President Donald Trump suggested referring NBC News anchor Kristen Welker for possible punishment by the Federal Communications Commission after the “Meet the Press” moderator made innocuous remarks about candidates the President has backed in the run-up to the nation’s midterm elections later this year.
Trump’s chilling diatribe, released via Truth Social, appeared to be misinformed. During a local segment in which Welker previewed her program with anchors on NBC’s Washington, D.C. station, WRC, she said that Trump had enjoyed “mixed results,” with some of the Republican candidates he’s backed losing in primaries, but also noted that Trump is “going to loom large over these midterms. There’s no doubt about that.”
Trump called for Welker to be “reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment.” The Commission can’t directly mete out condemnation to individual journalists, but it can put bumps in the path of the company that owns the station as well as NBC News. That would be NBCUniversal, currently a unit of Comcast that is slated to be spun off from its parent over the next several months.
“Kristen is one of the best in the business and we stand by her,” NBC News said in a statement Sunday afternoon. Welker did not utter any of the remarks that angered Trump during NBC’s actual broadcast of “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
Under Trump and Chairman Brendan Carr, the FCC has been more activist than at any other time in recent memory. The Commission is currently enmeshed in a legal tangle with Walt Disney Co and ABC. The FCC has ordered Disney to file for renewals for ABC’s eight owned-and-operated stations years ahead of schedule. In filings, Disney has said its applications were made “under protest in response to an unlawful, arbitrary, and unconstitutional order.” “The View,” which has thrived in recent years with discussion of politics, has also found itself in the administration’s crosshairs. The FCC has probed whether the program has violated so-called “equal-time” election laws following the appearance of political figures, launching its investigation after James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate from Texas, appeared on the show in February. The FCC issued new guidance in January that late-night and daytime hosts needed to give equal time to political candidates from various parties, claiming the programs might be working along partisan lines.
Disney and ABC have alleged in a suit filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that the FCC is in violation of the First Amendment.
Trump’s relationship with Welker appears to run hot and cold. Many of the interviews he agrees to do with NBC News have been with her, and Trump has made a handful of appearances on “Meet the Press” to speak with her. But on Sunday, he called Welker “the Unpopular ‘Hostess’ of the once great Meet the Press, now considered Meet the Fake Press.”
To be sure, Welker’s analysis was accurate. Some candidates backed by Trump, including Randy Feenstra, a Republican candidate for the Iowa governor seat, and Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who made a bid to run as the Republican candidate in Minnesota’s gubernatorial race, both lost in primaries. More recently, Senator Darline Graham, who has filled in on an interim basis for her late brother, former South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, won a primary for the Senate seat in her home state.