FULL TRANSCRIPT: President Donald Trump’s interview with “Face the Nation”

What follows is a full transcript of the interview, which aired on CBS earlier Sunday. Additional coverage of the interview will air Monday on “CBS This Morning,” broadcasting live from the White House.

.. The relationship I have with China, it’s been already acclaimed as being something very special, something very different than we’ve ever had.

.. JOHN DICKERSON: Why do these missiles keep blowing up?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I’d rather not discuss it. But perhaps they’re just not very good missiles. But eventually, he’ll have good missiles.

JOHN DICKERSON: You don’t want to discuss it because maybe we have something to do with it?

.. Well, it’s a tough job. But I’ve had a lot of tough jobs. I’ve had things that were tougher, although I’ll let you know that better at the end of eight years. Perhaps eight years. Hopefully, eight years.

.. You know, it’s very funny when the fake media goes out, you know, which we call the mainstream media which sometimes, I must say, is you.

JOHN DICKERSON: You mean me personally or?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, your show. I love your show. I call it Deface the Nation. But, you know, your show is sometimes not exactly correct.

.. I think that, frankly, North Korea is maybe more important than trade.

.. JOHN DICKERSON: What do you know now on day 100 that you wish you knew on day one of the presidency?

Lunch with the FT: Marc Andreessen

The Netscape founder and tech investor talks about the trouble with stock markets, what he looks for in entrepreneurs and why illegal immigration is good for America

His extended family farmed in Iowa. His father, Lowell, sold seed corn for an agricultural company; his mother, Patricia, was a housewife.

.. Deferral of gratification is a huge thing. Calvinism runs very deep. It sets you up pretty well for engineering.”

.. Andreessen sees technology as enabling what he calls the “great awakening”. Waggling his iPhone affectionately, he says: “This little guy right here is the equivalent power capability of the $20m supercomputer I was using. This thing is in two billion people’s hands.”

.. Within six months he had posted 22,300 tweets, and now, according to Bloomberg, averages more than 100 a day to his almost 250,000 followers.

.. His tech-optimism attracts both admiration and mockery. Last June, a Salon article said he used Twitter as a “personal pulpit for delivering Silicon Valley’s version of the Sermon from the Mount”.

.. it is not so much his voice as the speed at which he talks that makes lunch like navigating conversational rapids. He rushes at sentences, starting so many with “And”, or “So”, it is as if his speech cannot keep pace with his ideas. The transcript of our two-hour conversation comes to 20,000 words.

.. I’m really boring. My wife and I have no social life. We don’t travel. We don’t go on vacation. We don’t go out.”

.. We watch an unbelievable amount of TV or movies.” He gossips about The Honourable Woman series, and attributes the creative renaissance of television to its expanding internet audience.

.. He likes television, he says, because it puts the writer in charge, and compares it to the best tech companies which are also built when you put founders in charge for long periods. “By the way, writers are often crazy; they’re unpredictable, they don’t necessarily operate on a budget or timetable you might want. They argue a lot. Which is the same thing we deal with, with founders. But you get the magic.”

.. “We look for the ones who have been programming since 10.”

.. While the position of minorities and women are obviously things Andreessen has thought about, he is bluffly dismissive of too much hand-wringing. “In 2004, it was outsourcing. In 1989, it was Japan. Now it’s China. There’s always some bogeyman. I think the destiny of the US is in our hands.”

.. All will be well, he says, provided we allow more technology. “If we don’t get it quite quickly, we will not be able to afford things like social security, Medicare. We need far higher productivity for the shrinking percentage of people who are going to be working.”All will be well, he says, provided we allow more technology. “If we don’t get it quite quickly, we will not be able to afford things like social security, Medicare. We need far higher productivity for the shrinking percentage of people who are going to be working.”

.. “There is no backlash,” he continues: technology companies remain popular with the public. “There is only the tech backlash of the New Yorker and the New York Times and of the New Republic and of Harvard University.”

.. “They’re threatened. It’s a power recalibration. There’s a coastal element to it. There’s a liberal arts versus engineering element to it.

.. It’s a CP Snow thing.” Snow, a British chemist and novelist, in the 1950s identified two camps: a liberal arts culture and a science one.

