One of Trump’s ‘most heated’ interviews: Media analyst reacts

[0:00] During this pre-taped interview on Meet the Press, President Trump, as many of us have seen, [0:04] stormed off after Kristen Welker asked him for evidence to back up his false claims of [0:09] election fraud in California. Let's watch. Your elections in this country, we're like a third [0:15] world country. Your elections are crooked and you're crooked and Meet the Press is crooked [0:20] and so is ABC and CBS and CNN. Your one-sided crooked networks. Let's call it quits because [0:28] I've had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time. Mr. President, let's please, I traveled all the way to Wisconsin. I've sat in the rain with you. I know. I've sat in the rain with you for an hour. On and off in the rain and I've given you enough time. You ought to straighten out your press because you know what? A country can never be great with a dishonest press. Listen, we traveled all the way to Wisconsin for this interview. So clearly a lot going on there. Wow. Brian, help us understand what led up to that moment. It's one of the most heated endings to an interview with [1:01] President Trump I've ever seen. Yes, there was an issue with the rain. It had been raining on the roof of this barn that they were sitting in. So Trump was distracted by the rain. It made the production of the interview a little bit harder. He said afterwards he was angry because of the rain, but he was clearly also angry at Welker's questions. And this gets to the difference between accessibility and accountability. President Trump is very accessible. He answers questions from the press all the time, but that's not always the same as accountability. When he's talking with his daughter-in-law on Fox News or he's answering one or two questions on the phone to a reporter who calls [1:31] him, there's not the same form of accountability that you see in a sit down television interview. With Kristen Welker, she was asking specific questions that were trying to hold the president accountable. And he kept repeating conspiracy theories with no basis in reality. He talked about the January 6 rioters being having their lives destroyed by the government. He talked about California elections being rigged for which there is no evidence. And Welker kept asking a simple question. Where's the evidence for those claims? Daniel Dale, our fact checker here at CNN, has said those claims are just straight up lies. There is no evidence for them. Trump did not like that [2:01] accountability, right? He's happy to be accessible, but he doesn't want to be accountable. And so that's why he walked off, even took off the microphone. You can hear him stepping on the microphone there. Notably, however, he did talk to Welker the next day and he committed to another interview with NBC. So that really speaks to the president's desire to be on camera, to be the center of attention. But like I said, Pam and Wolf, he doesn't want to be held accountable. And that's why he went back to those usual insults and smears when he was asked for evidence of his conspiracy theories. [2:29] I want to shift gears to our colleague Kristen Welker at NBC Meet the Press, who held an interview with the president over the weekend. We should know it was pouring rain outside, which made it hard to get the interview off. But the president stormed out in the middle of the interview, no pun intended, with the storm going on after he was making wild, you know, unbased claims about the elections in California, January 6th, you know, the 2020 election. And Kristen was pushing back, asking for evidence of which he had none. And he walked off. I want to play that. [3:01] Your elections in this country, we're like a third world country. Your elections are crooked and you're crooked and Mr. Press is crooked. And so is ABC and CBS and CNN. [3:13] But Mr. President. Your one-sided crooked network. So let's call it quits because I've had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time. [3:19] And Tia, it's interesting because even before this, sort of the context that led up to it was the president defending this political $1.8 billion fund that he still very much wants to compensate people who feel that they've been unfairly prosecuted. That's what even led up to it before it. He walks off there. Just, Tia, quickly, your take on that moment. You know, even by the standards of the last 10 years with Donald Trump, that was something. [3:44] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I'll try to be quick, but I'll say this. I think a lot of people at home are watching and they're going, why does the media continue to sit down with him? [3:55] Why do they platform him? Knowing that particularly he treats women and black women, especially harshly and unfairly and quite frankly, disrespectfully. [4:05] But he is the president of the United States. We have to listen to him as the leader of the free world. We're trying to ask him questions, get to the truth. Kristen was doing her job, but Donald Trump loves to hate the media. I think this is just kind of part of the dog and pony show that