Trump Wants You Talking About His Manners—Not His Election Lies

Don’t let Trump’s blowup on NBC’s <em>Meet the Press</em> distract from what he actually said.

Trump Wants You Talking About His Manners—Not His Election Lies

Don’t let Trump’s blowup on NBC’s Meet the Press distract from what he actually said.

President Donald Trump sits down with NBC News’s Kristen Welker on June 5 in Wisconsin.

(Adam Bettcher / NBC via Getty Images)

When President Donald Trump abruptly broke off his interview with NBC White House correspondent Kristen Welker on Meet the Press , the consensus among the commentariat was that Trump was once more acting out of hair-trigger pique and poor impulse control. The exchange “ was explosive ” and “ heated ”; the aggrieved president “stormed off” into a cloud of paranoid conspiracy theories about the media’s collusion with Democratic-engineered election theft.

Such accounts fit a common template of coverage during Trump’s second term: The president, never an avatar of calm, reasoned judgment, is increasingly in thrall to wild mood swings and tantrums—when, that is, he’s not falling asleep on the job after a late-night bout of online shit-posting .

Yet there’s always been ample calculation in Trump’s shows of grievance and outrage, and Sunday’s performance was no exception. It’s important to underline this given the context for Trump’s outburst: Welker’s insistence that Trump’s multiple allegations of rampant election fraud carried out by his political opponents have no basis in fact. In grouping this under the vague and ever-pliant heading of “Trump unhinged,” our keepers of public discourse are repeating the miscalculation that they made in the run-up to the failed coup attempt on January 6: By failing to account for Trump’s theatrics as anything more than the latest flourish from an old man predisposed to shouting at a cloud, they’re missing the urgent and disturbing effort to discredit an election that will serve as a referendum on Trump’s performance.

To grasp this point, we must pan back from the decontextualized presentation of “takeaways” from Trump’s interview with Welker and consider the full exchange. Trump’s belligerent replies to Welker’s correction of his false election claims came near the end of a 40-minute interview, which proceeded along remarkably equable lines—especially by the standards of Trump’s usual run-ins with mainstream press reporters, particularly those who are women .

More than half of the sit-down was devoted to Trump’s assessment of the Iran War and prospects for an agreement to end the conflict; seeming to relish the role of a diplomatic power broker, Trump described what he considered the successful US campaign to “decapitate” the leadership of the Iranian regime and to lay waste to its military resources. He also claimed, for the umpteenth time, that the United States is on the verge of a lasting peace deal with Iran—while also holding out the prospect that he could unilaterally bomb the country into submission. After claiming to have masterfully maneuvered Iran’s leaders into the framework of an agreement, he said they would sign “or I’m gonna blow the hell out of them.”

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This was all Trump’s usual fact-challenged bluster about his handling of the war, but apart from a stray swipe at opinion polling (“They’re all fake polls, especially yours,” Trump told Welker) and a drive-by characterization of Welker as “a big progressive,” Trump mostly projected a statesmanlike calm (once more grading on a curve) through most of the interview, hailing his own supposed breakthroughs in negotiations and contrasting the timeline leading to the conclusion of hostilities to the quagmires in Vietnam and Iraq.

Then there was the weird series of weather and technical delays that extended the scheduled taping of the exchange. Trump had invited Welker to interview him after an appearance in Wisconsin to shore up support in the beleaguered Midwest farm economy. As they sat in a corrugated tin shed in front of a prop John Deere tractor, the skies opened up, and the torrential rain made it difficult for the interlocutors to hear each other. They paused repeatedly for several minutes to let the rain let up; on another occasion, taping difficulties prompted a similar delay. Through the foul-ups, Trump maintained his generally even keel, marveling about the downpour and joking about the delays—scarcely the temperament of a guy hell-bent on blowing up the whole proceedings.

Trump’s talk became more overtly warlike when the discussion turned to domestic politics—though even then his tone didn’t modulate much. When Welker asked him about the status of his “so-called anti-weaponization fund” in the wake of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s announcement that the payoff scheme for January 6 rioters was dead in the water, Trump went into a tirade about the justice owed to victims of the “radical left lunatics that worked for the Biden administration and Sleepy Joe.” “People have been destroyed, many have committed suicide…