Meet the Press as Shorthand for Having Truly Arrived

Showing 3 Meet the Press videos from Charlie Kirk's video collection.

Meet the Press, NBC's long-running Sunday political interview show, kept surfacing as a marker of political relevance and, in one case, tragic timing rather than as a subject discussed in its own right. Donald Trump referenced an upcoming Meet the Press appearance while deflecting a question about whether he intended to seek a third presidential term, framing an offhand remark he'd made about the idea as a joke rather than a serious plan, a moment observers at a campus debate cited directly when arguing Trump had already ruled the idea out publicly. Senator Lindsey Graham's death carried a far heavier connection to the show: according to one account, Graham had been scheduled to appear on Meet the Press the Sunday after he began feeling unwell, and reportedly joked he couldn't die yet because he still needed to finish work on Russia sanctions, Iran policy, and Israeli-Saudi normalization before his appearance, only to pass away hours later. Dr. Anthony Fauci's own diary entries, revealed separately, showed him fixated specifically on getting booked on Meet the Press as a marker of his own continued relevance and status, a detail commentators seized on as evidence of the self-focus running through his private writing even during the pandemic's most serious months. Across all three moments, an invitation to appear on Meet the Press functioned as recognizable shorthand for having reached the highest tier of political relevance, regardless of whether the person actually made it to air.