When NBC News‘ Peter Alexander asked Donald Trump last spring about Qatar’s gift of a $400 million jet to be used as Air Force One, and that would later to go to the Trump library, the president lashed out not only at him, but at NBC News and even Brian Roberts, the CEO of its parent company, Comcast.
“You don’t have what it takes to be a reporter. You’re not smart enough,” Trump raged.
The clip was played last week as Alexander, the chief White House correspondent for NBC News, was recognized last week with a Walter Cronkite Award, for “holding power accountable” and “maintaining his dignity despite ad hominem attacks.”
It’s not the first time Alexander has been the target of Trump’s tirade, nor is it altogether uncommon among other reporters in the White House press corps, as the president has lately attacked a series of female correspondents.
At the ceremony, Alexander told the crowd, “Viewers always ask, ‘How do you just sit there and not respond?’ My answer is simple: Those moments reflect on the other person, not on me. My job is the next question.”
In an interview with Deadline, Alexander also said that there is a practical matter at play: Time. Making the moment about himself, he said, will “waste an opportunity” to question the president further.
Covering the White House is different in Trump 2.0, in part because the White House has taken control of who gets into the press pool, the small group that follows the president and routinely peppers him with questions in the Oval Office and elsewhere. Mainstream outlets remain, but the pool now includes members of pro-Trump media, whose questions tend to bolster the president’s talking points.
Deadline spoke to Alexander this week about covering the White House, the changed composition of the press pool and the continued challenges of fact checking.
DEADLINE: First the award. They cited your steadiness in the face of these attacks from the president. As the president is shouting at you, what goes through your mind?
PETER ALEXANDER: Well, it’s happened plenty of times. I’ve had those experiences being shouted down or verbally smacked around, as I describe it. And you’re right. Everybody asks, ‘How do you just sit there and not respond?’ And honestly, my answer on that is is simple. It’s that those moments reflect on the other person, not on me. My job, as I like to say, is the next question, and that’s what I’ve taken pride in over the course of the time, of covering not just this president, but past presidents. Donald Trump is more inclined, perhaps, to go after the reporter than others, but he’s not the first to do it. My priority is to try to get the most out of that moment as I can, which is to say, to move on to the next question, to try not to let the president divert to other topics per se, because our window of opportunity to speak to the president and push them on these topics of importance to all Americans is slim, right? So if you make it about you, you waste an opportunity to make it about the people for whom you’re in the office in the first place, asking good questions of the American people.
One of the unique challenges that exist today is that we have, and have long had, what’s called the press pool. This is the group of reporters who are assigned each day who will have access to the president wherever he may be, whether it’s in the Oval Office or if he’s traveling. And they have limited opportunities to ask questions about the most important things happening that day, to get the president’s perspective or his pushback on anything, including criticism. And one of the unique challenges today is that under this administration now, the pool has changed in such a way that there are more reporters … who are, I would suggest, aligned with the president’s views on a lot of things. And sometimes that puts us in a position where, when there are some pressing issues of the day, those questions don’t get asked, and instead, the back and forth is a little bit more sympathetic, which in effect, takes away from the Americans who are trying to get real answers to tough questions.
DEADLINE: [When the White House took control of the pool back in February] the change in the questions from the pool seemed to happen very quickly.
ALEXANDER: If anybody pays attention, if you watch from home, whether it’s on our air, or on C-SPAN, or wherever you choose to see it, you can see that in action sometimes. You can see those who are asking challenging questions, and you can see those who are asking what I would propose are sympathetic questions. If you’re asking a challenging question, it’s not about a political persuasion. I’ve asked tough questions of Republican presidents and Democratic presidents and I’ve gotten pushback from both sides, but the job remains the same in those situations. And I think just as evidence of how things have changed, I remember one recent example when I was in the briefing room and someone, a member of the press corps who was served in the pool on other occasions, shouted, ‘Trump 2028.’ That’s something I had never heard before, and I think sort of underscored the different environment we’re working in right now.
DEADLINE: I’ve talked to other reporters who say that you can have one moment where the president is raging at you, the next moment he’s even praiseworthy.
ALEXANDER: There aren’t moments where, after we go back and forth, the president calls me and says, ‘Ah, that was fun. Wasn’t it?’ That doesn’t happen. So that has not been my experience. However, we have had some sharp exchanges, as I would describe them, and then I’ll see him on occasion when I’m the pooler. I was on the road with him in the Middle East one time, and he saw me as he was walking through a display of some investments from foreign countries into the U.S. And he saw me at the corner of his eye, and he just riffed at me and brought me up multiple times in a way that was not combative. It was just engaging. As someone who has covered this president from the beginning, someone he recognizes when I walk into the room, sometimes he’ll walk in and he’ll say, ‘Hello, everybody, Hello Peter.’ So I think he knows when I’m in the room that I’m going to ask him questions that are on the news of the day, on the topic of the day, and then I’m going to ask challenging questions in a hope and effort to get answers.
