"Please! I traveled all the way to Wisconsin!... Listen, we traveled all the way to Wisconsin for this interview"

News companies know women like this are tanking their ratings. If one of these Sunday broadcasts brought in a non ideological White Man their ratings would double. However, they still choose to loose money, just to promote the views of the ownership. Trump is right. pic.twitter.com/Un33VHNqro

— Nate P. Hall (@Nate_PHall) June 8, 2026

Wouldn't it have been funny if the all-the-way-to-Wisconsin plea had worked? Oh, yeah, poor you, going to Wisconsin, let me sit back down and yammer on with you, because you endured the ordeal of coming to Wisconsin.

How many times has Trump traveled to Wisconsin in his political career? 40? 60? He's put in the hard work of demonstrating to Wisconsin that we matter, and here's Kristen Welker obviously irked to have had to touch down in a flyover state. I can't believe I came to this hellhole for you!

ADDED: I love the set with the hay bales and tractors. I was hoping Welker and Trump would jump up and do his old "Green Acres" routine:

"Because it was raining, I got a little bit angry at them. I was not happy with them. But we had a good time."

Said Trump, quoted at the end of "Trump walks out of 'Meet the Press' interview when challenged over false claims/When pressed by host Kristen Welker, the president cited no evidence for claims about Jan. 6 and elections he said were 'rigged'" (WaPo)(gift link).

I was watching that live, but I fell asleep. I heard the loud rain that was adding stress and discontinuity to the interchange, but I'm sorry I missed witnessing the big falling out as it happened. It's easy to catch up:

"Is President Trump serious about annexing Greenland?"/"President Trump strongly believes that we cannot outsource our security."

 

BESSENT: It might not be next year. Might not be in 4 years. But down the road this fight for the Arctic is real. We would keep our NATO guarantees. And if there were an attack on Greenland from Russia, from some other area, we would get dragged in. So better now, peace through strength, make it part of the United States.... The Europeans project weakness. The U.S. projects strength....

Trump on "Meet the Press."

Watch the whole thing. I did.

I thought it was good, balanced sparring and that he said nothing that surprised or shocked me. How about you?

ADDED: Kristen Welker likes to needle Trump with questions in the form of "What do you say to people who say....?"

"Leader Schumer, what do you say to Americans who feel as though you and other top Democrats misled them about President Biden's mental acuity?"

Chuck Schumer is confronted on NBC for covering up Biden's mental health decline.

Never forget: The Democratic Party knew that Biden wasn't competent enough to be president and hid the truth from Americans for four years.

Democrats do not care about Americans. It's that simple. pic.twitter.com/4sJbzMPi4C

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) January 5, 2025

"No. Look, we didn't. And let's – let’s look – let’s look at President Biden. He's had an amazing record. The legislation we passed, one of the most significant groups of legislation since the New Deal – since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, putting in 235 judges, a record. And he's a patriot. He's a great guy. And when he stepped down, he did it on his own because he thought it was better not only for the Democratic Party, for America. We should all salute him. We should all salute him."

The question was "What do you say to Americans who feel as though" we were lied to. The question was framed to exclude an assertion about what you supposedly really did. But you gave that kind of response anyway — the nonresponsive response. Why'd you do that? It wasn't believable. It was a bald-faced lie about a bald-faced lie. It didn't even address us, the people — people with feelings about what you did. You just went off on a screwy rant that ended with a demand that we salute Joe Biden.

Salute the President? And they say Trump supporters seem like fascists.

ADDED: Here's the transcript. In case you are questioning whether Schumer said "We should all salute him" twice. 

"The first thing to understand about Trump is that he’s not a normal politician. He doesn’t give a rip about policy."

"What he cares about is saying and doing whatever it takes to fulfill his desires and thirst for power, including destroying democracy if necessary. Treating him as anything other than a depraved authoritarian is not only wrongheaded, but helps his cause by legitimizing him as a reasonable choice for voters. And that’s exactly what Welker did."

I'm reading "How not to interview Trump/Kristen Welker's tenure as 'Meet the Press' moderator got off to an inauspicious start," by Aaron Rupar.

We're supposed to believe that other politicians don't say "whatever it takes to fulfill [their] desires and thirst for power."

I don't like the way the abnormalization of Trump has come at the cost of stifling our capacity to critique other politicians. The others may be more "normal" than Trump, but since when is a "normal politician" a genuine policy wonk who's dedicated to telling the truth and serving the people?

I watched the entire interview with Trump — video, transcript — and it seemed to me that Trump was heavily immersed in policy. His haters act as though it's a matter of principle to refuse to engage on the substance at all. Ironically, they are making it easier for him to win on the merits.

Stop dehumanizing him and answer him! The abnormalization strategy reinforces a suspicion that you don't dare argue substance. 

Watching the interview, I wrote down the time stamp 17:43. I wanted to remember where it was that I said out loud, "He's going to win."

It was right when he said: "It's sweet. It's the finest. We have the best." Context:

FMR. PRES. DONALD TRUMP:

But I would get inflation down, because drill we must. We will be drilling for oil. We are going to become, again, energy independent. We are going to reduce our debt, because we’re also going to become energy dominant. You know, we were ready to go dominant within a matter of months. We would have been making so much money. We have more oil, I call it liquid gold, under our feet than any other country — Saudi Arabia, Russia. There’s no country with more — and it’s sweet. It’s the finest. We have the best. You know, we’re taking it from Venezuela. You know what it is? Tar.

KRISTEN WELKER:

Are you —

FMR. PRES. DONALD TRUMP:

It’s the worst.

"I don’t know why people stick up for [Biden] so much... – when he makes bad decisions, like you.... I don’t know why..."

"... you and other people say, 'Oh, it’s okay that he’s destroyed the strategic petroleum reserves.' I mean, why do you do that? Or, 'It’s okay that he has open borders.'... I don’t know why. And I think that’s why the media has lost so much credibility."

Said Donald Trump to Kristen Welker in the unedited version of the "Meet the Press" interview.

Here's the transcript. Here's the video. And scroll down for the full text of the video, in which you can see how Welker — who is getting criticized for not inserting more fact-checking in real time — broke in to do what Trump called "sticking up for Biden."