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Source: The Washington Post / Getty
Donald Trump’s first post-election network interview with NBC News’ Kristin Welker was widely trashed for his numerous false claims and Welker’s apparent lack of pushback on his answers.
The first network interview for President-elect Donald Trump, which was recorded to be aired on NBC’s Meet The Press on Sunday (December 8), was derided by observers who tuned in, noting that he repeated many of the false claims that were a hallmark of his campaign with re-election. Trump was interviewed by the news program’s host, Kristin Welker, being combative with her as he has been in the past, reacting to her questioning of his proposed policies in his return to the White House. “You have such potential. If you could be just non-biased… you hurt yourself so badly,” he remarked as Welker’s frustration could be seen.
Trump maintains his composure as “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker grows frustrated.
“You have such potential. If you could be just non-biased… you hurt yourself so badly.” pic.twitter.com/YYQmniPH4h
— Julianna Frieman (@JuliannaFrieman) December 8, 2024
Trump made false claims again about migrants in the United States, misusing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement statistic to say 13,000 immigrants who had committed murder were “released into our country over the last three years.” When asked about his proposal to remove so many undocumented immigrants, he replied: “Well, I think you have to do it, and it’s a hard – it’s a very tough thing to do,” Trump said. “But you have to have rules, regulations, laws. They came in illegally. You know the people that have been treated very unfairly are the people that have been on line for ten years to come into the country. And we’re going to make it very easy for people to come in in terms of they have to pass the test.” He also lied about the United States being the only nation granting birthright citizenship – 30 other nations also do so.
Trump also claimed that he “was able to get hundreds of billions of dollars put into NATO just by a tough attitude.” The false claim refers to NATO countries agreeing to put more money into boosting their military forces but The New York Times noted that the agreement was in place since 2014. Trump also falsely claimed that “just prior to Covid coming in, I had polls that were the highest.” In truth, at that point in 2020 he had a 48% approval rating, placing him lower than all but three presidents dating back to Harry S. Truman.
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Donald Trump appeared on Meet The Press Sunday morning (Dec. 8), marking his first televised interview since becoming the president-elect in November after a tight race with Vice President Kamala Harris. Sitting down with Meet The Press moderator Kristen Welker, Donald Trump was measured at times but also slippery on some of his positions as observers on the X social media platform pointed out contradictions and flat-out lies in his statements where he received little pushback.
President-elect Donald Trump, 78, spoke in a conversational tone as he sat across from Kristen Welker, displaying a muted version of expressing himself in comparison to some of his fiery and off-the-rails campaign speeches. With the presidential victory in hand and emboldened by officially winning the Republican Party majority of both the House and Senate, Trump toned down the rhetoric but also said that he would carry out unpopular policies despite growing murmurs of discontent among his base and those far outside of it.
Trump spoke to Welker’s inquiry about his plans for the first 100 days in the White House, a longstanding marker of the president making his intentions known and setting a tone for the government as his leadership continues to come into view over the next four years.
After a rambling answer that covered everything from tackling crime in major cities and extending the so-called “Trump tax cuts,” Trump defended his nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth despite the mounting allegations against him. Trump’s answer was a masterclass of avoiding the actual question by using filler words and highlighting how much Fox News supported Hegseth, once more ignoring the fact that some of the allegations against his nominee originated within the network.
Early in the chat, Welker lobbed a question regarding tariffs, which some felt was one of several softballs tossed at Trump. Instead of getting Trump to explain how he’ll attack inflation and lower prices, since it was a key campaign point and why many voters pulled the lever for him, he elected not to offer a guarantee on one of his top promises.
“I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee tomorrow. But I can say that if you look at my — just pre-Covid, we had the greatest economy in the history of our country. And I had a lot of tariffs on a lot of different countries, but in particular China,” Trump said before meandering and calling the tariffs “beautiful,” but Welker did remind Trump that those “beautiful” tariffs cost Americans billions.
In other portions of the conversation, Trump still refused to concede the 2020 election results despite overwhelming evidence that the presidency was not stolen from him. He also doubled down on false claims that he improved the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which he continues to refer to as “Obamacare,” a law that took cues from Sen. Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts and the state’s health care reform law.
