The $16 Million Question: If Editing Harris Was ‘Election Interference,’ What Was Editing Trump?

from the remember-the-first-amendment? dept

In late 2024, Donald Trump sued CBS for $10 billion claiming “election interference” because 60 Minutes had the audacity to (*gasp*) edit a Kamala Harris interview down for broadcast. The lawsuit was, on its face, ridiculous — editing interviews is protected First Amendment activity, the kind of editorial discretion that has been the entire premise of magazine-format television since the format existed. But CBS’s owners at Paramount needed FCC approval for their Skydance merger, and Trump controlled the FCC, so they paid $16 million to make the lawsuit go away. We covered that institutional cave at the time and called it what it was: a bribe dressed up as a legal settlement.

Now here we are, in 2026, and 60 Minutes has done an interview with Trump that they edited down from 40 minutes to 13. Sure enough, the editing made Trump sound way more coherent than he actually was.

Decoding Fox News did the tedious work of comparing what aired against the full transcript that CBS published, and the results are wild. When asked why so many people seem to want to kill him, Trump went on a meandering rant about transgender athletes and “men playing in women’s sports” — the kind of free-association nonsense that makes you wonder who’s actually running the country. CBS edited that out. You can read it here, though:

60 Minutes: Why do you think so many people may be trying to kill you?

Trump: So, I’ve said it and I’ve said it numerous times, and I actually, because of the position I’m in, I’ve done quite a bit of research into the word assassination. Terrible word. And they go after consequential presidents. They go after presidents that, do things. If you look at what I’ve done, we’ve turned this country around. We’ve taken a country that was actually a dead country. It was dying very rapidly, and it’s the hottest country anywhere in the world. We had a skirmish, a war, whatever you want to call it. With Venezuela, we won that very decisively. And we now have a great relationship with Venezuela. And it’s been a very profitable relationship. And we’re in Iran right now. Other presidents should have done it, but they never chose to do it. They should have. They made a terrible mistake by not doing it. It’s tougher now than it would have been ten years ago or even five years ago because, you know, thousands and thousands of missiles and everything else. And we didn’t do the B-2 bomber attack. That alone was a big deal. The killing of Soleimani, which I did in my first term, was a big deal. But when you’re a consequential when you do things, a lot of things and things that work out very well for our country. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, McKinley was assassinated. McKinley made the country very rich. People don’t realize it. Then Teddy Roosevelt went out and spent the money that was made by McKinley. But it was very consequential, actually. But he was assassinated. So,

60 Minutes: You mentioned, Mr. President, consequential. And your policies are also controversial. Is that part of it?

Trump: Well, I don’t think that way. I don’t think in terms of what they are. I just think of what they are for the country. For instance, I inherited the worst border we’ve ever had in the history of a country where 25 million people came in, 25 million people at least, and many of them were from hardcore criminals, and they were drug dealers, and they were from prisons. They emptied our prisons into our country. They have, mental institutions, insane asylums into our country. And I don’t know if that’s controversial to say we have to move those people out, but we have and but it is from the standpoint you’re doing something and you’re doing something that’s good. Things like, men playing in women’s sports, I’m against it. Things like transgender for everyone. I’m against that. There’s so many things that I’m against. I don’t think they’re controversial. I think the other side is controversial, but I do a lot of things and I get things done. And, you know, we’re respected now as a country all over the world. And some people love that, but some people probably don’t.

That word salad that we’ve all become used to is mostly nonsense. It remains absolutely incredible that no one points out to the President of the United States that “migrants pleading asylum from violence” is not “coming from insane asylums.” He doesn’t seem to understand that.

