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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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A recent report claims that the Trump administration had easy access to prescription medications in large amounts, with doctors behaving “like the Wild West”.
A follow-up to a report from the Inspector General of the Department of Defense that criticized the White House Medical Unit during the Trump administration reveals that the unit doled out prescription medication with little to no oversight and messy record keeping. One source close to the matter stated to Rolling Stone, “It was kind of like the Wild West. Things were pretty loose. Whatever someone needs, we were going to fill this.”
According to the investigation, a tracking form in the report that was released in January contained numerous medications ordered in large doses such as Xanax, morphine, hydrocodone, diazepam and lorazepam (the latter two more commonly known as Valium and Ativan) and even ketamine and fentanyl. The report claims that there was no oversight exercised, with high scrutiny leveled at Ronny Jackson, who was the personal physician for former President Donald Trump at the time until 2019 after filling a similar role for former President Barack Obama.
It was also noted that many senior Trump officials would combine Xanax usage with drinking alcohol. “Knowledgeable sources say that samples of the stimulant were passed around for those contributing lines to major Trump speeches, working late hours on foreign policy initiatives, responding to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, coping with the deluge of media inquiries about that investigation, and so much more,” said the follow-up article. One former senior administration official said frankly of the situation: “You try working for him and not chasing pills with alcohol.” For those who wanted to raise complaints, they chose not to because “they feared they would receive negative work assignments or be “fired” if they did.
Jackson, who is currently a Republican congressman representing the 13th District of Texas, declined to comment when his office was reached. The physician has been regarded as an “eccentric” type in the past, with complaints about his behavior piling up including 56 of 60 subordinates interviewed testifying to the Pentagon that they “experienced, saw, or heard about [him] yelling, screaming, cursing, or belittling subordinates.” Other sources corroborated his actions. “Any practices existing at that time were all set up by Jackson, who’d been there for a dozen years. Though the med unit was led by an administrator, little happened without his say-so,” another source claimed.
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