U.K. Editor Who Prompted Trump’s ‘Nasty’ Quip About Meghan Markle Calls Controversy ‘A Bit Overblown’

Tom Newton Dunn, the Sun political editor who interviewed President Donald Trump last week, joined CNN’s Brooke Baldwin today to discuss the response to the president’s comments regarding Meghan Markle.

Trump was complimentary towards the Duchess of Sussex in the interview, but when told of her past criticism of him during the 2016 campaign, he remarked, “I didn’t know that she was nasty.” The official Trump War Room Twitter account denounced the news coverage of that remark and Trump himself tweeted, “I never called Meghan Markle ‘nasty.'”

Baldwin asked Newton Dunn today for his reaction to “the White House denying that he said it.”

“I think this is all a bit of a row about semantics,” he responded. “He clearly said the words ‘I didn’t know she was nasty.’ That’s on tape. We played the tape. We’ve had it on our website since we published the whole interview. So I don’t think that’s in dispute. Perhaps what is in dispute is what he meant by that. If he finished the sentence, I didn’t know she was nasty about me, or to me, then clearly he would have been referring to the fact that she was pretty disparaging about the president during his 2016 election campaign.”

He said it’s “perhaps a bit overblown” and noted some speculation about Prince Harry‘s attendance at lunch with the president.

Baldwin asked Newton Dunn if he was “nudging President Trump just a little bit.”

“We were trying to get his reaction to a whole manner of different things,” he responded, saying there was a lot they wanted to ask, given the special relationship between the two nations.

And, as Newton Dunn pointed out, when you interview Trump, “you really don’t need to push him too far to get a pretty strong opinion out of him.”

You can watch above, via CNN.

[image via screengrab]

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