Continuing a game day tradition, Trump agrees to Super Bowl Sunday interview with NBC
By Brian Stelter, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump isn’t attending the Super Bowl this year – but he will still be a part of the football festivities on NBC.
The network announced Tuesday that Trump will tape a sit-down with “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Llamas. The interview will air in several parts beginning Wednesday night, and a separate segment will be televised on Sunday’s Super Bowl LX pre-game show.
It is a notable booking for a couple reasons. First, Trump has attacked NBC News too many times to count and has nicknamed its parent company Comcast as “Concast.” Second, the last time NBC televised the Super Bowl when Trump was president, in 2018, he passed on a chance to appear on the pre-game show.
But this time around, Trump evidently wants the air time and attention.
The pre-game telecast is a chance for Trump to reach beyond his regular audience. Even the afternoon hours of Super Bowl coverage, long before the kickoff, draw significant viewership every year.
The idea of a presidential Super Bowl interview originated with George W. Bush. Barack Obama picked it up in 2009 and sat down for an interview with the host network every year.
In the Trump years, things got more complicated. Veteran journalists typically conduct the interviews for other networks, so Fox was criticized for having Trump’s Fox News friends Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity lead the sit-downs in 2017 and 2020, respectively.
President Joe Biden continued the tradition in 2021 with CBS and in 2022 with NBC, but he passed up the interview opportunity in 2023 and 2024, which led conservative critics to accuse the White House of hiding the president from public scrutiny.
Trump, true to form, knocked Biden for skipping the Super Bowl Sunday platform.
“They ask a question, and you give them an answer,” Trump said in the run-up to last year’s telecast. “It’s not that hard.”
Trump taped an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier for last year’s broadcast on Fox, and he attended the game in person in New Orleans, becoming the first sitting president to do so.
This year, the game is being played in Santa Clara, California; Trump told the New York Post that “it’s just too far away.”
The-CNN-Wire
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