NBC’s Softball Trump Interview Normalized an Abnormal President
I fact-checked Tom Llamas’s deferential interview with the president, in which the 'NBC Nightly News' anchor did not ask him even a single question about the Epstein files.
Another Donald Trump interview. Another infuriating journalistic failure from our mainstream media.
Tom Llamas – who replaced Lester Holt as anchor and managing editor of ‘NBC Nightly News’ less than a year ago – went to the White House for what NBC billed as an “extended interview” with President Trump ahead of Sunday’s Super Bowl.
It lasted 49 minutes.
And yes, once again, I watched every excruciating second so you don’t have to. (NBC also posted a full transcript online, in case you want to witness what a journalistic surrender looks like in print.)
I’ll be honest: I’m not sure what required more discipline – sitting through Trump’s typical torrent of lies and nonsense, or watching Llamas repeatedly let him get away with it. By the end, I couldn’t even tell who I was angrier at: the serial liar in the Oval Office, or the professional journalist sitting opposite him, nodding along as if “truth” is something subjective, or worse, partisan.
The most damning part of the interview, however, wasn’t what Trump said. It was what Llamas never asked.
Because somehow – somehow – NBC News managed to air a 49-minute sit-down with the president of the United States and didn’t ask him a single question about the biggest story in the country right now: the latest Epstein files dump.
Not. A. Single. One.
I couldn’t quite believe it when I watched it. I had to go and check the NBC transcript. The New York Times found that Trump, his wife, and his property are mentioned more than 38,000 times across 5,300 of the DOJ Epstein files. So how does a top TV journalist sit down with the president for almost an hour and not ask him about any of that? Not ask him, for example, about the document in the files that includes sworn testimony, under penalty of perjury, from someone who alleged that Trump threatened to kill her if she exposed Epstein’s sexual abuse? Not ask him about his well-documented and close friendship with the most notorious child sex trafficker in American history?
To be clear: there was a single moment towards the end of the interview in which Llamas did mention the word “Epstein,” but Trump immediately interrupted him, talked over him, and changed the subject to the Clintons, after which Llamas… just moved on.
TOM LLAMAS: The Epstein —
DONALD TRUMP: — the Epstein thing, which turned out that I have nothing to do – and they did – about Epstein. And they said, “Do you think it’s terrible what” – you know, with the subpoenas and everything and they’re disobeying the subpoenas. And I actually said it’s a shame. You have an ex-president and you have, you know, the president’s wife and secretary of state. And I said it’s a shame. It is a shame.
Then there were the softball questions. With Trump, they’re the journalistic equivalent of gifting an arsonist a box of matches and asking him for his “thoughts” on fire safety. As I’ve argued before, far too many anchors and reporters interviewing this president seem incapable of resisting what I call the “opinion question”: soliciting Trump’s take on the news of the day, as if he were just another cable pundit and not the most powerful man on Earth – a man whose record demands scrutiny and challenge, not deference and chumminess.
Consider this sample of actual Llamas questions to Trump:
“Mr. President, speaking of Minneapolis, what did you learn?
“You said ICE made some mistakes. What – what were the mistakes?”
“What should Americans expect going forward?”
“Which cities are you headed to next?”
“Most Americans say they don’t like how you’ve handled immigration… How do you change their minds?”
“What’s your response to [Joe Rogan]?”
“Have you ever used ChatGPT?”
“Will you endorse in the 2028 presidential primary?
There were hardly any challenging questions at all. Zero follow-ups that put Trump on the defensive or caught him off guard. The proverbial Martian landing on Earth and watching this entire 49-minute interview would have no idea that this president is a serial liar, in the midst of multiple controversies and scandals, and has spent recent weeks hurling vicious racial abuse at non-white Americans and posting deranged conspiracy theories online in the middle of the night. On Wednesday evening, a deeply abnormal president was, once again, normalized by our mainstream and supposedly “liberal” media.
NBC News later produced an online “fact-check” of the interview, highlighting and debunking what the authors of that fact-check described as Trump’s “false, exaggerated or misleading claims” to Llamas.
But, I’m sorry, what is the point of producing a separate fact-check after the interview is over? Why not fact-check him in real time? Why not have an anchor who is equipped with the facts and willing to tell Trump to his face, during the interview itself, that he is making false, exaggerated, or misleading claims? Why do it in an online article afterwards that will likely get 1% of the audience of the televised ‘Nightly News’ interview, and which won’t affect Donald Trump in any way whatsoever?
As CNN’s in-house fact-checker Daniel Dale has pointed out, it isn’t actually that hard to fact-check Trump in real time. Why? Because he tells the same lies, again and again, from one interview to another. So Llamas should have been ready for these particular gems from the president:
“I inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country.” (FALSE!)
“We have 11,888 murderers that [Joe] Biden and his group led into our country.” (FALSE!)
“They allowed to come into our country people from their mental institutions, people from insane asylums.” (FALSE!)
