Stephen A. Smith was back at the White House on Thursday, and this time he came to do an interview. The ESPN star walked into the West Wing for a roughly 40 minute sit down with Donald Trump, recorded for his SiriusXM politics show Straight Shooter with Stephen A., which airs tonight at 6 p.m. ET.
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Smith arrived in a suit and sunglasses, and CBS News caught video of him heading into the West Wing. When he came back out, he stopped to talk with reporters, and he did not sound like a man who had been charmed.
The biggest topic was last week’s midterm elections, which went badly for Republicans. Before Election Day, Trump repeatedly told voters to treat the races as a referendum on him. Since the losses, he has insisted he was never on the ballot. When Fox News anchor Bret Baier confronted him about that last Tuesday, Trump blamed Republican candidates for failing to fire up his base.
Smith told reporters he raised that same contradiction. “He says a lot of things, honestly. He’s not somebody that considers himself to have been on the ballot. To me, that was inconsistent with what he had been saying, talking about people putting him on the ballot,” Smith said.
He also asked whether the war in Iran and Trump’s tariffs, the taxes on imported goods that have pushed up prices on everyday items, played a part in the Republican losses. Trump did not concede the point. He did not walk anything back. He doubled down, according to Smith. “He’s not one to sit up there and acknowledge that he was mistaken,” Smith said.
Then came the question a lot of people wanted answered. Asked whether he would ever take a job as Trump’s White House press secretary, Smith shut it down. “No way in hell,” he said.
This is Stephen A. Smith’s second trip to the White House in about a month. In mid October, Bill Maher brought him to a private dinner with Trump and Kid Rock after Trump told Maher he could bring anyone, even one of his “lunatic leftist” friends. Smith expected the evening to last half an hour. It ran more than four hours and included a tour of the Oval Office, the West Wing, and the ballroom construction.
Smith said at the time that he went to advocate for HBCUs. He told Trump that while the administration has promoted its federal funding for Black colleges, private funding for those schools has taken a hit. He also pressed Trump on DEI and on Black unemployment, which Smith later noted sits above 7 percent while white unemployment is around 3.7 percent. According to Smith, Trump said he would look into the HBCU issue and might call him.
The goodwill did not last. Trump later disputed Smith’s account of the evening in a lengthy social media post and called the dinner a waste of time. Days after the dinner, Smith told his Straight Shooter audience that Trump had called him “nasty” and “mean” during the meeting, and he said plainly that he was not happy about the economy, affordability, or rising Black unemployment.
The two have a long history of trading shots. During the NBA Finals in June, Trump called Smith an “arrogant fool” and “dumb as a rock” after Smith criticized him. Smith had spent more than a year publicly challenging Trump to sit down with him, offering to do it at the White House, Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster, “wherever.”
Now Stephen A. Smith has his interview, and he has left the door open to a 2028 presidential run of his own. He has not said whether HBCU funding came up again on Thursday.
