Less than a minute into an interview with CNN Monday morning, presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump launched into an attack on the network and anchor Chris Cuomo, slamming both after Cuomo led off the interview asking him about his weekend attacks on Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.
"This is a nice way to start off the interview," Trump told Cuomo, host of the network's
"New Day" program. "First of all, you should congratulate me for having won the race. I thought, at least there would be a small congratulations, but I'm not surprised with CNN, because that's the way they treat Trump. It's the — they call it the Clinton network and I believe that."
And when Cuomo told Trump he congratulated him the last time they spoke, Trump replied, "Thank you so much. So warm and so well-felt."
"We haven't spoken, last week, towards the end," said Trump. "I was the, essentially the nominee of the party, and you start off with this question which is not surprising, because I understand CNN perhaps a lot better than you do."
And, Trump denied that he came out first with attacks on Clinton when he spoke of husband Bill's sexual past.
Over the weekend, Trump told a Spokane, Washington rally that former President Clinton was "the worst abuser of women in the history of politics" and called Hillary Clinton an "enabler" because "some of these women were destroyed, not by him, but by the way that Hillary Clinton treated them after everything went down," reports
Fox News.
But, he told Cuomo on Monday that he didn't come out swinging on Clinton first, as the CNN anchor had said, but rather on trade.
"We're making horrible trade deals, losing your jobs, losing manufacturing," said Trump. "It's trade. The next thing I came out with is rebuilding our military, because our military is absolutely being decimated. We're not spending the proper money. We're not buying the proper equipment. We're not taking care of our soldiers."
He said he also talked about the Mexican border, and about stopping drugs from coming into the United States.
"Every one of them had tens of thousands of people. I mean, there were massively — they were massively attended," he said. "Of course you don't mention, nor does CNN ever show the crowds. Very interesting. I could be making a speech for an hour and they never show the extent of the crowd."
Trump continued that part of the reason he won so many states was because of trade, and that he is "the only one that can do anything about trade. I'm going to renegotiate these trade deals. These trade deals sucked everything out of our country. By the way, [Bill] Clinton is the one that approved NAFTA."
Cuomo argued back that former President George H.W. Bush had signed the agreement, leading to sparring between the two men over it.
According to
infoplease.com, the agreement was initially reached and signed by Bush, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1992. It was then ratified by the three countries in 1993, and Clinton signed the bill into U.S. law on Dec. 8, 1993, with it taking effect on Jan. 1, 1994.
"NAFTA was a Clinton deal and he wanted it so badly, and I have not been a big fan of what went on in terms, economic development, or with the war with Bush either, frankly," Trump said Monday. "If you look at NAFTA and look at what's been done and how hard Clinton pushed it, and that bill has been an absolute disaster."
And as far as the former president's indiscretions, "I spoke very little about that compared to other things," said Trump. "You took a small amount of the speech, and you build it up like it's the biggest thing in the world, but it is a big thing. Look, he was the worst abuser of women. He was impeached. Impeached and then lied about it."