Fox host Laura Ingraham repeatedly butted heads with President Donald Trump on numerous subjects in a fiery interview on Fox News.
Trump, 79, appeared on Fox’s The Ingraham Angle on Monday, but did not get the usual easy ride he might expect on the conservative network. Instead, MAGA host Laura Ingraham pushed back against the president several times.
In one instance, Ingraham asked Trump about his administration trying to tackle housing costs, with the average age of first-time home buyers being 40.
Trump interjected, “We inherited that, you have to understand,” before Ingraham interrupted him, saying, “Let me get to the question, though.”
She raised Trump’s heavily criticized concept of a 50-year mortgage and pointed out that there had been a “significant MAGA backlash” to the extended time it would take Americans to own their homes outright.
The host asked the real estate mogul, “Is that really a good idea?”
“It’s not even a big deal,” Trump said. “I mean, you go from 40 to 50 years.” Ingraham corrected it to be 30 to 50 years. The president went on to blame Joe Biden and his “lousy Fed person” Jerome Powell, noting that the Federal Reserve Chair “is going to be gone in a few months.”
“If we had a normal person, the Fed would have really low interest rates,” he added.
Ingraham then pushed back on Trump, asking, “Why are people saying they are anxious about the economy? Why are they saying that?”
The president said, “I don’t know that they are saying [that]. I think polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we ever had.”
Referencing the Republican Party being demolished by Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia elections last week, Ingraham asked Trump if he felt voters had the wrong “perception” of his repeated claims of strong economic growth or if the GOP needed to do more to convince them.
Trump reverted to form, noting, “More than anything else, it’s a con job by the Democrats. Costs are way down.”
The interview, which was filmed at the White House on Monday, also addressed Trump’s Truth Social post where he offered a $10,000 bonus for air traffic controllers who have continued to work during the government shutdown.
There are “a lot of delays now, sir,” Ingraham noted.
Trump then claimed he was “not happy” when he saw people refusing to do unpaid work during the shutdown. “Look, life is not so easy for anybody. Our country has never done better. We should not have had people leaving their jobs. What I basically said the ones that stayed—there were a lot of them-I’m sending them a $10,000 bonus."
Ingraham asked, “Where is that money coming from?”
Trump said, “I don’t know. I will get it from some place. I always get the money from some place, regardless. It doesn’t matter.”
Their chat then moved to Ingraham citing a CNN report on China expanding their missile facilities, stating “China are not our friends, sir.” Trump said, “They don’t want to mess around with us. I can tell you that.”
The two then sparred on foreign relations with Ingraham stating the Chinese “spy on us, they steal our intellectual property.”
Trump argued, “Do you think the French are better?” After Ingraham said she did, Trump replied, “I’m not so sure.”
Ingraham told Trump, “a lot of MAGA folks are not thrilled about this idea of hundreds of thousands of foreign students in the United States,” and mentioned Trump’s figure of as many as 600,000 Chinese students in America.
“Why, sir, is that a pro-MAGA position when so many American kids want to go to school and there are places not for them and these universities are getting rich off Chinese money?” Ingraham asked Trump.
The president noted that without foreign students “you would have half the colleges in the United States go out of business.”
The Fox host bluntly said, “So what?” Trump replied, “I think that’s a big deal.”
After Ingraham claimed America was “dependent on China” to fund its universities, Trump said, “You don’t want to cut half of the people, half of the students from all over the world that are coming into our country, destroy our entire university and college system. I don’t want to do that.”
Ingraham added, “I wouldn’t lose any sleep.”
The president also addressed Ingraham’s repeated use of “MAGA folk” being critical of some of his ideas.
“MAGA was my idea,” Trump said. “It was nobody else’s idea. I know better than anybody else MAGA wants to see our country thrive.”
The interview is in stark contrast to Ingraham’s visit to the Oval Office in March; when the president showed off his "Coke button" to the Fox host and complained about the Rose Garden and the need to pave it over.
Ingraham implemented a harsher tone last month when interviewing Mike Johnson over the government shutdown, calling out the House speaker for plugging points that were “not true.”
