President Trump refused to take a question from an NBC News reporter, slamming the broadcast network as “discredited.”
The president answered questions from a gaggle of journalists during a visit to the Kennedy Center on Monday – but stopped short when one reporter jumped in with a question.
After Trump asked the reporter to identify their press outlet, they replied: “Sir, I’m with NBC News.”
“I don’t want to talk to NBC anymore,” Trump said with a wave of his hand. “I think you’re so discredited.”
NBC News did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Trump’s bad blood with Comcast, which owns NBC News and MSNBC, goes back years.
In 2023, during his presidential campaign, he threatened to sue Comcast once he was back in the White House over NBC News’ and MSNBC’s allegedly unfair coverage of him.
His attacks on the left-leaning sister channel have only ramped up, last month calling MSNBC a “THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY” and earlier questioning whether the outlet should “have a right to broadcast.”
During his conversation with reporters on Monday, the president, who recently crowned himself chairman of the storied Kennedy Center, said he plans to release 80,000 pages of JFK files on Tuesday.
“People have been waiting decades for this,” Trump said about the Kennedy papers’ release. “They have a tremendous amount of paper. You have a lot of reading. I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything.”
Trump’s refusal to speak with the NBC News reporter is just his latest spat with members of the press.
On Monday, he signed an executive order gutting the federal agency that oversees the Voice of America – effectively shuttering the news outlet that for more than 80 years broadcast news into countries where independent reporting is censored.
In a press release, the White House accused Voice of America stations of “a leftist bias aligned with partisan national media.”
Last month, after the Associated Press continued to use the term “Gulf of Mexico” – ignoring Trump’s proclamation to rename it “Gulf of America” – officials barred their reporters from the White House’s briefing room and kept them from boarding Air Force One.
The wire service responded with a lawsuit accusing top White House officials of violating the First and Fifth Amendments.
Members of his administration and close Trump allies have also called on the White House to “defund” public broadcast networks like NPR and PBS.
In January, FCC Chair Brendan Carr launched a probe into the two networks over their alleged use of “prohibited commercial advertisements,” which he argued could be reason enough to yank their federal funding.
Elon Musk, the billionaire behind the White House’s cost-cutting task force, has also threatened to “defund” the public station, arguing “It should survive on its own.”
NPR has reported that it receives about 1% of its funding from federal sources annually, and that PBS receives 16% of its funds from the government.
Faced with the threats, public broadcaster PBS last month shuttered its diversity office and fired two staffers, citing a need to comply with Trump’s order since the network relies on federal funding.