The Sunday Shows Set the Agenda in Trump’s Washington

“I think, without any question, this is the biggest moment of the Trump presidency.”

It was the day in June when Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, and Chris Wallace was on Fox News explaining to viewers the gravity of the Court’s swing vote stepping down.

I’d been interviewing Wallace when the Kennedy news broke, and he’d politely excused himself from our call and hopped on the air. Within a few moments after he finished up his five-minute spot, he called me back.

Moments like this are what Wallace credits for reinforcing the importance of his primary news format: the political talk show broadcast from Washington, D.C., every Sunday morning. A stalwart of network television since the late 1970s, Wallace has hosted Fox News Sunday since 2003 and is the face of Fox’s hard-news division. “I think that the Sunday shows are more relevant and more important than ever in the Trump era,” Wallace explained during our interview. “And the reason I say that is because the velocity of news and the amount of news in a week is so much greater than we’ve ever seen before, and I’ve been doing Sunday talk shows since Reagan was president.” (Wallace also hosted Meet the Press from 1987 to 1988.)

Wallace’s superlatives are the subject of much debate among the chattering class in Washington. While there’s no question that Sunday morning retains an important place in the spin cycle, these iconic shows are fast evolving—as is just about everything else—in Donald Trump’s Washington. An important new focus: helping viewers fight through the partisan noise and tell truth from lies.

The Sunday shows also often now help define the news of the week—and’s Chuck Todd on Sunday over Trump’s possible testimony before the special prosecutor and fear of a “perjury trap.”