-Stephen Miller was on your show on Sunday,
and he came out guns blazing.
I want to show -- for those who missed it, and first of all,
I feel bad for anyone who missed it.
But let's just show a bit of a super cut of the highlights
of your interview with Stephen Miller,
and then I have some questions. -Okay.
-Why don't you just give me three minutes to tell you
the truth about Donald Trump that I know,
and that all of our campaign staff know?
-Because it's my show, and I don't want to do that. So --
-Well, this isn't -- this isn't a courtroom
and I have a right to speak. -Stephen, Stephen, settle down,
settle down. Calm down. -Jake.
-I have a question for you about issues.
-I would be with the President on a campaign plane with a rally
in 20 minutes, and he would be able --
-You've already made this point, Stephen.
-A self-made billionaire, revolutionized reality TV,
and tapped into something magical that's happening
in the heart of this country. The people that you don't --
-The President has an approval rating in the 30s.
-The people -- the people --
-I don't know what magical you're talking about.
There's one viewer that you care about right now,
and you're being obsequious -- -No, but you're being --
-You're being a factotum in order to please him, okay?
-No. You know -- you know who I care about?
-I think I've wasted -- I think I've wasted enough
of my viewers' time. Thank you, Stephen.
-You know who I care about? -As Republican lawmakers
call for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign.
-So...So I had to ask. [ Cheers and applause ]
You -- you know Stephen Miller.
You've interacted with him before. Were you --
did that catch you off-guard, the tone of that interview?
-Yeah. I've known him for a long time.
He was a press secretary on Capitol Hill
for quite some time. And I knew that he was sometimes
unusual to interact with. -Mm-hmm.
[ Laughter ]
-But, no, I was not expecting that.
I was not -- I would not have booked him if I thought that
that was what was going to happen.
-You -- does it feel at some point,
a little bit like a rodeo, and you're just trying to stay
on top of the interview with that?
-It was -- it was just so... [ Sighs ]
Most of the time, when people come and they want to represent
their point of view, and I've interviewed President Trump.
I've interviewed Rex Tillerson.
We've interviewed lots of people.
Most of the time when they want to get across
their point of view, even if they think
you're being unfair, or they don't like the questions,
there's an effort made
to have a certain behavior like a human being.
-Yeah. [ Laughter ]
Which makes sense, 'cause human -- you're a human.
-I'm a human being. -Humans are watching.
-Yeah. -Yeah.
My viewers are 90% human. -Yeah.
[ Laughter ] -10% cats.
And there's also usually, in politics,
an effort to be likeable. -Mm-hmm.
-To convince people.
And I certainly understand the White House point of view
that the media's unfair to them,
and doesn't give them their due, and all of that.
But, you know, this wasn't -- it wasn't a conversation
where he wasn't allowing me to ask questions,
he wasn't answering my questions.
He started repeating himself. It was just bizarre.
-He was complaining that you weren't giving him time to talk
about issues, and yet every time you tried to cede time,
it seemed like he went back to things he'd already said.
-Yeah. -Do you feel like --
-Like the story about the President coming up with --
riffing off the news. -Yeah.
-If you missed it at 9:01, he told it again at 9:07.
[ Laughter ]
-You said, had you known it would go like that,
you wouldn't have had him on. -Yeah.
-You must have this balance, that I'm sure people ask you
about this all the time, like, who you allow on your show.
And there are people with certain hateful rhetoric
who are now in the White House. -[ Laughs ] Right.
-And so how do you decide, as far as just being
a gatekeeper as to guests... -Yeah.
-You obviously have a lot of Trump people on your show.
Do you think that's important? -Well, he's the President.
And Republicans control the House and the Senate
and the White House. So I think it is very important
to ask them questions and to speak truth to power
and also to just get information from them and have them explain
what they're doing. The way it works normally,
is you have a Sunday show, or even a weekday show,
and you ask the White House we would like this guest
or we would like that guest. On Sunday, it's really just
a, "who are you putting out this Sunday?"
-Mm-hmm. -This is how it was during
Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump.
And they tell you who they're offering.
That Sunday, you know, they were offering Nikki Haley
and CIA Director Pompeo, and Stephen Miller.
And I wanted Nikki Haley or CIA Director Pompeo.
[ Laughter ] -Yeah.
-But we got Miller. And, look, I'm happy -- he was --
The big news was the Michael Wolff book...
-Yep. -Which the White House
cooperated with, otherwise I don't think it would get
a quarter as much attention. -Mm-hmm.
-The falling out between President Trump
and Steve Bannon, and Steve Bannon was responsible
for getting Stephen Miller on the campaign.
They did used to work closely together. And immigration.
Those were three big issues, and Stephen Miller, you know,
could talk to all three of them. So we booked him.
-He called Steve Bannon "grotesque" a few times
during your interview, and he came back to that point,
Steve Bannon, obviously, has fallen out of favor
at the White House, and the knives are out for him,
despite the fact that he was a guy who also seemed
to have knives out quite a bit.
Do you have any empathy for these sort of fallen members
of the Trump Administration, once they sort of fall out
and they're sort of, ravaged by their once-colleagues?
-I wouldn't call it empathy, but, I mean, the truth
of the matter is, Steve Bannon played a huge role
in the final months of the Trump Campaign.
And in the first, whatever it was,
eight months of the Trump presidency.
And to pretend that he didn't was silly.
And when President Trump issued the statement -- and this is
really where the conversation with Stephen Miller started
to go off the rails -- is when I started to ask
about the fact that the President had said
Bannon didn't play a role.
And I said, "well, what about all these issues?
I was defending Steve Bannon, which is one of the reasons why
his attack on me and CNN subsequent -- like, you know,
we're liberal media, we're biased.
I was defending Steve Bannon.
[ Laughter ]
-That's liberal? -You lefty. [ Laughs ]
You bleeding heart lefty.
You did say he was talking to a audience of one,
and very quickly after, Donald Trump tweeted --
sort of, I felt like brought truth to the statement.
And said, "Jake Tapper, fake news, just got destroyed
"in this interview with Stephen Miller
"of the Trump Administration.
"Watch the hatred and unfairness of the CNN flunky --"
I'm sorry about that. [ Laughter ]
But then you wrote back -- -I said "factotum."
-[ Laughs ] -That's a word.
-[ Laughs ] -You -- you wrote back with an emoji.
"Here's the interview. Judge for yourself,"
So, you certainly -- your feelings weren't hurt that much.