Photo: Alamy
During his powerful Time magazine interviews, President Trump was asked, “Why is democracy better than dictatorship?”
The question came from the outlet’s National Politics Reporter Eric Cortellessa, who notably told President Trump that Biden “didn’t say yes,” when he was asked to sit for a similar interview.
Cortellessa prefaced the dictatorship question by noting that Trump was “the leader of the world’s most powerful democracy,” but that he also “dealt with the leaders of authoritarian countries.”
The 45th president provided a simple answer, stating, “Well, it’s because the word freedom. You have freedom. And you have all the advantages with none of the disadvantages. You have freedom if you have a real democracy.”
Trump told Cortellessa why he felt that democracy was in jeopardy, stating, “I think we’re becoming less of a democracy when I look at the weaponization of the Justice Department, the FBI.”
He recalled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuses that occurred during his 2016 campaign and beyond, arguing that things like that prove that “we’re becoming less and less of a democracy.”
He returned to the question, telling Cortellessa, “But with democracy, if it’s a properly-run democracy, which it will be, if and when I get back into office, it’ll be a very proper democracy, not like what we have right now. I don’t even think what we have right now is, where a presidential candidate has to spend eight hours a day in court instead of campaigning over nothing. Over zero. Over nonsense. And all speared and all spread out and—and really done by the Biden administration. And I think that’s no longer democracy. I think that’s third-world country stuff.”
President Trump shared the May 2024 TIME magazine cover on Tuesday. The cover depicts him in black and white against a red and black background. Trump captioned his Truth Social post with “Text Trump to 88022.”