At the end of their discussion, which was the first 20 minutes of Wednesday night’s O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly went in for the ask, even though Donald Trump asked him not to, off camera, before their interview. “Would you consider? I want you to consider… all right, come back, forgive, go forward, answer the questions, look out for the folks. I just want you to consider it,” O’Reilly asked, hoping Trump would reconsider pulling out of Thursday night’s debate on Fox News. (TVNewser)
The pre-taped interview with O’Reilly took place a day after the GOP presidential front-runner announced he would not take part in Thursday’s Fox News primary debate. Trump made the decision because he felt slighted by the network for a mocking statement it released about him on Tuesday. “It was a taunt, and I said, ‘How much do you take?'” Trump said, calling the statement “childish.” “I don’t like being taken advantage of, in this case I was being taken advantage of by Fox [News],” he added. (THR)
While O’Reilly suggested that he was letting petty things get to him and had to rise above it all, Trump said that such a personality trait would carry over into getting better deals from other countries like Iran. “It is a personality trait, but I don’t think it is a bad personality trait,” Trump said, while insisting he was not “walking away.” But O’Reilly said that Megyn Kelly’s question was within “journalistic bounds,” even though he said he may have asked it a different way. (Variety)
“I don’t know what games [Fox News chairman] Roger Ailes is playing,” Trump said at a news conference in Iowa earlier Wednesday. “With me, they’re dealing with somebody that’s a little bit different. They can’t toy with me like they toy with everybody else.” Trump was reacting to the sarcastic press statement Fox sent earlier in the day. (TVNewser)