The traditional pregame Super Bowl presidential interview is back on — and it’s almost certainly because it’s Fox’s turn to host the big game.
After President Joe Biden skipped out on sitdown the past two years, Donald Trump has agreed to be interviewed by Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s golf club. The pre-taped one-on-one conversation will air on Fox’s pregame show during the 3 p.m. ET hour, with additional portions to run on Baier’s Special Report the following evening.
The four biggest broadcast networks – ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox – generally take turns airing the Super Bowl, which commands the largest television ratings of the year at roughly 100 million viewers domestically. Fox airing the game this year is a bit of fortuitous timing for the president, considering the friendly relationship he enjoys with the Rupert Murdoch-owned broadcaster.
The sitdown with the president on perhaps the biggest stage comes as Trump’s first two weeks in office have been marked by chaos and controversy. Besides unleashing a “shock and awe” flood of executive orders to undo a host of Biden-era policies, the administration has engaged in mass deportations, blamed diversity for a deadly air crash, plunged the nation into a “constitutional crisis” with his funding freeze, and threatened to upend America’s economy by launching a multi-pronged trade war.
Fox, meanwhile, says Baier’s interview with Trump will “focus on the changes the Trump administration has enacted since the Inauguration and the first 100 days of his presidency.”
Though the president will be in relatively friendly company, he has been highly critical of Baier, who is seen as the face of the right-wing network’s “straight news” division. Following the last one-on-one sitdown between the two in June 2023, which featured the anchor repeatedly pressing Trump on his 2020 election denialism, the president raged against the “hostile” Baier and even ran to wannabe Fox competitor Newsmax to grouse about the “nasty” interview.
Trump’s big stage interview also comes as Murdoch’s other news outlets, specifically the Wall Street Journal, have been pumping the brakes on the widespread enthusiasm overtaking conservative media throughout Trump’s first weeks in office. The Journal’s editorial board, for instance, has knocked Trump for showing “remarkably poor judgment” in selling his own branded crypto coin, blasted his blanket pardons of January 6 rioters, urged him to dump HHS nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and described his tariffs as the “dumbest trade war in history.”
Still, the president has taken a softer approach to Baier in recent months. Following the Fox anchor’s aggressive interview with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in October, which was largely trashed by liberals and progressives, Trump gushed over the “great job” by the “fair” Baier. Additionally, it was reported last month that Trump’s team was fed questions prior to a Fox News town hall in January 2024, which was co-moderated by Baier. However, the anchor was not implicated in the breach.
This also represents the first time since President Barack Obama made the Super Bowl interview an annual tradition that Fox has tapped a news anchor to conduct the presidential interview. Bill O’Reilly took the reigns during the Obama years and Trump’s first Super Bowl chat in 2017, while Trump’s good friend Sean Hannity received the honors in 2020.
On the other hand, Trump also decided to upend the pregame custom in 2018 when NBC aired the NFL championship. Biden additionally skipped out on two straight interviews at the end of his term after failing to come to terms with Fox in 2023 and declining to sit down with CBS last year.
