Morning Joe Softball Interview Lets Donald Trump Cite His “Many Environmental Awards” As Answer To Climate Change

From the November 30 edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe:

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RICHARD HAASS (FREQUENT GUEST): Donald, if you were president right now and and you were over in Paris, what is it you would be trying to do on climate change and what is it you would be trying to prevent if you were leading the United States at the conference?

DONALD TRUMP: Well, first of all, I think one of the dumbest statements I've ever heard in politics in the history of politics as I know it, which is pretty good, was Obama's statement that our number one problem is global warming, okay? When we have large groups of people that want to blow up every one of our cities, that want to destroy our country, that want to kill our people. And he's worried about global warming. I think it's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. Or perhaps most naive. He could be naive in a certain way. He actually, I think, is somewhat naive if you want to know the truth, beyond the incompetent part. And I think that his statement the other day that “We're going to show them when we meet that we mean business for the future and global warming and climate change” -- or whatever the new term is because now they have extreme weather. You know, they have so many new terms because the old ones don't work very well. You know it used to be global warming, and then they had a problem when they had some very cool areas and that wasn't working. So you know they call it climate change, now it's extreme weather, so I don't know which one of the many terms he used, all supposedly meaning the same thing. But for him to say that that's more important than stopping countries like -- by the way, North Korea, which is never even mentioned. You know, they made one of the worst deals in history when they made the Iran deal. But Iran probably doesn't have nuclear weapons right now. But what about North Korea? Nobody mentions that. That's like when you have something that you don't want to do, you don't mention it because you sort of don't want to do it, you don't want to talk about it --

JOE SCARBOROUGH (HOST): So Donald, what's your plan on climate change? What would you be saying as a leader of the --

TRUMP: I want to make sure we have clean air and we have clean water. That's what I want to make sure. That's what my thing on climate change is. We want to have clean air to breathe and we want to have beautiful clean water. That's very important to me.

HAASS: Clean air and clean water are also an environmental issue, something narrow --

TRUMP: I've received -- you know, people don't know this about me, but I've built many, many projects all over the world. And I've received many environmental awards. You know, the environmentalists hate to see those awards. Because it really does -- but I've received some of the high awards, and many of them, for the work I've done.

Related:

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Previously:

Donald Trump Spouts Climate Denial Without Rebuttal On MSNBC's Morning Joe

The Best And Worst Media Interviews With Climate-Denying Presidential Candidates

STUDY: How The Media Is Covering Presidential Candidates' Climate Science Denial