Former President Donald Trump is “exhausted and refusing interviews,” a campaign adviser reportedly told producers at the pop culture news site The Shade Report.
For weeks, Trump had been in talks to do an interview with site, which hosted a sit-down with Vice President Kamala Harris last week, Politico’s Playbook reported.
But after the conversations didn’t seem to be going anywhere, a Trump adviser finally told producers the Republican presidential candidate was “exhausted and refusing interviews, but that could change.”
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The adviser suggested The Shade Report—which has many young, Black viewers and readers—instead interview the rapper Waka Flocka Flame, who went viral in August after posting on X that he planned to vote for Trump.
“I’m stilling voting for Trump!!!! Let’s be clear!!!!!” the rapper wrote in a post that garnered 2.6 million views.
Trump’s national press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied to Politico that Trump was tired, saying the report was “unequivocally false” and that the candidate “has done media interviews every day this week.”
The 78-year-old participated in a meandering, erratic interview on Tuesday with Bloomberg Editor in Chief John Micklethwait in which he tried to defend his plan to raise tariffs—a move economists say would send inflation soaring.
He also participated in two town halls with Fox News and Univision, though the all-female Fox News audience was packed with Republicans, and neither network fact-checked Trump’s answers during the respective events.
In the meantime, Trump canceled scheduled appearances this week with the CNBC show Squawk Box and with NBC News’ senior business correspondent, on top of dropping out of a scheduled interview with 60 Minutes earlier this month.