.. “Business journalism ought to do extremely well … [people need to] know what’s going on.” But “for general news people want their biases and prejudices confirmed”.

.. In the US, growth would be slowing were it not for “illegal immigration. It’s the best thing that can possibly be happening to us, and I find it ironic; nobody wants to talk about that.”

.. His biggest worry? “There are so many people paid to make the problem worse: paid to regulate, to short-sell; to activists, to the governance experts, to the analysts. The pressure that comes to bear when you’re a public company is just astonishing and it comes at you from a dozen dimensions and you’re, “I can’t believe all these people are out there getting paid to attack me like this.”

.. Besides, tech groups have access to multimillions of private capital to fund growth, so have less need for public markets. Any gains, therefore, accrue to a narrow group of wealthy private investors, such as Andreessen, rather than pension funds.

Five or Six Things I Didn’t Know About Brad Pitt, by Marlon James

Musings from the Man Booker-winning author after his first
meeting with one of the biggest — and nicest — stars on the planet.

“I’ve gone into areas of third-world countries where people have suffered the most, but those people always seem to have the biggest laugh,” he says. As a Jamaican native who has witnessed quite a few third-world missions, I tell him that sometimes our biggest laugh is directed at foreign do-gooders who really have no idea how to fix our problems. “I’ve been one of those at times,” he admits. “But you’ve got to start somewhere. You start with your best intentions, understanding the world as you do. And then you get in and you see that it’s much more complicated than you could possibly imagine. Our failings in foreign policy have always been to think that we can place our ideas on another culture, while not really understanding the other culture.”

.. Someone once famously said that he is a character actor trapped in a leading man’s body

.. We have this great line in ‘The Big Short,’ ” he says, referring to the Oscar-winning film about the global financial crisis of 2008, which he produced. “When things are going wrong and we can’t find the reason for it, we just start creating enemies.” I mention that when creating those enemies, we often look no further than what’s right in front of us. Gays, for example. “Or illegal immigrants,” he says.

.. “You gotta understand,” he says, “that it’s also in our DNA. Most Americans don’t have time to watch CNN and Fox and Al Jazeera. They’re trying to make the rent, get the kids fed, they’re tired when they get home and they want to forget about everything. And so suddenly when this voice comes in — and it doesn’t have to be a voice of substance — saying he’s fed up with all of this, that’s the part that hooks into the DNA.”

.. “What does he even mean, take our country back? Would someone please explain that to me?”

.. Gibson movies typically do one thing really well: violence. “Oh, extremely well,” Pitt says. “ ‘Apocalypto’ is a great film.”

.. The bad thing about playing an interview slow and loose is that you’re never sure how to end it.

 

Will ‘Megyn vs. Donald’ Measure Up?

One of the things that makes Kelly so good on her Fox News Channel program, The Kelly File, is her steely, real-time, and often non-Foxian grillings of her guests. The confrontational style she uses to such good effect will be replaced with pre-recorded and (presumably) edited sit-down interviews on her new show, starting with Trump.

It’s a shame, because if the show was live, we’d all be excited by the prospect of Kelly interrogating Trump about the Times story about his treatment of women, which broke after this interview was taped. Instead, we probably see an updated version of what Walters once did for ABC, tilted towards personality coverage and away from policy questions.

.. Journalists delight in one-on-one interviews like with office holders and candidates like tomorrow’s Trump vs. Kelly contest because it fixes their status as equals with the candidates in a way that a “scrum” interview or a press conference Q&A rarely does. If edited by the interviewer instead of run verbatim, the interviewer can control the information flow and in effect “make” the news instead of merely “report” on it, to echo a point made by media scholar Michael Schudson in his 1982 book The Power of News. Like any media pro—and as an inheritor of the Walters infotainment tradition—Kelly will work all the advantages to make the interview hers, not Trump’s.

.. If I can be so bold to retool a show that has yet to air, may I suggest that Roger Ailes, the founding genius behind Fox News Channel, put more faith in his talking head by running Megyn Kelly Presents as a live program? As Kelly demonstrates most nights, and as she proved on election night 2012 when shepunctured Karl Rose’s fantasy Romney could still win in Ohio when she walked the cameras to the Fox “decision desk” for confirmation.

Why not call it Megyn Kelly Presents … Live?