This cuts off at the end and it ends up with some idiot playing a video game, but you’ll get 30 minutes of last night’s interview on the Tucker Carlson show in which Carlson sits down with former President Donald Trump down at Mar-a-Lago.

It’s a good interview, though it’s a whole lot of Trump doing his thing about how “when I was president they wouldn’t dare do X and they’re doing it now.” He talks about Russia and China in that vein and others.

Which isn’t wrong, obviously, but it grates a little.

Because at the end of the day, while China didn’t invade Taiwan on Trump’s watch, something they’re clearly going to do on Joe Biden’s watch – the Chinese navy has Taiwan surrounded (probably a precursor to a naval blockade) and they’re now claiming they’re going to enforce a no-fly zone over Taiwan, which are provocations clearly intended to make the Taiwanese economy crater and to influence their political class to surrender without a fight – it isn’t like Trump backed Xi Jinping down over the four years he was president.

Remember what came out of Wuhan, after all, and the damage that caused. And after China released the COVID-19 virus into the world (perhaps accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology; without question on purpose internationally, the proof of which was the fact that for weeks the airport in Wuhan was wide open to international flights), they bragged about how Trump, Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro weren’t up to the challenge of the virus and “populist” Western politicians were useless.

It was almost an admission that the virus was a tool of the Chinese Communist Party for world domination. Not quite, but almost. It didn’t even matter whether it was released as a bioweapon; they were using it that way, and have.

Trump, at least in the interview portion we’ve seen, doesn’t address any of that. He’s not talking about what he learned from the COVID fiasco. He’s still talking about manufacturing ventilators and vaccines at an accelerated pace.

And the part of the interview in which Trump talks up Gavin Newsom on the basis of how nice Newsom was to him is a little bit of a tell here – and not a good one.

What he’s saying here is that it’s all about Trump.

That isn’t a disqualifier, but it is a problem. Because while he understands the trouble America is in, what’s crucial is that the leadership mindset has to be about what can be done for the American people – not about what can be done for Trump.

Gavin Newsom buttering Donald Trump up while he’s destroying California, killing the economic and personal liberty of Californians and running the state into the ground? You can’t reward that with nice statements. And it isn’t a viable point that Gavin Newsom thinks, or thought, that Trump was swell. He’s an enemy.

At the end of the day, what we’re saying is Trump isn’t perfect. We’d certainly rather him than the catastrophic current administration. But it’s a bit discouraging that he just doesn’t seem to have learned much of anything from his experience.

He’s right about Afghanistan. He’s right about Ukraine. He’s right about Taiwan. But he isn’t particularly right about Trump, which is why the interview comes off as a little less of a victory than we hoped.