Trump wants to read Ukraine call transcript on live television, sell coordinating T-shirts

(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

published 1 November 2019

If you love your "Make America Great Again" hat, you'll really flip for the latest item from President Trump's fall collection: a "Read the Transcript" T-shirt.

During an interview with The Washington Examiner on Thursday, Trump defended his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a conversation that sparked the House impeachment inquiry. He revealed that his strategy to fight back against the accusations of quid pro quo involves releasing a shirt that says "Read the Transcript" and talking directly to the people, FDR style.

"At some point, I'm going to sit down, perhaps as a fireside chat on live television, and I will read the transcript of the call, because people have to hear it," he said. "When you read it, it's a straight call." In late September, the White House released a reconstructed transcript of the call, which Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testified was incomplete and missing key words and phrases, The New York Times reports.

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Trump's phone call with Zelensky raised eyebrows, as he used the time to ask Zelensky to launch an investigation into his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. "Everybody knows I did nothing wrong," Trump told the Examiner. "Bill Clinton did things wrong. Richard Nixon did things wrong. I won't go back to [Andrew] Johnson because that was a little before my time. But they did things wrong. I did nothing wrong." When asked if he would cooperate with subpoenas, Trump responded, "You are setting a terrible precedent for other presidents."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.