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POLITICS

Who is Kristen Welker, the moderator on ‘Meet the Press’ who will interview Trump Sunday?

Kristen Welker is taking over the helm of Meet the Press from Chuck Todd. Her first show as host will feature an interview with Donald Trump.

Update:
Kristen Welker sets bar high for first show, interviewing Trump

After nine years at the helm of the longest-running public affairs news program, Chuck Todd passed the baton this past Sunday to Kristen Welker. The veteran journalist will debut as host on Meet the Press with an interview with former president and front-runner candidate in the GOP presidential primaries Donald Trump.

The interview, first reported by CNN, will be pre-recorded on Thursday at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club due to air on NBC this Sunday. The interview will be his first on the show since 2019.

The network is pre-taping the interview to allow fact-checking of claims he may make and put them into context. Despite this, Welker will have her work cut out for her as Trump is notorious for lying on the fly at such a pace that even seasoned journalists have found it difficult to confront him in real-time.

However, in a memo to staff regarding the changing of the guard the network pointed out that Welker’s “sharp questioning of lawmakers is a masterclass in political interviews.”

Who is Kristen Welker, the new Meet the Press hostess who will interview Donald Trump this Sunday?

Welker, 47, graduated from Harvard in ‘98 with a history degree and has worked at ABC affiliate stations in Redding, California and Providence, Rhode Island. She was with the NBC affiliate in her hometown of Philadelphia before joining NBC News in 2010. She became a White House correspondent a year later and held that role for over a decade.

In 2020, Welker was named co-host of Weekend Today and hosted the final 2020 presidential debate between Trump and President Joe Biden. She was considered the winner of that debate for her moderating, even receiving praise from Trump afterward despite calling her ‘biased’ in the run-up to the debate.

Nor is she new to Meet the Press, having regularly stood in for Todd leading him to comfortably say that she has been “ready for this for a long time.”

She was named 2020′s Outstanding Broadcast Journalist at the Washington Women in Journalism Awards and she won a National Emmy Award in 2015 for her coverage of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash.

“She is a dogged reporter who relishes getting big scoops and is widely admired throughout the bureau and the network for her deeply collaborative nature,” said NBC News’ president of editorial, Rebecca Blumenstein, and NBC News’ senior vice president of politics, Carrie Budoff Brown.