President Trump gets on the phone with reporters regularly. He sometimes makes news, but a lot of those interviews are journalistically unremarkable. So how do we try to get the most out of Trump when we call him up? Our White House reporters Erica L. Green and Tyler Pager decided with their editors that it made sense to call the president on election night. They were the first of a number of reporters to talk to Trump as the Republican shellacking was underway. I was curious about the backstory of their call and what they hoped to get out of it.
Let’s set the scene. Erica, you were on duty that night covering President Trump, so start us off.
ERICA GREEN: I was in our Washington office watching the results. When it started looking grim for Republicans, I packed up and ran to the White House just to capture the mood and be in place in case he decided to make a move. When we decided to call him, I left the press area of the White House, which is very cramped, noisy and where our competitors also work. I found a quiet spot outside a side entrance and plopped on the ground. Tyler said, “Ready,” and it was off to the races.
Why bother to call Trump in the first place? He is talking and posting on social media all the time.
ERICA: It was worth trying to get his unvarnished, real-time reaction to the results as he absorbed them. And it would be more authentic and illuminating than what we would get on Truth Social.
TYLER PAGER: We’ve had many discussions about the usefulness of calling the president directly. We’ve done it sparingly. Here, we wanted to know if Trump was going to accept the results, given his history of casting doubt on election outcomes that don’t go his way. That would be news.
Is there such a thing as a successful interview with Trump? What does that look like?
ERICA: I learned from listening to my teammates who have masterfully interviewed him that the best strategy is to ask him straightforward, direct questions.
TYLER: Yes, we want to be intentional and avoid questions that will yield answers that we’ve heard countless times before. To me, a successful interview with Trump generates something new.
ERICA: So we hopped on the phone for about 30 seconds before we called him, and told each other the one question we wanted to prioritize and start with if we got him. And we decided that would be about accepting the results. The rest of the questions, we didn’t discuss beforehand, we just tag-teamed organically.
OK, so Erica is sitting outside the White House. Tyler, you were at the Times mother ship in New York. How did the call start?
TYLER: I found a random desk in the New York newsroom that had a landline phone. I called Erica on my cellphone and put her on speakerphone and then called the president on the landline. I used Otter, a recording app, on my computer to record the conversation.
ERICA: We’d decided we’d make the call when the results came in for one of the high-stakes races or one of his handpicked candidates. We knew it’d be Texas or South Carolina. We called him around 10:30 p.m. when it became clear that Darline Graham would lose her seat. We called his cellphone.
He said, “I’m just looking at these results as I’m talking.” He added: “I see that Darline lost. Wow, that’s amazing. How do you think Lindsey would have done if he ran?” He was referring to Senator Lindsey Graham, who died in July.
TYLER: We ended up learning a lot: his reaction to the results, his decision to accept them and his thinking on how the Iran war affected the election.
Minutes after your call, you debriefed your editors and fellow White House reporters as well as The Times’s executive editor, Joe Kahn, and Carolyn Ryan, a managing editor. It was a fast-moving conversation. What did you need to hash out?
TYLER: We knew we were the first reporters to reach Trump, and so we wanted to move quickly. We knew what the headline was — that he was accepting the results — and so we did a quick download of what the president said and wrote up a short story. Once that was published, we jumped back in and continued to build it out with the rest of the interview.
ERICA: We just needed to make sure everyone was on the same page about what the news was. It seemed everyone agreed that it was capturing his reaction to what was shaping up to be a stinging repudiation — which, considering how unpredictable the president can be, really could have been a range of emotions — and what he would do next.
Tyler, you’ve mentioned how relaxed Trump seemed on the phone. This was after a night of posting inflammatory remarks. Can you dive into this dichotomy?
TYLER: I’ve found this to be the case in many of my nontelevised interactions with Trump. He is eager to lash out at The New York Times at rallies and on camera. He has sued us, and his administration subpoenaed me and my phone records. But when he’s engaging in an interview or a call — without TV cameras — his demeanor is different. He comes from the hospitality business and likes to host, even people that he rails against.
Erica, during all that talk in our conference room on Tuesday night, you cut to the chase with a memorable comment to Tyler about the story. Let’s have it.
ERICA: “All right, T, write that bad boy.”
The post Calling Trump on Election Night appeared first on New York Times.
