The Dictatorship
Trump’s Super Bowl interview brings back one of the least helpful Obama-era rituals
President Donald Trump’s chat with Fox News’ Bret Baier, airing before the Super Bowl, will have one of the larger audiences he’s likely to get this year. Despite becoming the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl, the interview was taped ahead of time in Mar-a-Lago. Though Trump is making a big deal about it, the return of the presidential pregame is a tradition that America didn’t particularly need resurrected.
The notion that the president would do a formal interview with a political journalist ahead of the Super Bowl didn’t begin until 2009. Before that, the earliest analogy was then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s high-stakes appearance on “60 Minutes” that aired immediately after CBS’ Super Bowl broadcast finished in 1992. Seated alongside Hillary Clinton, he answered questions from co-anchor Steve Kroft about his reported infidelities in a 10-minute interview that likely saved his campaign.
The notion that the president would do a formal interview with a political journalist ahead of the Super Bowl didn’t begin until 2009.
We moved closer to the current format in 2004, when George W. Bush became the first sitting president to conduct a pregame interview. The game was held in Houston that year, and as a former governor of Texas, it was certainly fitting for Bush to speak with CBS sportscaster Jim Nantz live from the Rose Garden. Nantz’s most pointed question referenced Bush’s recent State of the Union address, where he had criticized the rampant use of steroids in the NFL. But otherwise, the four-minute chat was exactly the kind of gentle media appearance any president would dream about getting.
Despite the low-key nature of the Bush-Nantz interview, the politics involved in the decision to give it were unmistakable at the beginning of an election year. As The Washington Post reported a few days later, ahead of a high-stakes appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the president had “dipped in the polls and [was] on the defensive over the failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.” He later went on to win re-election comfortably, but when looking for opportunities to present Bush in a positive light, the Super Bowl likely seemed like an ideal moment.
In contrast, in 2009, President Barack Obama had just finished running for office, having been sworn in less than two weeks earlier when he sat down with NBC News ahead of that year’s Super Bowl. The 12-minute live interview was a mix of politics and mostly personality-driven questions in a time slot that helped highlight Obama’s “cool factor” and the historic nature of his win. From then on, Obama would give an interview with the network airing the game that year ahead of every Super Bowl.
Obama notably didn’t shy away from sitting down with Fox News in years (like this one) where Fox had the broadcast rights to the championship game. While his 2011 appearance with Bill O’Reilly was lively, the elbows were much sharper when the two sat down again in 2014. As Poynter’s Tom Jones wrote in 2023after that point “if the interview wasn’t at least a little contentious, the interviewers were crushed for being too soft.”
Trump went on to give interviews ahead of three out of four Super Bowls while he was in office. He chatted with Fox News’ Baier for the first of those in 2017, before skipping out on NBC News the following year in the middle of the Russia investigation. His 2019 interview with CBS News’ Margaret Brennan marked the hardest-hitting of those pregame conversations, but delivered little in the way of substance from him. And then in 2020, Trump sat with Fox News’ Sean Hannity for eight minutes of pure, uncut Trumpian stream of consciousness.
President Joe Biden, for his part, kept the tradition alive for two years before letting it falter the final two years of his term, turning down interviews with Fox and CBS respectively. By that point, the interviews had probably lost some of the appeal that Obama saw in them over a decade earlier. The pregame show’s audience, while still sizable, is a fraction of the more than 100 million people who tune in closer to kickoff. And it seems probable that when declining a wide-ranging interview last year, Biden’s advisers who were managing perceptions of his age didn’t see much upside to continuing the tradition.
As is so often the case with Trump, of course, he couldn’t help but lie in boasting about his interview, claiming on Truth Social that there “hasn’t been one in four years.” That’s the level of honesty that was always going to be on display in his interview with Fox News. Baier was more likely to ask at least one newsworthy question during the interview than Hannity, but without much — if any — pushback on his wildest tangents and claims. Absent any sort of real journalistic purpose, all we’re left with is the president being given a platform to spread lies to millions of Americans who may never see the truth when scrolling through their feeds.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for BLN Daily, where he helps frame the news of the day for readers. He was previously at BuzzFeed News and holds a degree in international relations from Michigan State University.