• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, Yesterday

Just for fun, let’s continue delving into the Trump-“60 Minutes” saga with an analysis of the edit the TV show made in an interview with Kamala Harris last October that exasperated the president so much that he sued CBS and Paramount Global for $20 billion.

What I can dope out from the transcript of the unedited interview that CBS News released last February, and the snippets that were seen on CBS around the time of the interview, the edits are so trivial that they don’t merit a nanosecond of anyone’s attention unless you’re Donald Trump.

The story centers on how a quote from the interview was used on “Face the Nation” on Sunday morning, October 6, and a different quote from the same answer was used the next evening on “60 Minutes.”

The question posed by “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker in that part of the transcript was a follow-up question to a previous question-and-answer about the relationship between the Biden administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening,” Whitaker said. “The Wall Street Journal said that he -- that your administration has repeatedly been blindsided by Netanyahu and, in fact, he has rebuffed just about all of your administration’s entreaties.”

To which Harris replied: “Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region. And we’re not going to stop doing that. We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”

The first sentence of that answer was used on “Face the Nation”: “Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”

On “60 Minutes,” the final sentence was used instead: “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”

According to the AP, some or all of Whitaker’s original question was used in both instances.

Trump and others who have jumped on this editing bandwagon are saying that in the quote used on “60 Minutes,” Harris comes across as more coherent than in the quote used on “Face the Nation.”

Ergo, says Trump and the others, CBS is guilty of election fraud. You can’t make this stuff up, folks.

In some ways, the extreme exaggeration of the effects and consequences of these editing choices -- basically there are none -- stems from a tendency to overreact that is prevalent today from the presidency on down. Today, there is a tempest in every teapot and every molehill is a mountain.

Trump’s eruption on TruthSocial about the way CBS edited the interview revealed that he probably never heard it, nor even bothered to find out what the difference between the two quotes was.

“Her REAL ANSWER WAS CRAZY, OR DUMB, so they actually REPLACED it with another in order to save her or, at least, to make her look better,” Trump ranted on Truth Social.

By the way Trump exploded over the situation, you would have thought CBS had digitally rearranged the vice president’s words and then spliced them back together in such a way that the entire meaning of what she said was put in reverse.

That did not happen, of course. It is even reasonable to question whether the swapping of one quote for another should be referred to as an “edit” at all. 

If I understand the whole thing correctly, in actual fact, CBS did not edit or otherwise revise what she said. They just used one sentence instead of another one. 

Whether or not the choice made Harris sound more self-assured or coherent on “60 Minutes” than the other quote used on “Face the Nation” is a matter of opinion.

My own opinion is that both quotes were so inconsequential that it is doubtful anyone remembered them five minutes after they aired.