DEADLINE: How does it impact your relationships with the White House staff when the president lashes out at you?
ALEXANDER: I have a good working relationship with members of the president’s staff. I’m not speaking to senior advisors as often as I’d like. We’d all like to be talking to them more regularly, surely. But you know what? Speaking to his press staff and others, they engage me. They respond in a timely manner. [Press Secretary] Karoline Leavitt will answer my calls early in the morning before the Today show, and late in the afternoon and evening before Nightly News if there are things I’m trying to get better clarity. So those working relationships are good. I’m not friends with these individuals. My job isn’t to be anybody’s friend. My job is just to do my job, and I think they appreciate that I’m working in good faith to do that each day.
DEADLINE: How would you sum up how the President’s engagement with the press in these moments is different from the first term, if at all?
ALEXANDER: What is different the second go around than the first Trump term is that in the first term, and I based this on reporting from conversations with those close to the president, there was not the expectation that he would win. When he did win, there was a rapid learning curve. There were a lot of different voices within the West Wing, dissenting voices. There was a lot of criticism that came from within. Routinely, I would receive phone calls from the president’s own advisors, sometimes top advisors, about things they had just witnessed and wanted to share. There would be an opposing voice on the other end of the building each day to share a different perspective from within. So it created a much more chaotic environment in terms of what we were able to share, in terms of our reporting. This go around the president, who has had years between terms to prepare and and to build his team of allies and advisers, they are much more in line, which is to say, there is a lot less dissent from within, criticism from the inside. And I think that’s why, in part, you’ve seen a lot fewer of those of those stories reported out, because he, and he’s made a focus of this, has surrounded himself with particularly loyal individuals.
DEADLINE: One of the criticisms I hear from the left is that the press corps isn’t giving the same critical coverage of Trump’s health as they did to Biden. What do you make of that? And do you think that coverage is changing?
ALEXANDER: What I would say to that is, I remember receiving pushback from the Biden White House for questions I asked the then press secretary Karine Jean Pierre about the president’s stamina and about the limited opportunities we had to access him, to see him. They didn’t like that. The Trump administration surely doesn’t like when we ask similarly challenging questions about his stamina. But I think my responsibility is to our audience, and I think those who see my work each day expect from me to ask those questions. When the president recently had an MRI without the White House detailing for what purpose he was receiving that MRI, our job was, of course, to try to find out an answer to that. He’s the most powerful person in the world, and he’s the commander in chief in the United States, so I believe that the audience views that as my responsibility and would expect no less.
DEADLINE: The president can make a firehose of false statements. When do you decide whether to step in to fact check?
ALEXANDER: I view myself not as an advocate for Republicans or for Democrats, but as an advocate for the facts. As I said, even and especially when it isn’t easy. … When I was in college, my final essay was about the higher obligation of the news media, and I do feel like this is our responsibility to get our facts right all the time and not to just amplify or pass on false statements. So one of the unique challenges in this climate is when the president speaks for two hours, and to use your language, there is a fire hose of false statements. You don’t want to ignore everything, but you also don’t want to fact check everything, because then you get lost … in the weeds of it, which is to say, you’d be at that forever.
So one of the unique challenges now is when you’re in the Oval Office and the president says something that may not be factually true, do you fact check him there and then cause a back and forth, or do you push forward with another question and fact check it when you report it on television and whatever form that may take? Those are tricky, real-time decisions that we have to make. I know, and I have done this when I push the president on facts, on statements he’s made that are not factually true, he’s going to get upset about that. I always am prepared as a reporter with the facts in my hand. If I am going to use a quote that he has said, I always have the full quote there on me to be able to push back in its entirety. If I’m going to ask him, as I did after the [January] plane-helicopter collision over the Potomac, about some of his past positions on DEI, I’d have the documentation of those past positions, a policy that he kept in place that existed under Obama, and he kept in place during his first term.
DEADLINE: What is the challenge in preparing for those moments?
ALEXANDER: My view is, when I’m going in one of those briefings or an exchange with the president, I have to be ready, because you don’t know what the president is going to say, but I can control what I am able to say.
