Trump says he shouldn’t be impeached because “everyone would be very poor”

President Donald Trump argued against his own impeachment Thursday, claiming it would “crash” the market and make everyone "very poor."

In a meandering interview with Ainsley Earhardt on "Fox & Friends," Trump warned, “I don't know how you can impeach somebody who's done a great job. If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor.”

Pointing to his head, he added: “Without this thinking, you would see, you would see numbers that you wouldn’t believe.”

During the interview, Trump was asked if he knew about the hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels — payments that led to Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen pleading guilty Tuesday to eight federal charges, including violating campaign finance laws.

“Later on I knew,” Trump said in a rambling explanation. “Later on. What he did — and they weren’t taken out of the campaign finance, that’s the big thing. That’s a much bigger thing. Did they come out of the campaign? They didn’t come out of the campaign; they came from me.”

Last month Cohen released a tape in which he and Trump can be heard discussing the Daniels payment before it was made.

Trump dodged a question on whether he was considering a pardon for his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was found guilty on eight criminal charges earlier this week, claiming the financier’s crimes were the same as what “every consultant, every lobbyist in Washington probably does.” There was no follow-up from Earhardt.

READ: Paul Manafort has a single juror to thank for not being convicted on all counts

He then crowbarred in lots of his favorite words and names— James Comey, Robert Mueller, witch hunt, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, text messages and Jeff Sessions — with zero pushback from the Fox News host.

Here are some of Trump's semi-coherent lines from the sit-down:

"[Cohen] made the deals. He pled the two counts and they are not a crime, which nobody understands. I watched a number of shows, sometimes you get some pretty good information by watching shows. Those two counts are not a crime."

"My first question when I heard about [payments to Stormy Daniels] was 'Did they come out of the campaign?' because that could be a little dicey. Almost everybody who runs for office has campaign violations. Campaign violations are considered not a big deal, frankly."

“In all fairness to [Cohen], most people are going to do that. I've seen it many times, I've had many friends involved in this stuff, it's called flipping and it almost ought to be illegal. You get 10 years in jail, but if you say bad things about people — in other words, make up stories — they go from 10 years to a national hero, they have a statue in their honor.”

“I tell you what, if you took a poll in the FBI, I guarantee you one thing, I would do very well.”

"We are building the wall, it has already started, we have spent $3.2 billion, we are asking for $5 billion for this years funding. The wall is going up, a lot of people don’t know it, I’d like to build it even faster, but dealing with the Democrats is very tough."

“When I came in China was a dominant force. Now they like me very much, I get along great with President Xi.”

"Look at the crimes that Clinton did, with the emails, and she deletes 33,000 emails after she got a subpoena from Congress, and this Justice Department does nothing about it."

Cover image: A screengrab of Donald trump during his interview with Fox & Friends.