President Donald Trump made headlines for cutting short his Meet the Press interview with terminal stare Kristen Welker and then abruptly tossing his lavalier microphone off to the side before walking off the set. As is always the case with the left and with leftists, if all you see about this is on social media, you see the tail end of the exchange and not what led up to it. You’ll see what I mean.
Aaron Rupar is the best at taking things out of context. Here he gives you 2:28 of Trump ending the interview, but it’s difficult to tell by this how much Welker pushed him to just throw his hands in the air and give up trying to get his responses to her questions in.
WOW -- Trump crashes out and cuts his interview with Welker short as she presses him on his lack of evidence for claiming elections are rigged
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 7, 2026
"You're either crooked or you're stupid. Let's call it quits. Because I've had enough. Thank you darling," he tells her."
"I traveled… pic.twitter.com/qQaNIDnX4y
While Chris Welch has taken a doofus position on this, at least he provided a better lead-up to what transpired. You’ll see in the first minute here that while the interview was heated, it was civil, and Trump was not the one who escalated things.
This interview hurt my soul. The mistreatment of black women and journalists by this President is down right embarrassing and unacceptable. Kristin Welker is neither crooked or stupid. She is a history making journalist who has earned the right to be respected. The President… pic.twitter.com/9V1REko2IF
— Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch (@SpeakerWelchIL) June 7, 2026
At 2:15 on this second clip, Trump says, “Comey was a dirty cop,” and that’s what triggered Welker to hit Trump hard by interrupting and talking over him without so much as taking a breath.
This is what passes for journalism now. When a legacy media interviewer has a chance to interview Trump, he or she knows that their peers are judging them by how tough they are or were on the president. But they define “tough” differently than actual journalism.
Actual journalism would require the interviewer to do the homework in advance, and to ask smart and progressively pointed questions to get the interviewee to admit something he may not want to admit. It’s a cross-examination. To do that, the interviewer has to let the subject speak. If you don't give the interviewee a chance to answer your question, it's no longer an interview; it's a debate. Welker's not challenging Trump to provide better answers. She's not giving his answers a hearing. All she's doing is pushing back as any debate opponent would.
These interviews aren't judged according to a journalistic standard. They’re judged by how unfair they can be. They are judged by whether or not they allow Trump to answer the question. They are judged by how much pushback they give to Trump. To "journalists," failure is defined by how much time Trump is given to answer a question. It’s defined by whether he’s allowed to use “the platform” to his own advantage.
This clip shows how Welker can do an interview without interrupting her guest if she so chooses; it's with Trump-hater Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.).
Kristen Welker: “You broke with Trump on key issues such as voting against the so-called big beautiful bill, and you're opposed to the Iran war. Was it all worth it?”
— HOT SPOT (@HotSpotHotSpot) May 24, 2026
Congressman Thomas Massie: “It was absolutely worth it for me. Now I don't think it's going to be worth it for… pic.twitter.com/RNgXXsjvuw
You can’t say that her combative style applies across the board to all interviewees.
If Trump's latest run-in with Welker seems familiar, you may remember an interview he gave to Lesley Stahl of CBS's 60 Minutes on Oct. 26, 2020. That was when Stahl lazily did not ask Trump a series of questions to get the most revealing answers. Instead, she skipped the entire journalistic process altogether and just took the opposing view. She told him his claims about the Hunter Biden laptop wrong, demanding evidence without pointing to any evidence of her own. She tells him she can’t let him say things on camera that they can’t verify.
She actually says to Trump, “This is 60 Minutes, we can’t put things on the air we can’t verify.” What’s the point of an interview if you will only let the interviewee say things that you may or may not decide to verify?
That’s disingenuous. Every week her network airs claims from interviewees, and they couch the responses as just that – third party's (Trump's in this case) responses and claims. That’s basic journalistic practice. In other words, they can air Trump’s answer to a question it they want. If she cared about the truth, what Stahl would have said was, "This is 60 Minutes and we won’t put things on the air that we decide not to investigate."
On Oct 19, 2020, 51 former intel officers called Hunter’s laptop “Russian disinformation”
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 5, 2024
On Oct 26, 2020 60 Minutes journo Leslie Stahl rudely interrupted Trump to say “we can’t verify the authenticity” of the laptop
Yesterday an FBI witness testified that it was legitimate… pic.twitter.com/nIP6L6KFBo
Both Welker and Stahl are practicing advocacy and propaganda, and to say so is not hyperbole. It’s never the reporter’s job to counter the interviewee as an opponent would in a debate. But when the interviewer plays the role of real-time fact-checker, while still not checking facts, you're not a journalist. If you won’t allow Trump to finish his sentence or make a response as he chooses, you are not a journalist. You're just a left-wing propagandist trying to shut the president down.
Trump can’t make CBS or NBC go out and find the evidence that’s readily available to check and double-check his facts. But instead of putting his claims to the test through deep and objective research, they presume to do what any good Democrat operative would do: just shut him down.
Trump knows he doesn’t have to take that, and so he doesn’t. Keep this in mind as we go forward and the field for 2028 takes shape. Trump won’t be in it, but we need candidates who, like Trump, will call these hacks out every single time. What Welker and Stahl have done with Trump is now becoming standard procedure in the legacy media's coverage of Republicans. Our side needs to be ready.
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