'I Don't Like to Lie' and Other Notable Quotes from Trump's Pre-Inauguration Interviews
The president-elect spoke on a range of issues.
— -- In the days before the Inauguration, Donald Trump gave a number of interviews, touching on a range of topics from how he likes to receive his intelligence briefings to lying.
The president-elect also showed that he's not only thinking about the big day this Friday but looking four years ahead as well, teasing his re-election's campaign slogan.
Here is a round up of six of the most interesting morsels that came out the interviews that Trump granted in the past day.
Trump appears to have revealed his slogan for his re-election campaign in 2020 during an interview with The Washington Post:
“Are you ready?” he said in the Washington Post interview. “ ‘Keep America Great,’ exclamation point.”
"Get me my lawyer!" Trump shouted, with one arriving two minutes later.
"Will you trademark and register, if you would, if you like it — I think I like it, right? Do this: 'Keep America Great,' with an exclamation point. With and without an exclamation. 'Keep America Great,'" Trump said.
"Got it," the lawyer said, according to the Post.
Trump gave a glimpse into his preference for briefings during an interview with Mike Allen's new newsletter Axios.
"I've had a lot of briefings that are very … I don't want to say 'scary,' because I'll solve the problems," he told Axios. "But … we have some big enemies out there in this country and we have some very big enemies — very big and, in some cases, strong enemies."
As for the length of the briefings, Trump said he liked to keep it short.
"I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don't need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you," Trump told Axios.
Questions have been raised about Trump's truthfulness during the campaign, but the president-elect told Axios that lying isn't something he likes doing.
"I don't like to lie, no. I don't like to lie, no. It's something that -- it's not something that I would like to be doing," Trump said.
Axios asked "Is it ever OK to lie?"
"I don't want to answer the question because it's -- it gets to, you know, a different level than what we're talking about for this interview," Trump said.
Trump told "Fox & Friends" this morning that he concedes that CIA Director John Brennan was not the leaker of the dossier of unsubstantiated claims that was made public last week, but said that the intelligence community "should not have been a part of that" before saying that no such tape like the one discussed in the dossier exists.
"There is never going to be a tape that shows up. There is never going to be anything that shows up. I would be very embarrassed if a tape showed up. I would be doubly embarrassed. There is no tape," he said.
One final nugget that was revealed today is that the press briefing room isn't going anywhere, in spite of earlier questions raised about whether the Trump administration would move it to a larger room outside of the White House. But Trump told Fox News that he thinks the press will regret it.
"We have so many people that want to go so we’ll have to just pick the people that go into the room. I'm sure other people will be thrilled about that. We offered a much larger room because we need a much larger room and we offered to do that but they went crazy. And they’ll be begging for a much larger room very soon. You watch," Trump said on "Fox & Friends" this morning.