60 Minutes… cut that entire segment out.

When asked about Cole Allen (who breached a first layer of security with weapons at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with the alleged intent to assassinate Trump) attending a “No Kings” protest, Trump’s actual answer included this gem:

Well the you see the reason you have people like that is you have people doing ‘No Kings’. I’m not a king. What am I, if I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you. You know I’m not a king, I get it, I don’t laugh, I don’t, I, I see these No Kings which are funded just like the southern law was funded. You all that southern laws, financing the KKK and lots of other radical, terrible groups. And then they go out and they say, oh, we’ve got to stop the KKK. And yet they give them hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. They work. It’s a total scam run by the Democrats. It shows you that, like Charlottesville, Charlottesville was all funded by the southern law. That was a southern law deal, too. And it was done to make me look bad. And it turned out to be a total fake. It basically was, a rigged election. This was a part of the rigging of the election. And that’s what you really should be doing. I mean, I hope one of your ‘60 Minute’ episodes, which really hasn’t changed very much for the last few years, I’m surprised. But one of those episodes should be on southern law, and the fact that they spent millions and millions of dollars on absolute far right and just bad, bad groups, and then they’d use those groups and they’d say, these are Republican groups, and we’re coming to your rescue, and they’re the ones that have funded it, and they’re the ones that kept them, keep them going. Pretty sad.

That’s the President of the United States repeatedly calling the Southern Poverty Law Center, against whom his DOJ has filed a highly questionable lawsuit, “southern law” and then just going pure word salad based on not even remotely understanding what SPLC did (or even what his own DOJ has accused them of doing). And, no, the bigoted “Jews will not replace us” marchers in Charlottesville were not “funded by the southern law.”

This is a man who can’t understand basic concepts.

What part actually aired?

Well the, you see the reason you have people like that is you have people doing ‘No Kings’. I’m not a king. What am I, if I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you.

Crisp, almost witty. A real “zinger.”

The rest of that word salad clipped to the dustbin of history.

And, of course, immediately after that he starts whining about 60 Minutes again. He goes on like this (none of which airs):

Trump: Do you think it’s pretty sad Norah?

60 Minutes: The allegations and the indictment.

Trump: There’re not just allegations.

60 Minutes: But it’s an indictment.

Trump: These facts okay. These are facts. I mean, they have checks to the two Klux Klan and many others, and then they’re saying how bad they are and blaming the Republican Party and Republicans. These are not just allegations, but go ahead.

60 Minutes: Well as you know sir, you’ve been accused of things and were able to go to a court of law and adjudicate them.

Trump: So yeah, it’s after five years. It’s it’s it takes you about five years.

60 Minutes: I do want to talk about that also.

Trump: I’ve also won a lot of money from fake news media where they write falsely about me. And not that I want to sue people because I don’t. But I bring lawsuits against the fake news and brought lawsuits against your network, and you paid me $38 million because you did something that was so horrible with Kamala. You put an answer down that wasn’t responsive to the question because her answer, her real answer was so bad, it was election threatening. And you paid me a lot of money, and you tried to pull one off. It was terrible. It was a terrible thing that you did. And you know, when you say, can we all get along? You can. But when people do things like that, or how about the BBC where the BBC has me? Actually, AI, they had me saying a horrible statement and I said, I never said that. It turned out they gave me AI and little AI treatment where they have my lips speaking words of hate. Tremendous hate that I never said they don’t know what to do. They’ve admitted they’re wrong. They just don’t know what to do. They actually have me making a major statement. And it wasn’t me. It was my face. It was my lips. My lips were perfectly in sync with the words I said. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. So

60 Minutes: I hear you Mr. President.

Trump: So then when you say, can you get along? I can get along with anybody. But if people are going to cheat, if people are going to be fake, you sort of don’t want to get along.

60 Minutes: On that. What do you say to people who are encouraging political violence or even cheering it on?

Trump: Well, I think the ones that are doing that are much more far left than far right, much more. When you see again, southern law, when you see some of the statements that are made there. So even when you say No Kings, that’s, that’s encouraging. You’re saying one of the things this guy said in his manifesto, what you didn’t read, you should have, is that he attended a No Kings rally along with not too many people, and probably it had an impact. You know, they get up and they say whatever they want. No, I’m against it. I think it’s terrible.

