President Donald Trump’s chat with Fox News’ Bret Baier, airing before the Super Bowl, will have one of the larger audiences he’s likely to get this year. Despite becoming the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl, the interview was taped ahead of time in Mar-a-Lago. Though Trump is making a big deal about it, the return of the presidential pregame is a tradition that America didn’t particularly need resurrected.
The notion that the president would do a formal interview with a political journalist ahead of the Super Bowl didn’t begin until 2009. Before that, the earliest analogy was then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s high-stakes appearance on “60 Minutes” that aired immediately after CBS’ Super Bowl broadcast finished in 1992. Seated alongside Hillary Clinton, he answered questions from co-anchor Steve Kroft about his reported infidelities in a 10-minute interview that likely saved his campaign.
The notion that the president would do a formal interview with a political journalist ahead of the Super Bowl didn’t begin until 2009.
We moved closer to the current format in 2004, when George W. Bush became the first sitting president to conduct a pregame interview. The game was held in Houston that year, and as a former governor of Texas, it was certainly fitting for Bush to speak with CBS sportscaster Jim Nantz live from the Rose Garden. Nantz’s most pointed question referenced Bush’s recent State of the Union address, where he had criticized the rampant use of steroids in the NFL. But otherwise, the four-minute chat was exactly the kind of gentle media appearance any president would dream about getting.
Despite the low-key nature of the Bush-Nantz interview, the politics involved in the decision to give it were unmistakable at the beginning of an election year. As The Washington Post reported a few days later, ahead of a high-stakes appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the president had “dipped in the polls and [was] on the defensive over the failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.” He later went on to win re-election comfortably, but when looking for opportunities to present Bush in a positive light, the Super Bowl likely seemed like an ideal moment.
In contrast, in 2009, President Barack Obama had just finished running for office, having been sworn in less than two weeks earlier when he sat down with NBC News ahead of that year’s Super Bowl. The 12-minute live interview was a mix of politics and mostly personality-driven questions in a time slot that helped highlight Obama’s “cool factor” and the historic nature of his win. From then on, Obama would give an interview with the network airing the game that year ahead of every Super Bowl.








