ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith discussed his Thursday dinner with President Donald Trump, singer Kid Rock, and “Real Time” host Bill Maher, telling CNN during a Friday appearance on “Laura Coates Live” that he didn’t expect the White House event to last more than 30 minutes — only for it to run over four hours.
“It was shocking,” Smith told Coates. “I certainly didn’t expect that amount of time. I knew that we were expecting to have dinner. I knew that we were going to have an opportunity to talk. I give him all the credit in the world because he didn’t run from any questions.”
He continued, “Anything we asked him, he kept coming back at us with the things that he had to say, his belief, in terms of what he had to say. But he also took us for a tour of the White House, took us to the West Wing, took us to the Rose Garden.”
While the length of the dinner seemed to be his biggest surprise, Smith had other highlights. He said Trump also showed them the Colonnade, adorned with photos of all former presidents except Joe Biden, whose portrait Trump infamously replaced with that of an autopen, when Smith protested, “Come on, man, that’s cruel” — and Trump pushed back.
“He said, ‘Actually, it’s very funny,’” Smith recalled, adding that Trump “laughed about it.”
As for their dinner conversation Thursday, Smith said Trump showed surprising confidence in the upcoming midterms — despite disastrous approval ratings and Democrats poised to potentially win a majority in both the House and Senate.
“He was saying, ‘I’m going to campaign, I’m going to go all over this country, I’ll do whatever I have to do to help whoever I have to do, because the people love me,’” Smith recalled Friday.
“I said, ‘Sir, the polls show you in the 30-percentile in terms of popularity,’” Smith continued. “He said, ‘Did you know that 99% of the Republicans actually approve of me? So, the people out there that are conservatives … they love me, I love them, they will vote the way that I want them to vote.’ That’s how he feels. That’s the level of confidence that he has.”
Smith noted that Maher told Trump during their dinner that this self-confidence won’t necessarily help Republicans “running for office or for re-election” in the midterms. Several GOP candidates have already distanced themselves from Trump ahead of November.