Sometimes, especially coming off a weekend, there are so many different directions that you can go with the questions, because there’s two or three days of stories that have built up. There’s really no break on the Trump beat. I got so many messages and texts, from people who don’t necessarily follow the 24-hour news cycle, saying that they had seen posts that there was something wrong with the president.
I know that the president tracks a lot of that stuff online, which is why I asked him about it in a way that was meant to be as straightforward as I could be about such a serious topic. It seemed like he knew generally what I was talking about, but it was definitely probably jarring to him and everybody else that was standing there to have a reporter ask how he found out that he died.
It almost seemed like he was prepared to answer questions about the rumors, but it struck him as surprising.
It was probably written a little too straightforward for my own good.
Why do you think his health is a ripe subject for conspiracy theories?
I couldn’t tell you. There are professional—I guess you would call them influencers—who are just looking for anything with top Republicans. Even though we see him basically every day, the brief time away from the cameras was enough for people to take it a little too far.
Recently the news cycle has been taken over by Charlie Kirk’s shooting. Did you know him at all, and if so, what was that relationship like?
I met Charlie Kirk a few times at the White House, and my read on him was that he was a very nice guy who was a lot more concerned with policy than the caricature that people on the left and people on the right put forward. Most of the time, he seemed like he was really taking advantage of the opportunity to be at the White House, and it seemed like that’s the reason why all of these very high-level White House folks, including the president, liked to have him around. He wasn’t just somebody who was there to help them own the libs. He wanted to talk about policy and things that he thought would be important and helpful to the country. So I did not know him well, but in my very limited interactions with him, that’s the read that I got.
How did you learn what happened and what have you made of the general public and the administration’s response thus far?
I heard what happened while I was on vacation in California, and I was getting a lot of text messages about it. My heart breaks for his family. I have kids who are about the same age, and it’s really unimaginable to think about everything that he leaves behind, and the lack of an opportunity to say goodbye to his young kids.
The administration’s response so far fits with how they viewed Charlie Kirk. If you’re going to fly Air Force Two out there with the vice president to take him home, and you’re going to have the president at an arena in Arizona for the funeral, that is something that is typically reserved only for heads of state, but that’s how important he was to a lot of these White House guys.
