The objectively ‘good’ moments for Trump were overshadowed by the number of rakes he stepped on.
At the risk of inviting professional and reputational consequences, I must dissent from Rich’s assessment of Donald Trump’s performance during his nearly 80-minute-long interview with Meet the Press host Kristen Welker. Even if we were inclined to dismiss Trump’s pathological devotion to the notion that the 2020 election results were fraudulent — a dispensation most Americans are unwilling to grant — the objectively “good” moments for Trump were overshadowed by the number of rakes onto which the president stepped.
The embarrassments started rolling in with the introductory topic: tariffs. Trump repeatedly predicated his claims about tariffs on his own intangible faith in their near-magical efficacy. “I have stopped wars with tariffs,” he asserted. “Tariffs are going to make our country rich.” The president-elect insisted that trade barriers will prevent the U.S. from “subsidizing” Mexico and Canada, by which we must assume he means not setting prices in Washington (which, when he’s being consistent, is the point of the USMCA trade deal he proudly negotiated). On top of it, Trump admitted that he could not guarantee Americans would not pay more for consumer goods and staples alike if his tariff scheme went into effect. But he doesn’t “believe” they will. Good luck defending that one, Republicans.
The president stammered almost incomprehensibly when he was confronted with the persistent existence of Obamacare. “I am the one who saved Obamacare, and I did the right thing,” Trump explained. Almost within the same breath, he explained that Obamacare “stinks” and should be repealed. When confronted with his administration’s efforts to do away with the 2010 health-care law, Trump explained that he tried to “kill it from a legal standpoint, but from a physical standpoint, I made it work.” But the law insured 20 million people, Welker observed. “Yeah, because of me,” Trump interjected. So, assuming one is still necessary, when will voters be privy to Trump’s preferred Obamacare replacement, the “concepts” of which Trump insisted he had in his grasp during the campaign? “I don’t know that you’ll see it at all,” Trump replied. “It’s a little hard to explain.” Clearly.
Welker appeared confused by Trump’s answer when she asked for his opinion on the legal status of pharmaceutical abortifacients. “Will you restrict the availability of abortion pills when you’re in office?” the host asked. “Probably,” Trump replied quickly. After a beat, he clarified that he’d “probably stay with exactly what I’ve been saying for the last two years, and the answer is no.” Would he “commit” to that? “Things change — I think things change,” Trump replied. “Things do change, but I don’t think it’s going to change at all.” If the president had any conviction on the issue, he’d “probably” have come up with a less half-hearted response.
Trump contradicted himself after he defended his nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, who he said would not busy himself with persecuting Trump’s political enemies when Trump insisted that his political enemies deserve to be persecuted. “For what they did, they should go to jail,” Trump said of the members of Congress who investigated January 6. The committee’s imagined offense is the deletion of records from the congressional inquiry (which its chair insists is untrue because those records are accessible to committee members and have not been archived pending a White House and Department of Homeland Security review).
The demonization of the January 6 committee justifies a cause about which the president-elect is passionate but is one of his most unpopular objectives: pardoning the rioters. When discussing the events of January 6, Trump’s audiences are confronted with a blizzard of conspiratorial bullet points. The name Ray Epps was invoked, the context of which is relevant only to the most insatiable consumers of January 6 revisionism. The “police let people in,” he said, as if one lone officer’s position being overrun by a mob invalidates the criminality of trespassing and vandalism. He appeared to contend that the pardons would make for an act of cosmic justice because dark-blue municipalities have failed to properly prosecute rioters in their cities — as if the remedy to injustice is more injustice.
The president toyed with the notion that the discredited Andrew Wakefield study linking vaccines to an uptick in autism was, in fact, valid lest he run afoul of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his supporters. “If you take a look at autism, 25 years, autism was almost nonexistent,” Trump observed. “What’s happening?” Welker explained that medical professionals have gotten “better” at diagnosing the condition, including “spectrum” cases, which caused case rates to balloon. “Something is going on,” Trump replied as though Welker didn’t even exist. “Maybe it’s chlorine in the water.”
Should Ukraine expect the U.S. to throw it to the Russian wolves devouring that sovereign state by force? “Probably,” Trump said with nary a care. “Sure.” The incoming president predicated his objection to supporting Ukraine’s cause on the notion that Europe has failed to pull commensurate weight, but that excuse was belied by his contention that Europe has more to fear from Russia than the United States. “We have a little thing called an ocean in between us,” Trump sneered. Presumably, the former and future commander in chief is familiar with intercontinental ballistic missiles.
“I won youth by 30 percent,” Trump explained in a craven defense of his distaste for the law that will compel Chinese firms to divest their holdings in the social media app TikTok (he lost voters aged 18–29 by nine points in November). When asked if he would enforce a law designed to mitigate the threat posed by that Chinese spyware application, Trump said he would merely “try to make it so that other companies don’t become an even bigger monopoly.” It doesn’t take much investigation into Trump’s thinking on TikTok to indicate that what he means is that he’s more inclined to take an adversarial approach to domestic social media companies like Meta, even at the expense of U.S. national security goals.
At the end of the interview, Trump laid into Welker. “You’re very hostile,” he said while congratulating himself on his own performance. “The questions are, you know, pretty nasty.” Trump noted that Welker’s barbed queries contrasted with her docile approach to interviewing President Joe Biden. “I’ve never interviewed President Biden,” Welker interjected. “When I say ‘you,’” Trump countered, “I’m speaking metaphorically.”
What an embarrassment. It’s a testament to human adaptability that this mortifying spectacle doesn’t arouse more distaste from Trump’s supporters and opponents alike. I do my best to ensure the accuracy of my work. Our daily goal here is to craft factually irrefutable cases both so that our readers are not misinformed and our skeptics will have to contend with the substance of our arguments. Trump has never shown that kind of respect for his audiences.
Yes, the president had some stronger moments on subjects like the unintended consequences of minimum-wage hikes, pledging to back away from his revenge tour, and constantly returning to the themes that won him the election — lowering consumer prices and restoring sanity to America’s immigration enforcement regime. But he created a lot of headaches for himself and his party in the process.
If this was good by Trump standards, it was abysmal by the objective metrics we would apply to any other sentient adult, much less a president about to begin his second term.