When President Donald Trump claimed to NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Llamas in a Wednesday interview that “I’m getting – starting to get great polls on the economy,” Llamas quickly pushed back by noting that Trump’s polling on the economy is “not great.”
Trump immediately backed off his assertion, retreating to a claim that his economy-related polling “should be great.”
That was a textbook moment in political interviewing – but it was one of the only times in the interview that Llamas challenged one of Trump’s false claims. 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.
Trump’s rapid-fire dishonesty is difficult for any interviewer to handle, especially given the limited time they are given by the White House, and it’s not uncommon for them to largely ignore the serial inaccuracy in order to get to the topics they’ve planned to address. Llamas certainly asked the president various skeptical and important questions, including some sharp follow-ups. And NBC published a fact check of some of the false claims in a Wednesday article on its website.
But Llamas’ hands-off approach to the president’s falsehoods left people watching the interview on television and through social media clips without immediate corrective information on a variety of pressing subjects. An exchange about inflation, for example, was littered with a bunch of inaccurate Trump figures and...
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