TRUMP TELLS GERALDO RIVERA, ‘I DO EVERYTHING STRAIGHT’

drunk during a high school party when they were both teenagers. He has categorically denied the allegation and the two are scheduled to testify separately before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Trump has stuck by Kavanaugh, who would join Justice Neil Gorsuch, his first appointee, on the high court.

“Hopefully, we’ll have a second judge very shortly who is a fantastic, fantastic man, a fantastic talent and intellect,” Trump said.

The president, nonetheless, said he favored allowing Blasey to make her case before the Senate. “I want her to have her voice,” he said. “Let her have her voice, let her say whatever she has to say. Let him say what he has to say and that in the end these senators will make a choice.”

The interview was taped before The New Yorker posted a story Sunday citing another woman, Deborah Ramirez, 53, who said that an inebriated Kavanaugh exposed himself in front of her face during a dormitory party at Yale University. Kavanaugh denied that allegation, too.

At one point, the White House had hopes of winning the support of several Democratic senators running for re-election in states that Trump won, but that prospect seemed to vanish with the emergence of Blasey’s allegations. If no Democrats support Kavanaugh, that means the Republicans, who hold a 51-to49 majority with Vice President Mike Pence able to break ties, can afford to lose only one of their own caucus.

During the interview, Trump declined to say whether he might fire Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, after a report in The New York Times that Rosenstein last year suggested secretly recording the president to demonstrate the chaos in the administration and raised the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.

The Justice Department has said that Rosenstein was joking when he talked about taping the president, a version in conflict with others who described his comments. Rosenstein said that he currently sees “no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment.”

Advisers have sought to keep Trump from firing Rosenstein, at least until after the midterm elections in November, for fear of a backlash. Since Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself from overseeing the Russia investigation, Rosenstein supervises special counsel Robert Mueller.

“I don’t want to comment on it until I get all the facts,” Trump said when asked if he would fire Rosenstein. “I haven’t gotten all the facts, but certainly it’s being looked at in terms of what took place. If anything took place and I’ll make a determination sometime later, but I don’t have the facts.”

Trump asserted that he was not worried about his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, who is talking with Mueller’s prosecutors after pleading guilty to breaking campaign finance laws and other crimes.

“No, I’m not, because I’m an honest guy,” Trump said. “And that stuff is unrelated to me. And that was Michael did that stuff. And Michael I mean you know, you know I have many, many lawyers. I have very big law firms I have that do my work.”

While the president said it was “unrelated to me,” in fact Cohen acknowledged in court that Trump directed him to make payments to two women during the 2016 campaign to keep them silent about affairs they said they had with the candidate.

Rivera asked if Trump knew of anything that Cohen could tell the authorities that could be a problem for the president. “I don’t know anything because, I’ll be honest, I do everything straight,” Trump said. “I do everything straight.”

Trump again defended his handling of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and again assailed Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, calling her a “horror show.” The mayor recently called Trump “delusional, paranoid and unhinged from any sense of reality” for denying the officially accepted death count of 3,000 from the hurricane.

“You have the mayor of San Juan who’s incompetent,” Trump said. “She should never be there. She’s just doesn’t know what she’s doing, she’s totally incompetent person. You have as you know locally they did a very, very poor job. The electric was broken before the storms that got hit by two storms not one.”

He said that critics blamed him for a situation that was already dysfunctional before the storm. “It was a total mess, it was corrupt — couldn’t be worse,” he said. “The storms hit and they said, ‘Oh let’s blame Trump for the electric, let’s have Trump, let’s have Trump fix the electric plant, which takes a long time to rebuild it, which is a big deal. Let’s blame Trump for everything.’”

Trump expressed affection for the people of the island. “I love Puerto Rican people,” he told Rivera. “I love you. You’re half Puerto Rico. I love you.”