Donald Trump did not make it through his Meet the Press interview. What was supposed to be an exclusive sit down with NBC’s Kristen Welker turned into a live unraveling on Sunday, ending with Trump telling the veteran moderator she was either crooked or stupid before walking away from the table.
The interview was taped Friday inside a Wisconsin barn at Custer Farms in Chippewa Falls, a setting the White House had requested, with rain hammering the metal roof loud enough to interrupt the conversation more than once. It aired Sunday and marked Welker’s fourth sit down with Trump. The wheels came off in the final stretch, after she pressed him on the roughly $1.8 billion fund he had been promoting and then moved into his claims about election fraud.
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His California argument hinged on the state’s slow vote count, with ballots still being tallied days after its primary. Trump read the delay as proof of cheating. Welker noted that state and local officials acknowledge the count is slow and are pushing to speed it up. He was not interested in the distinction, branding those officials crooked, then turning the word on Welker, her network, Meet the Press, and for good measure ABC, CBS, and CNN.
When Welker calmly answered that she was not crooked, Trump shot back with a “Really?” and told her she was playing right into their hands. Then came the line. “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.” He likened American elections to a third world country and kept hammering the same word over and over.
Moments later he was finished. “Let’s call it quits, because I’ve had enough,” he said, tacking on a “thank you, darling” as he wrapped. Welker pushed to keep going, reminding him she had traveled all the way to Wisconsin and sat in the rain with him for an hour. His parting shot doubled as a thesis statement. “A country can never be great with a dishonest press.”
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NBC later published a fact check of the sit down, noting that Trump made a series of false, misleading, or exaggerated claims across topics ranging from Iran to the January 6 riots to the California vote, and that his years of voter fraud allegations have never been backed by evidence in a courtroom.
The whole thing ran about an hour before he pulled the plug. By Sunday afternoon, the clip of him branding one of network television’s most prominent anchors crooked and stupid and then leaving her at the table was everywhere.