Trump continues to claim he “saved Obamacare” despite his many attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and insert a law of his own, even though it could harm those who voted for Trump in the long run. Trump also stuck to his incorrect statement that 13,099 murders in the past three years were allegedly committed by illegal immigrants. Welker attempted to get Trump to understand the number includes four decades of data but Trump insisted this exaggerated number came under President Joe Biden’s tenure.
On X, formerly Twitter, Donald Trump’s Meet The Press interview found its way onto the timeline with many pointing out how it missed several marks. Check out the replies below.
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Photo: Getty
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Source: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / Getty
President-elect Donald Trump has agreed to sit down with NBC’s Kristen Welker for his first network interview after winning the 2024 election last month.
According to reports, Donald Trump has agreed to sit down with Meet The Press moderator Kristen Welker for his first network interview since being reelected to the White House in last month’s presidential election. The interview with Welker will take place Friday (Dec. 6), and will be recorded and aired Sunday (Dec. 8), during the 10:30 a.m. time slot that Meet The Press usually airs in, as announced by NBC.
Trump and Welker have a turbulent history as interviewer and subject. Welker interviewed him for Meet The Press in September 2023, which would be Trump’s only major network appearance. Welker was taken to task by critics for not firmly fact-checking Trump on his talking points, which included immigration and the policies of his then-Republican primary opponent, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. That interview stood out among his appearances on Fox News networks and with podcast hosts such as Joe Rogan and Adin Ross during the presidential election cycle.
Welker was also attacked by Trump as being “biased” before his debate against then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in September 2020. He’d later praise her during the debate, hosted by NBC News. “By the way, so far, I respect very much the way you’re handling this. I have to say,” he said at the debate stage in Belmont, Tennessee. She also sparred with Vice President-elect JD Vance over his backpedaling on abortion after his debate in October.
The interview is significant as other outlets are plotting on how to cover and approach Trump, who has repeatedly expressed his desire to get revenge on those whom he felt had wronged him. Most recently, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, have been under constant criticism after they visited Mar-a-Lago last month after the election. Scarborough blasted critics of the meeting in a 20-minute rant Thursday morning (Dec. 5), claiming that other networks are plotting out their own sit-downs with Trump. “Do we judge CNN for doing it? No,” he said. “You know why? It’s their jobs! Grow up! It’s their jobs. The only thing we did that caused this Twitter storm is we told you. Now, if you’d prefer that we don’t tell you everything that we do that’s fine. But we just thought in this case that transparency was best.”
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Kristen Welker, now some months into her hosting duties for political talk show Meet The Press, sparked the wrath of X users after making a statement about Donald Trump. Welker stated during the broadcast that Trump allegedly tried to overturn the November 2020 elections, causing the reporter’s name to trend on X with loads of commentary.
Kristen Welker was on Meet The Press on Sunday (March 3), with Republican Party presidential hopeful Nikki Haley and Democratic Party congresswoman Rep. Debbie Dingell as guests. During one segment, Welker explained that Trump allegedly attempted to overthrow the November 2020 election results, which the business mogul lost to President Joe Biden.
Almost immediately, Kristen Welker saw her name trending with users highlighting instances in which Trump denied the results and essentially egged on his supporters to express the same sentiment via the so-called “Stop The Steal” movement, which helped spark the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that left five dead, more than 170 people injured, and lead to several arrests.
Of course, Welker’s use of the phrase is proper in the legal context but the pushback largely stems from Trump’s history and his brash public stance about what took place on that fated day on Jan. 6, 2021. As one X user noted, Welker’s use of the word “allegedly” is properly used thus the outrage is somewhat misplaced.
Several of the replies on X, formerly Twitter, directly speak to the events around the insurrection as evidence that Donald Trump was attempting to switch the election results in his favor.
We’ve got all the reactions listed below.
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Photo: Getty
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Source: Meet The Press / NBC
It’s about time journalists everywhere implement a new rule: If you can’t interview Donald Trump without babying him with softball questions and refusing to call him out while he sits there and lies to you, then just don’t interview Donald Trump.
