The co-hosts of Fox & Friends expressed indignation at Meet the Press host Kristen Welker on Monday because she didn’t begin her interview with President-elect Donald Trump with a softball question about his accomplishments.
Noting that “everyone’s got their own styles,” co-host Brian Kilmeade said he “would never start an interview after an historic election” and not ask Trump about his path to victory after the 2024 vote.
On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News chat show, he even began to sketch out what he believed was the appropriate question to kick off with: “‘You have overcome four or five indictments and two impeachments, people thought you were done, to win a contested primary, do you believe that you have won the biggest comeback in American—give me something to start with and then you go down [to other issues].”
“I just think—maybe I was hoping for too much—I think you can in the very first interview give a sense of a profile before you get to ‘what are you gonna do with illegal immigrants,” he added. “But maybe that’s a style thing where she’s not allowed to.”
Welker being a journalist, her preferred “style thing” was to use all of her time to ask the soon-to-be most powerful man in the world questions of consequence about key public policy issues.
Her first question to Trump was about what the American people can expect from his incoming administration: “What do you plan to accomplish in your first 100 days in office?”
Welker also quizzed the president-elect—among other things—about immigration, healthcare, inflation, tariffs, the federal minimum wage, the Federal Reserve, law enforcement, crime, birthright citizenship, healthcare, his Cabinet picks, and his baseless denial of the outcome of the 2020 election, which he lost to President Joe Biden.
Fox & Friends were incredibly upset about the latter, wondering why a journalist would ask Trump about his conspiratorial refusal to accept the outcome of the American electoral system.
“I just have to say—you know it was a wide-ranging interview—but to bring up 2020, it’s over,“ said co-host Lawrence Jones. ”Your message of democracy and 2020, that is over, the American people have decided, so why even bring that up in the interview?”
The co-hosts then praised Trump’s answer to the question, in which he refused to accept the legitimacy of the electoral system that, nevertheless, has seen him twice voted president.