Did you get all that. It’s a bit confusing because everything he says is confusing, but when 60 Minutes’ Norah O’Donnell points out that the claims against SPLC (which, yes, Trump keeps calling “Southern Law”) are simply allegations, Trump insists they’re not. O’Donnell points out what Trump himself should recognize, given how often he’s been charged with crimes, that charges in a criminal case still have to be proven in a court, and Trump denies that (which is shocking on its own).

And then he shifts to the nonsense vexatious censorial SLAPP suits he files, including the one against CBS and 60 Minutes, and falsely claims that CBS paid him $38 million (it was $16 million) and says “because you did something that was so horrible with Kamala. You put an answer down that wasn’t responsive to the question because her answer, her real answer was so bad, it was election threatening.”

Which, um, is literally the exact thing that 60 Minutes is doing here. In this interview. In not airing that part! The part that includes a demonstrably false claim about how much CBS paid.

Oh, and his claims about the BBC (also not aired!) are equally ridiculous and factually absurd. He is suing them, but nothing in the lawsuit is, as he claims, about AI. In the interview he says the following:

AI, they had me saying a horrible statement and I said, I never said that. It turned out they gave me AI and little AI treatment where they have my lips speaking words of hate. Tremendous hate that I never said they don’t know what to do.

But that’s not what the lawsuit says, and literally no one has accused the BBC of using AI. They simply showed two separate quotes, and the claim in the lawsuit was that doing so gave a false presumption that the two statements were said one after another when they were actually separated by many minutes.

In other words, it’s also a lawsuit about not liking the way a speech was edited. Not about AI. At all.

And 60 Minutes edited out him lying about it.

The editorial pattern is consistent throughout: 60 Minutes’ producers cut the parts where Trump sounded unhinged and kept the parts where he sounded like a slightly more normal politician answering questions.

This is, of course, exactly what 60 Minutes has always done with every politician they’ve ever interviewed. It’s the entire format. You sit someone down for 40 minutes or an hour, then you edit it down to ten to 15 minutes to fit the broadcast window, and you try to focus on the parts that actually make sense for television. This is television journalism, and it has worked this way since 60 Minutes premiered in 1968.

When CBS did this with Harris, plenty of people — including us — pointed out that this was just how the show works. The lawsuit was, as we noted at the time, a “blatant attack on free speech and the First Amendment, as editorial discretion is a protected right of news organizations.” Any first-year law student could tell you that. Hell anyone familiar with the First Amendment could tell you that. Trump’s own lawyers presumably knew it. The judge who would have eventually ruled on it would have known it.

But Trump didn’t need to win the lawsuit. He just needed CBS to care more about making the headache disappear than standing on principle. And because Paramount’s owners wanted their Skydance merger approved by Trump’s FCC and DOJ, they paid him $16 million to make it disappear.

60 Minutes edited Trump exactly the way they edited Harris — actually more aggressively, given how much rambling they had to compress — and they did it for exactly the same reason: because that’s what television journalism is. The full transcript exists. CBS published it themselves. Anyone can verify that the editing was extensive and that it consistently made Trump sound more coherent than he actually was.

So, it’s one of two things:

Either editing political interviews for broadcast is just part of how these shows work — protected by the First Amendment (in which case the Harris lawsuit was the frivolous nonsense we always said it was, and CBS paid $16 million to settle a baseless claim) — or it’s “election interference” worth $20 billion in damages (in which case CBS just committed it again, even more egregiously, and the DNC should be filing a similar suit).

You don’t get to have it both ways. Unless, of course, you’re Trump, MAGA media, or — apparently — CBS News itself.

Brian Beutler, over at Off Message, makes the case that the DNC should actually sue CBS for $20 billion, settle for $16 million, and force the network to confront its own hypocrisy:

What if [DNC boss] Ken Martin were to claim CBS News interfered in the 2026 election by editing down Trump’s interview, no less than it interfered in the 2024 election by editing down Harris’s? What if he filed an angry lawsuit, if only to hold up a mirror to the perversity of the status quo? What if he insisted that nominally neutral institutions treat the parties equally? Why not let CBS decide whether it wants to settle the score, or whether it wants to be known as the network that gives money to Republicans only?