On Sunday, NBC aired a new episode of Meet the Press, which featured the show’s new host Kristen Welker, who replaced host Chuck Todd. The general consensus—at least from everyone who isn’t a dedicated Trump acolyte who thinks up is down, left is right, and a legal election was stolen from Trump thought non-existent election fraud—is that all Kristen did was let Trump talk over her and tell demonstrable lies with little to no pushback.
NBC did publish a fact check on Trump’s interview, which generally showed that virtually everything that came out of Trump’s booty-hole-shaped mout was a lie from the moment he stated, “I have all the facts,” and then went on to falsely claim, once again, that the 2020 presidential race was stolen from him. But, while it’s true that trying to fact-check Trump in real-time would be like publicly cataloging every single day that the sun rises and falls, most people seem to think Welker could have done a better job of, at the ver least, pushing back on Trump’s most obvious lies.
For example: When Trump said regarding Democrats’ abortion policies, “You have some states that are allowed to kill the child after birth,” that was not a moment to gloss over, nor was it when he got specific and said, “You have New York state and other places that passed legislation where you’re allowed to kill the baby after birth.”
Nah, if a Republican tells you Democrats have made baby murder legal, it’s OK to tell them plainly that what they said isn’t just cap, it’s an entire sombrero. Nobody with a brain is going to accuse you of liberal media bias over that.
Another example: Trump claimed, as he has ad nauseam over the past two years, that the 2020 election was stolen from him. That lie, his “big lie,” was to be expected. There’s just no way he wasn’t going to continue that one. But then Trump said this: “If this were ever before a court, we would win so easy. There is so much evidence that the election was rigged.”
In fact, Trump brought nearly 60 lawsuits that were heard by lower court, appellate courts, state supreme courts and even the U.S. Supreme Court, and just about every one of his suits were dismissed due to lack of evidence.
So many opportunities to put Trump in his place and let him hang himself by trying to defend clear-as-day lies were missed. Sorry, that’s just deplorable journalism, and everyone involved, including Wlker, should feel ashamed.
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Source: The Washington Post / Getty
Kristen Welker’s debut as host of NBC’s Meet The Press was marred by an interview with an erratic Donald Trump.
On Sunday (September 17th), the veteran journalist took over as the moderator of the renowned weekly news program, highlighted by her interview with the former president which was heavily promoted by NBC and its networks. But it was soon apparent that even Welker had difficulty in limiting the chaos that Trump often stokes in his sit-down interviews.
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A prime example of this was when she asked him about his whereabouts as the events of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021 commenced. “Tell me how you watched this all unfold,” she asked the former president. “Were you in the dining room watching TV?” Trump retorted, “I’m not going to tell you. I’ll tell people later, at an appropriate time.”
Welker followed up by asking: “What did you do when the Capitol was under attack, though?” The twice-impeached former president responded: “Did you see the statements I made in the Oval Office and just outside of the Oval Office?” Trump would then issue a flurry of indirect comments, not answering Welker’s questions and again reiterating the false claim that the 2020 presidential elections were rigged, calling his words that day a “beautiful statement”. At one point Welker broke in and asked, “That was 4 o’clock in the afternoon, three hours after the attack started. I want to know who you called on that day.”
Trump would then shunt blame to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in an attempt to blame for the rioters wreaking havoc.
Despite the disarray, Welker kept her composure and even managed to get Trump to provide a somewhat direct answer on some topics. “I don’t think you should be allowed to have abortions well into a pregnancy,” he said in response to a question she posed about Republican governments exerting strict bans on abortions. He also dismissed fears about going to jail despite four impending trials. “When you say, do I lose sleep? I sleep,” he said. “I sleep. Because I truly feel that, in the end, we’re going to win.”
Meet The Press also provided multiple fact-checks broadcast on-air during the interview and afterward. “He is the former president,” she noted to a panelist during the show, undoubtedly preparing to head off critiques of the show choosing to interview Trump. “He’s facing four indictments, as journalists just set the scene, the backdrop why there is still news value and value for the public to hear from him.”
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