“I won three times.” (FALSE!)
And yet, as CNN’s Dale also observed in his own fact-check of the NBC interview: “Over and over, when the president repeated lies that were debunked months or years ago, Llamas responded simply ‘right’ or ‘yeah’ – or didn’t acknowledge them at all.” (Llamas said “right” more than 30 times and “yeah” more than 130 times, over the course of the interview.)
At one point, Trump falsely claimed that “very few” prices had not fallen over the course of his second term, and Llamas… agreed with his false claim. “Yeah, very few, I get it.”
At another point, Trump brazenly denied that he said he wanted to “nationalize” our elections, when we all heard him say it, but Llamas didn’t push back at all.
It gets worse. Once the sit-down part of the interview was done, Trump and Llamas did a tour of the Oval Office while the NBC anchor delivered this zinger: “Do you think at one point people will talk about you when they talk about presidents like Washington and Lincoln? Is that something you think is gonna happen?”
To call this a journalistic dereliction of duty is an understatement of epic proportions. If you get the opportunity to interview the president and you can’t ask about Jeffrey Epstein but can ask about ChatGPT, then you have failed at your job. You can’t claim to be holding power accountable if you won’t even ask the obvious question everyone at home is already asking.
But this isn’t just about NBC’s Tom Llamas. Or CBS’s Norah O’Donnell, who also did a truly awful job interviewing Trump in November 2025. Or former ABC correspondent Terry Moran, who told the president they could “agree to disagree” about a clearly doctored image Trump was holding up during a White House interview in April 2025.
This is about our mainstream media as a whole protecting access, rather than practicing journalism. This is about TV networks mistaking “we got the interview” for “we did the journalism.” Above all else, this is about a free press that is directly threatened by the president of the United States but doesn’t dare call him out to his face. They don’t want to risk losing the next booking, the next scoop, the next “exclusive.”
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Regarding trump's "interaction" with "the media" I often marvel at how complacent and complicit "journalists" are with him. Tuesday, once again, a reporter asked trump a question as he sat like an oaf at OUR Resolute Desk and once again he interrupted the reporter, talked over her (almost always a female he likes to attack), refused to answer her question, and insulted, insulted, insulted her and her employer. The reporter today was Kaitlyn Collins from CNN. You could see in his leathery face and lizard eyes that he enjoyed the bullying but that he also was desperate to deflect the question about anything to do with him and Epstein. That must not happen. All media must hound him and the other monsters and the DOJ. NEVER let up!
The other point is how the “profession” of journalism as displayed by journalists covering trump shows absolutely no signs of professional cooperation or integrity; to whit, my repeated question for “the media” which is as follows:
Again, a question for the “media,” for “the press,” for the “fourth estate”: WHEN are you ALL going to do one or both of the following WHENEVER trump will not answer questions or when he deflects by insulting a reporter, any reporter; WHEN are you going to stand up for truth, decency, professionalism, collegial support, honor, show some basic integrity?!
Whenever trump deflects or declines to answer a reporter’s question or changes the subject or insults the reporter or the reporter’s employer, WALK OUT EN MASSE! Fold up your devices or your notebooks and WALK OUT! Do not "stand and take it," the lies, bullying, insults, deflections. WALK OUT! He will deride you for it - he derides you anyway - but much of America will APPLAUD you and be astounded that you really DO have spines and souls....
OR
After the first instance of a reporter being insulted, demeaned and over-ridden, or a reporter’s question being declined, deflected or changed, then every subsequent reporter who is “called upon” MUST THEN ASK THE VERY SAME QUESTION, OVER AND OVER AGAIN! DO NOT LET UP! DO NOT LET him GET AWAY WITH HIS BAD BEHAVIOR, at least as it pertains to “the media.” DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! When he ignored Kaitlynn Collins' question about "the survivors" and then proceeded to insult her by way of deflecting attention away from - what else - Epstein and HIM, then the next reporter and the next reporter and the next should have asked THE SAME QUESTIONS that he quashed from Collins, repeatedly, not letting it go!
To see “the media” in the Leavitt Lie-Fests or standing around OUR Resolute Desk where a loathsome con-man sits holding court like a mob-boss hurling insults, lies and parries to reporters is a disgusting experience – almost worse in many ways than learning about that foul "defecating" January 6 criminal invading OUR government offices, but he and that criminal have similar crass, craven and gross levels of behavior and lack of character.
MEDIA: WALK OUT and/or EACH ONE OF YOU REPEAT THE QUESTION/REPEAT THE QUESTION/REPEAT THE QUESTION and then WALK OUT!!
STOP LYING DOWN AND ACTING LIKE THE DOGS HE TREATS YOU AS BEING!! STAND UP FOR YOURSELVES, YOUR PROFESSION AND FOR US, FOR AMERICA, AND STAND UP FOR EACH OTHER AGAINST THIS BULLYING OAF INTERLOPER INTO OUR GOVERNMENT!
NBC chose not to go for the jugular
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