Beutler’s broader point — that Democrats consistently refuse to impose costs on bad-faith actors and thereby teach those actors there are no consequences for bad faith — is largely correct. And yes, there’s something satisfying about the thought experiment.

But the actual lawsuit would be a total disaster — because it would lose. Badly. Easily. Obviously. Just like Trump’s lawsuit should have lost. The First Amendment protects editorial discretion. A judge would dismiss it, probably quickly, and Republicans would immediately spin that dismissal as proof that the original Trump lawsuit had merit. “See? When the Democrats tried it, the courts saw right through it. But Trump’s case was so strong, CBS settled for $16 million.” The fact that this framing would be exactly backwards — that Trump’s case was settled because of regulatory extortion, not legal merit — would be lost in the noise.

You can’t fight a bad-faith propaganda operation by feeding it more propaganda fuel. The DNC suing would hand the GOP a winning narrative for free.

What CBS should be doing — what any media organization with a spine would do — is loudly defend the editing of the Trump interview as exactly what it is: standard journalism. They should be pointing to the published transcript and saying “yes, we edited this, here’s why, this is what we do, this is what we have always done, and it’s what we did with the Harris interview too. This is what the First Amendment protects us in doing.”

They should be using this moment to show everyone just how ridiculous the Harris lawsuit really was, and to make clear that the $16 million payment was a business decision driven by merger pressures, not an admission of journalistic wrongdoing. Otherwise Trump is just going to keep insisting, to CBS’s own reporters, that he has proof that they somehow treated him unfairly.

But they won’t. Because CBS, under its new ownership, has thoroughly learned the coward’s lesson that resistance is costly and capitulation is cheap. Bari Weiss now runs CBS News. The network that paid Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit about editing a leading politician is now in the business of editing Trump’s interviews to make him sound presidential — and the total silence from everyone who pretended to care about journalistic integrity during the Harris episode is telling.

Where is the Free Press exposé on this clear-cut case of “news distortion”? Where is the Ted Cruz hearing demanding accountability? Where is FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatening to revoke CBS’s licenses for “election interference” or “news distortion” ahead of the 2026 midterms? Where is the $20 billion lawsuit from anyone, anywhere, claiming that CBS is putting its thumb on the scale by making the president sound less like a man losing his grip on reality?

We all know where they are. The only “principle” at play here was always, transparently, about leverage. Trump had leverage over CBS via the FCC. CBS folded. Now CBS uses that same editorial discretion to flatter Trump, and suddenly editorial discretion is fine again, actually.

This is institutional capitulation under an authoritarian government. CBS has editorial discretion. It’s well within their First Amendment rights to edit 60 Minutes in ways that flatter the person they paid the bribe to. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t call out the rank hypocrisy.

The reality is that the editing of this interview was, on its own merits, fine. Editing a 40-minute interview down to 13 minutes is what 60 Minutes does, even though I would argue cutting out much of his rambling hid parts that were genuinely newsworthy in favor of sanewashing the president. But that’s CBS’s editorial discretion. Bari Weiss and 60 Minutes are free to trash their own reputation by burnishing the President’s.

What’s not defensible is doing this now, after paying $16 million on the premise that doing this for Harris was somehow corrupt. CBS has put itself in a position where it cannot honestly defend its own editorial choices without acknowledging the settlement for the cowardice it was. In both cases CBS had perfectly defensible arguments for its edits. But in one case it capitulated. CBS should be forced to explain why.

But they’ll just say nothing. And Trump will say nothing, because he knows the editing helps him. And MAGA media will say nothing, because they only care about “news distortion” when it’s politically useful. And the rest of us will watch yet another major American institution demonstrate that it has no principles, only prices.

The $16 million was a down payment on every future editorial decision CBS makes about Donald Trump. And we just saw what that buys.

Filed Under: 60 minutes, donald trump, editing, election interference, interviews, kamala harris, norah o’donnell

Companies: cbs, paramount