we get from the president because he'll be back to NBC, CNN, all the networks. He can't leave the media alone, even though he likes to treat media members poorly. [4:31] Jeff, go ahead. He also likes to change the subject. And it was the questions on Iran and the questions on the weaponization fund that led him into a path of this, this familiar path of confronting the media here. [4:46] So he was very much trying to change the uncomfortable subject. Republicans are not happy with the war. The voters there that I was speaking with on Friday, many said that. So I think he was, you know, definitely some deflection going on. [4:59] Okay, it's been almost a week. Votes are still being counted in L.A. Nithya Rahman now pulling ahead of former reality TV star Spencer Pratt in the Los Angeles mayoral race. Rahman, an L.A. city council member, gained about 3,000 more votes than Pratt on Sunday. [5:15] The two are fighting to see who will face off against incumbent mayor Karen Bass in November. In a contentious interview that Trump abruptly ended with NBC's Meet the Press, he continued to falsely claim fraud in California elections. [5:29] Group chat is back. Why did he get so upset about this in particular? [5:33] Well, he's being challenged on something, misinformation that he's spreading. But the president has been on this for some time. He has counted, he has pointed to particularly California's notoriously slow system of counting votes, particularly because they allow mail-in ballots that are postmarked on or before Election Day. That's his biggest issue. [5:52] Let me just say that one more time. They allow mail-in ballots that have been posted on Election Day. [5:58] So these are people who at least got their, they put it in the mail on that day, but because they arrive later, it takes a while to cut. [6:07] And they wait until a full week after Election Day. So as of tomorrow will be the cutoff for their arrival. But yes, they allow for basically a full week sort of grace period for these ballots to show up. [6:16] And 80 percent of California uses mail-in balloting. So it's a lot of ballots that have to come in and they get processed. [6:23] But I just wanted to underscore that because what Trump is saying is very much reflected in the media ecosystem where there are people who are like, look, in this silence, we're going to fill it with the allegation that California is rigging the vote. [6:37] Yep. And news organizations have always struggled with how do we handle those types of comments? [6:41] Because you don't want to inadvertently elevate somebody undermining an election before the results come in because you are inadvertently amplifying what could be misinformation. [6:50] Do you think that's what happened with Pratt? I mean, there's so much reporting because it's like, oh, reality, oh, this, oh, he did better than he ever thought he could. [6:59] But L.A. is like 20 percent Republican and he had Trump's backing. [7:02] Oh, it's a great question. I think that people just got overly excited about the fact that somebody novel is breaking through. [7:07] But I don't think anybody was preemptively saying that he won the election and that these elections were rigged because Spencer Pratt happened to be doing well. [7:14] I think the president's comments are taking it a step further than sort of the Prattosphere was. [7:18] The Prattosphere, how did we get through all these months without using that phrase? [7:26] Now, this ended up being a pretty testy interview for a variety of reasons. [7:29] But I want to talk about this part about no endless wars because we're in a moment where the regional conflict is escalating. [7:37] We just don't know how far this is going to spread. [7:40] But is this a sensitivity for this White House? [7:43] When Hegseth is asked, he often says something like, well, we meant no stupid wars. [7:47] And I think that's sort of eye of the beholder. [7:50] Right, right. And when you ask Trump about it, especially, you know, in these gaggles or in the interview yesterday, he says no endless wars. [7:58] He says he's talking about, you know, extricating ourselves from conflicts such as Afghanistan. [8:02] It's only been three months. [8:03] Exactly, exactly. And you saw that kind of messaging even, you know, even a couple of months ago. [8:08] I remember when he was talking about, in his Oval Office address, around the time the war started, [8:13] he's talking about all of these conflicts in the past such as Vietnam and that he's like, we're not talking about those types of conflicts. [8:21] But the sensitivity is there. It's because he did make that promise of no new wars during the campaign. [8:26] That's why this kind of this unusual coalition, especially younger voters, really rallied around this president because he made that promise. [8:34] And now he's in a conflict that is so much more difficult than just a simple kind of a more simple strike that he made last summer in Iran on those nuclear facilities. [8:45] And he's struggling to get out of it. And that's why that's where that sensitivity is coming from, because it's kind of out of his control.