Former U.S. president Donald Trump is denying that he stormed out of a highly publicized interview with Piers Morgan after the British television presenter released a teaser for the segment that shows Trump abruptly leaving the room.
Trump’s team is claiming that the trailer was misleadingly edited to generate buzz for Morgan’s new show. In the video, it appears that Trump walks out in anger, ordering the crew to “turn the camera off” after Morgan pressures him with hardball questions.
The interview will air on Talk TV, a new subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and has been billed as “the most explosive interview of the year.”
Trump’s alleged walkout was reported by the New York Post, also a subsidiary of News Corp.
Trump spokesperson Tayor Budowich said of the trailer: “This is a pathetic attempt to use president Trump as a way to revive the career of a failed television host.”
A recording of the interview has been leaked by Trump’s team and it appears to show that Morgan and the former president exchanged pleasantries after the interview. There are no signs that Trump stormed off the set in this recording.
Morgan says, “That was a great interview,” at the end of the recording and Trump agrees, saying “Yeah.”
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“Thank you very much. I really appreciate it,” Morgan says.
Trump then says, “Turn the camera off,” but Budowich says that the former president was already out of his seat at this point.
Trump can also be heard saying “very deceptive” in the teaser, but Budowich says this was in relation to the fact that Morgan was dragging out the interview for longer than he initially claimed.
Budowich said that Trump expected the interview to last 20 minutes but it ended up going on for more than an hour. Morgan kept insisting that he only had one last question but continued to ask more.
At one point toward the end of recording, Budowich asks, “Is that the last question? You’ve said ‘the last question’ four times now. So I feel like you’re lying at this point.”
“I’m not lying,” Morgan said, prompting Trump to say, “Very deceptive.”
Morgan sat down with ITV on Thursday morning to push back on the former president’s assertion that the trailer was misleadingly edited.
“He says it’s a rigged election, and he now says I have a rigged promo. What I would say is: watch the interview. It will all be there. We won’t be doing any duplicitous editing.”
“The promo reflects exactly what happened. Donald Trump got very angry about one particular thing and he couldn’t let it go. But when people see the interview they’ll see that we have nice exchanges. We always have done before. But simmering is this anger he was feeling about what was said to him before we started the interview,” he said.
The presenter was seemingly delighted that Trump reacted publicly to the promo. “I said to my team, the only way this can get bigger is if I wake up in the morning to a personal statement from Donald J Trump. (At) 5 a.m. my phone rattled, and there it was!”
Morgan used to present for ITV’s Good Morning Britain but quit after refusing to apologize for comments he made about Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex.
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