In a friendly interview with Fox News that aired Sunday morning, former President Donald J. Trump repeated a litany of grievances about the trial that led to his conviction on 34 felony charges last week, while alternately casting himself as a martyr and insisting he was taking it well.
He also suggested that, if he were sentenced to prison or to house arrest, “at a certain point, there’s a breaking point” for the public — the latest in a string of comments that hint at the possibility of political violence.
Mr. Trump’s comments on the guilty verdicts — in which a jury in Manhattan agreed with prosecutors that he had falsified business records to cover up a hush-money payment to a p*rn star during the 2016 presidential campaign — largely echoed ones he made on Friday, the day after his conviction.
He said the verdict was biased because the New York City venue for the trial is mostly Democratic. He maintained that the payments he had made to Michael D. Cohen — his former lawyer and the key witness against him — were legal fees, though the jury found they were not. He denounced witnesses like Mr. Cohen without naming them and claimed, while talking about the trial in a nationally televised interview, that the gag order issued by the judge in the case was preventing him from doing so.
In the interview, a pretaped, 90-minute session spooled out over the four hours of the show “Fox & Friends,” Mr. Trump also repeatedly referred to his political opponents — and even some of his former supporters, like the former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom he deemed insufficiently loyal — as “evil,” “sick,” “deranged” and “bad people.” And he suggested, as he has before, that Democrats are an “enemy from within” who pose a greater threat to the United States than foreign adversaries like Russia or China.
“These people are sick. They’re sick. They’re deranged,” he said. “You know, I talk about the enemy on the outside and the enemy from within. So you have Russia, you have China — if you have a smart president, you always handle them quite easily, actually. We have a lot of advantages. But the enemy from within, they are doing damage to this country.”
The interview, Mr. Trump’s first since the verdict, did not feature many tough questions. At times, the Fox News hosts appeared to be trying to guide him toward certain answers, at one point implying that it would be understandable if he wanted to weaponize the Justice Department against President Biden and other Democrats.
“We were just talking about the weaponization of the justice system against political opponents,” one host, Rachel Campos-Duffy, said. “Some of your supporters have said, well, the only way to stop this is mutually assured destruction, right? If you do it to us, we’re going to do it to you. You’ve said no, my revenge is going to be success for America. You’ve just had this verdict. Do you still feel the same?”
Mr. Trump — who has said explicitly that he wants to use the Justice Department to target his political opponents, including by appointing a special prosecutor to “go after” Mr. Biden — insisted that he had no idea.
“It’s a really tough question in one way, because these are bad people,” he said, before pivoting: “A lot of people said we have no choice but to elect Trump, Republicans, because he’s the only one that can withstand this. Don’t forget, if it weren’t me, they’d go after somebody else, and I know a lot of the competition. They wouldn’t do so well. They wouldn’t be doing so well right now. They’d be saying, ‘Mommy, take me home, I want to go home.’”
He then claimed falsely that he had never said “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton — that only his supporters had said it — and praised himself for what he suggested was his restraint in not doing it once elected.
“They all said ‘lock her up,’ and I felt — and I could have done it, but I felt it would have been a terrible thing,” he said. “And then this happened to me, and so I may feel differently about it. I can’t tell you. I’m not sure I can answer the question.”
When he added, “Think of it, you lock up the wife of a president of the United States,” Ms. Campos-Duffy prodded him to answer differently: “They want to lock you up over $130,000 of an accounting thing!”
“And a perfectly stated accounting thing,” Mr. Trump said, “but people also say, ‘Can you bring the country together?,’ and the answer is yes. Success will bring the country together, because I had it together.”
Talking among themselves after showing the interview clips, the Fox News hosts praised Mr. Trump’s responses with an air of admiration.
“We just spent 90 minutes with a man who, a sham trial over here convicted him of 34 stacked counts,” said one of the hosts, Pete Hegseth. “If he could be in a good mood —”
“Said he loved life,” another host, Will Cain, chimed in.
“Saying ‘I love life’ yesterday, then you, Will Cain, can be in a good mood all the time,” Mr. Hegseth said.
The hosts also echoed a talking point that Mr. Trump and his supporters have made: that prosecuting a former president is characteristic of “banana republics” and “corrupt, dysfunctional countries.”
While the segments of the interview that aired were mainly focused on the trial and its aftermath, Mr. Trump was also asked about policies. He gave largely the same answers he has given before, including that he would carry out a mass deportation bigger than President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback” and that he would reauthorize oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska as part of a set of pro-fossil-fuel policies.
He also continued a pattern of promising to end wars immediately without saying how.
“I get along very well with Putin and I get along with Zelensky, and I would get them in a room and I would get it ended,” Mr. Trump said of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “And I have an exact plan as to how, but I can’t tell you that.”
Michael Gold contributed reporting.
