 103 days -- well, some will be voting early. By the way, I have information on my website hannity.com, early voting, how do you do absentee voting, who your congressperson is that's up for election. In 103 days, I say the American people, the ultimate jury. You are asking the American people for four more years. If you are given the four more years, what will this country look like, in your view, four years from now?

TRUMP: So it's all going to be about America first. We always put other countries before us, which is so foolish and so horrible. And it has been so destructive for us. It's about America first. We will help other countries, but we want to take care of ourselves. We are going to be building factories. We are going to be bringing in shops like you've never seen. We were all set to do it until we got hit with the virus.

Our troops will be home. The endless wars are already ending. Down to very few soldiers in -- as you know, in Afghanistan. Very few in Iraq. Syria is largely out except we kept the oil. We have oil there that we kept. I didn't want to leave the oil, we kept it. We took it over.

We are going to be about jobs like you haven't seen. We are going to be respected. And we are now by other countries. They're respecting us more than they have in many, many decades. I will tell you that. We are going to have a wall that is complete. We're up to 257 miles on the new wall. And by the way, if we didn't have that wall in right now, you would have numbers in Texas and in California, in New Mexico like you wouldn't believe.

But we built 257 miles of -- it's 450 but we are going to do about 537 miles altogether. And it will give a complete, beautiful wall on our southern border that has really helped.

And the other thing is, we are going to start making our product. And I have been pushing this from before this happened. We are going to make things here. We will make them here. Right now China and many other countries are doing what we are supposed to be doing. They went, they became globalists, these great geniuses became globalists. And they really hurt our country.

We are going to start making it here. As with Elon Musk, I said, Elon, build a factory in Texas. He just announced today they're building one of the biggest plants in the world, auto plant for Tesla, and it's going to be in Texas. And, you know, it's great. He called me up just a little while ago to say, I got it done. So that meeting, he got it done. But I was pushing that job very hard from Elon, because we work with him and we do a lot for him. And I said, it's time. And he was great. He's doing a good job.

But the other thing we have done is Space Force. You know, we put it in, it's the first time in 76 years we have a new force. We have -- so important, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and now we have the Air Force. It's so great. And it's so important. It's going to end up being one of -- at first, I didn't even talk about that on the campaign. This was after I got in office.

I realized we need it. Because China and Russia were going to dominate space. And we can't let that -- and now we're going to be dominating space. They're not too happy about what we did with Air Force. But we have it. And -- with Space Force.

So we have now Space Force, so important, and so many other things, Sean, regulation cuts, tax cuts, the biggest tax cuts in history, biggest regulation cuts in history. And we are going to continue that foreword. There are still many things we can do. But the bottom line is we are putting America first and we are making America better than it has ever been.

You will see that. We are going to have a great year next year. We're going to have a great third quarter. And the nice thing about the third quarter is the results are going to come out before the election.

HANNITY: You know, I've been saying to my audience on radio and TV that the biggest choice election in our lifetime. It's literally, you know, taxes higher or lower, deregulation, more regulation, law and order, lawlessness, amnesty or border security, judges, energy, trade, foreign policy, it seems like you are running against the team. And the team is Joe, Bernie, "Bolshevik Bernie" I call him, Bernie Sanders the socialist, AOC, Green New Deal, Beto, Schumer, Pelosi, so I think it is.

I want to go back to baseball. You announced today you are going to throw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium on August 15th. Dr. Fauci did not do too well tonight with the Nationals. Have you ever thrown out a first pitch before? Are you nervous about throwing out the first pitch? Derek Jeter once famously said I guess to George Bush after 9/11, if you bounce it, you are going to get booed.

TRUMP: Yes, no, I have thrown out first pitches. I have agreed to do it for the Yankees on I think they are playing the Boston Red Sox. That is a great rivalry. And I will do it. It's great that baseball is back, and other sports are back. I hope everyone is standing. I hope they are not going to be kneeling when the flag is raised. I don't like to see that. That would hurt a lot of people in our country. They don't want to see that with the NFL or baseball or basketball or anything else. We want to -- there are plenty of places you can protest. You don't have to protest on the raising of our flag.

So a lot of great things happening for our country. One other thing I want to say is, we have made incredible trade deals. And we are going to continue that along. Because we got taken to the cleaners by every country. Ally or non-ally, we were taken to the cleaners. And we will keep that going.

HANNITY: Mr. President, Mark Meadows, your chief of staff, recently indicated that indictments could be imminent in the Durham probe. We have big breaking news tonight. I don't know if you saw the opening of the show, a document declassified by your director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, revealing the FBI agent who gave you that defensive briefing in August of 2016 used it as a cover to monitor you and Michael Flynn as it relates to Russia.

Do you remember it? It also, I believe, puts Jim Comey in a position of being proven to have lied just like when he said to you at Trump Tower the dossier is salacious but unverified. But he swore that it was accurate and true when he signed the FISA application to spy on you and your campaign and take away Carter Page's rights. What is your reaction to this news? And your thoughts on where this probe with John Durham is going?

TRUMP: Well, it's just more and more things that you see. And that's only what you see. It is really bad. It is a terrible thing that happened. It should never happen to another president. The fact is that President Obama and Vice President Biden, and the whole group of them with Brennan and Comey and McCabe and Lisa Page and Strzok, her lover, and beyond them, long beyond them, they spied on the campaign, using the intelligence agencies of our country, they illegally -- this is illegal as can be, this is treason, this is many things you can call it, they spied on the campaign of another party or presidential campaign.

HANNITY: And the attorney general.

TRUMP: Both before and after victory. Both before and after. Never been done before. It is so bad. If it were the other side, they would have been in jail for two years, and it would have been a 50-year term. But Obama and Biden knew everything, and they spied on the campaign of the opposing party, using intelligence.

HANNITY: Do you -- well, this raises a question. Now we know what happened in the Oval Office on January 5th. Do you think that Barack Obama, the former president, Joe Biden, should have to answer for what we now know happened 15 days before your inauguration in the Oval Office? We have one minute, sir.

TRUMP: That was just one meeting. There were many meetings. There was no way -- I understand the system very well, I understand being president very well, there was no way this could have gone out without -- gone down without President Obama knowing every single thing.

And even Biden brought up the Logan Act with respect to General Flynn, a great gentleman who has been treated so horribly and still is. A lot of -- a lot of things have been learned. And what happened is a disgrace. Again, should never, ever happen to another president.

HANNITY: Would you consider pardons for the people involved? In the last 15 seconds.

TRUMP: I've looked at a lot of different people, they have been treated extremely unfairly, and I think I probably would, yes.

HANNITY: Mr. President, thank you for your time. In 103 days, the American people will make the ultimate decision. Sir, we appreciate you always taking time for this audience. Thank you.

TRUMP: Thank you very much, Sean. Thank you.

HANNITY: All right. That's all the time we have left. My book coming out in 12 days.

Let not your heart be troubled.

Laura, I hit the post.

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