I’ll never forget one of the first times I covered the president as a candidate in 2015 when he was in Iowa, and I read to him a quote, a comment he had made about abortion rights in the past, and he said, ‘Well, what’s the next thing I said? What did I say next?’ And I had it in my phone, but I had no Wi Fi in the room of the campaign event, and I couldn’t pull it up, and I had to sit there and let him communicate it in his own terms when I knew it wasn’t true, but I didn’t know the exact language. And I promised myself I would never let that happen again, which is that I’ve always been prepared if I’m going to use a quote, I have the full context of the quote there, in case the president presses me on it. If I’m going to ask the president about something specifically, I have the details to support it.
And one of the better examples of that was on the first day of this term, when I asked the president, ‘Mr. President, you would agree it’s never okay to attack a police officer.’ And he says, ‘Yeah, of course not.’ And I said, ‘Well, let me ask you about D.J. Rodriguez.’ This was a man who pleaded guilty for his role in the January 6 attack, and I had all the details in front of me. The president said to me, ‘Well, did he get a pardon?’ And I said, ‘Yes, he did get a pardon.’ He said, ‘Well, we’ll have to take a look at that case’. That example got a lot of attention because I think the wide view of people who are watching this exchange, and of Americans who are trying to make sense of the president’s decision to pardon those January 6 defendants, was that the White House and the president should have known all the facts, or should know all the facts about those individuals before they would make a decision like that to pardon them. So that’s the way that I view my responsibility when I walk in there, and that means all the moments that you’re not seeing me on TV are as important in the moments as you are.
DEADLINE: In other words, it’s a much different response that you would get if you were asking about the pardons on January 6.
ALEXANDER: One of my concerns and one of the challenges for reporters doing this and how I try to counsel others who are coming up in the ranks, is that it’s not open mic night in the Oval. It’s not our job just to ask an open ended question and have the president riff. You have to ask questions that are well framed. Over the course of my time, first covering Obama, then Trump, and then Biden, and Trump again, with my colleagues like Kristen Welker and Garrett Haake and Gabe Gutierrez, we’ll often pepper each other with our suggested questions and anticipate the answers, and that prepares you in terms of what you need to have ready for your follow up. And I think that’s perhaps something I’m more proud of than anything else, is the work that goes on behind the scenes to prepare us for those questions.
DEADLINE: In terms of the White House taking control of the press pool, would you be surprised if they make further moves?
ALEXANDER: I would be surprised. I don’t anticipate there are any new restrictions coming to the White House per se. They now require reporters to make an appointment to go upstairs and see Karoline Leavitt and some of her top deputies. When I ask and they have availability, they say yes. So it’s different, but I still have similar access that I had previously. … So I do not anticipate that something like that’s going to happen, but at the same time, I recognize that these are unique times, and after witnessing what happened with the press restrictions at the Pentagon — our view, NBC’s view, my view, is that they threaten core journalistic protections. And so our team there, Courtney Kube, one of my closest colleagues, continues with military breaking news and keeping everybody informed, despite those challenges. So no matter what happens, we’re going to keep doing our job. [The Pentagon saw an exodus of most mainstream news outlets after imposing new restrictions on coverage from the complex].
DEADLINE: We’re heading into the midterms next year. You have Trump’s poll numbers. What do you expect?
DEADLINE: I think we have seen with the Biden administration, I think the American voters made a decision that they thought things had moved a little bit too far to the left. President Trump won and Republicans took control of both chambers of Congress, the House and the Senate. Now we’re seeing some indications that American voters may think that this administration has moved a little bit too far to the right, the example being a Democrat winning the mayoral seat in Miami for the first time in decades. Indiana Republican lawmakers, among others, pushing back on the president’s desire to redistrict in that state. So that could be an indication that Americans have made some assessment that the president has moved a bit far to the right. I think most Americans are in the middle, and so that’s sort of the perspective that I have from years of covering this.
I do know, based on all the conversations I’ve had, that the president faces a lot of challenges in this year before the midterms specifically on the topic of or cost of living. You pick your word. The president doesn’t like the word ‘affordability.’ I recognize that, but that’s the way that Americans describe it when I talk to them, and I stay in touch with Trump supporters that I met first covering him in 2015, 2016 to get their pulse from the middle of the country, people that I can’t see on a regular basis when I’m inside the West Wing and inside the briefing room…. At the end of the day for all of the things that we focus on, I think most Americans view this through the lens of, how am I impacted by it? And when they think of how they’re impacted, they think about how it impacts their pocketbook. And right now, two-thirds of Americans, according to our most recent polls show that they believe the president and his administration have not met their expectations in terms of addressing the cost of living. That’s a real challenge, and I think it’s gonna be central to our focus for the next 10 months.
