President Trump walked out of a "Meet the Press" interview that aired Sunday on NBC, ending an hour-long sit-down with moderator Kristen Welker after she pressed him for evidence behind his claims that California's primary count was rigged, that the FBI ushered rioters into the Capitol on Jan. 6, and that the Justice Department's shelved $1.8 billion compensation fund for alleged victims of the Biden administration should be revived.
The walk-off, recorded Friday at Custer Farms in Chippewa Falls, Wis., capped an exchange in which Welker repeatedly challenged the president's assertions and Trump accused NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN of being "crooked." He ended the interview with a dismissal.
"Sorry. Let's call it quits because I've had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time," Trump told Welker.
What set it off
The break came during a final block on election integrity and the proposed "anti-weaponization" fund. Welker asked whether Trump was abandoning the $1.8 billion payout program after acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told a federal court last week the administration would not move forward with it. Trump said he still backed the idea personally.
"If it was up to me, I'd pay them the kind of money that they deserve," Trump told Welker, saying victims of what he called Biden-era "weaponization" of the government deserved payment.
Welker told the president, "Just to be very clear, there's no evidence of what you're saying." Trump pivoted to California's vote count, which under state law can run more than a month because mail ballots postmarked by election day are accepted up to a week afterward. Republican margins in several California races have narrowed as late ballots are tallied; Democratic voters have leaned more heavily on mail-in voting since the pandemic.
"The election was rigged," Trump said. "It was a dirty election. And it's happening again right now in California." Asked for evidence, he said: "All I have to do is look. And I listen. I listen to people."
The fact-check
NBC News on Sunday published a fact-check by senior reporter Jane C. Timm cataloging what it called Trump's "false, misleading or exaggerated" claims in the interview. Timm wrote that there is "no evidence of election fraud in California or problems with the state's ballot counting," noting that more than 80 percent of Californians used mail ballots in recent elections.
On Jan. 6, Trump said the roughly 170 rioters who pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers "pled guilty because they were frightened." He added: "They had FBI agents ushering them into the building." NBC reported that a Justice Department inspector general found four FBI confidential informants entered the Capitol on their own and that the bureau did not direct them to do so. No on-duty FBI special agents were on Capitol grounds before the riot broke out, the inspector general found.
The disagreement
Fox News, which carried the full transcript of the closing exchange, framed the walk-off as a press grievance, citing Trump's complaint that a country "can never be great with a dishonest press." The NBC fact-check argued that Welker's pushback was warranted because the underlying claims about California ballots, the Jan. 6 prosecutions and the FBI's role do not match the public record.
The White House had not announced any further network sit-downs as of Sunday evening.