Dem
47
GOP
53
Josh Pate is a longtime local TV sports guy who eventually got into the podcasting business. And, after some amount of time, he was able to build Josh Pate's College Football Show into a moderate-sized player in the sports podcasting game. That's pretty good, given how much competition there is in that space.
Pate is one of those "stick to sports" guys, and his brand is that he doesn't allow politics to intrude on his show. But then, the White House reached out to arrange an interview with Donald Trump, and Pate took the offer. Recognizing that some might have viewed this as hypocritical, Pate got on eX-Twitter to make this declaration:
1.) When the President of the United States offers to discuss College Football it's an auto-yes 1000% of the time
2.) Those expecting political discussion will be sorely disappointed
In the actual "Trump episode," Pate did an intro in which he reiterated again that Trump's appearance would be politics-free, before cutting to the pre-recorded interview.
If you would like to see it for yourself, here it is:
It's about 10 minutes, and it's characteristically rambling. The breakdown goes something like this:
Pate must have a different definition of "politics-free" than we do. The one thing that did not show up very much, on this college football show, was college football. It really only came up twice.
We pass this story along for a couple of reasons. The first is that it's a preview of where Trump's at, mentally, heading into the State of the Union. And we'll add that yesterday, he spent a whole bunch of time ranting and raving about tariffs, the Supreme Court, etc. on his ritalin-for-presidents social media platform. So, if you're trying to guess how the SOTU will go, this is the last-minute scouting report, as it were.
The other reason we make mention of this is that both online, and in the actual episode, after the Trump interview portion was over, Pate defended himself over and over by saying "If you get a chance to interview a president, of COURSE you take it!" We understand why that's his instinctive response, but we wonder if other media figures are going to start making a different calculation. Consider the downsides to interviewing Trump:
Trump prefers softball Fox interviews anyhow, where they're happy to let him prattle on, and where there's no embarrassment to the interviewer, since everyone already knows they're in the bag for him. And the day may soon come when Fox is just about the only place he can get booked. (Z)