How New York Times Reporters Prepared to Interview President Trump

New York Times journalists had to plan carefully for an Oval Office conversation with a president who dominates discourse and makes false claims.

President Trump basks in media attention but is also known to use journalists as foils, lashing out at questions he does not like and even referring to the press as “the enemy of the people.”

So when four New York Times reporters and a photographer walked into the Oval Office around 5 p.m. last Wednesday to interview the president, they could not be sure which version of Mr. Trump they were going to get. They were tense, but prepared.

One of them, David E. Sanger, had decades of experience in situations like this. He has covered five presidents and interviewed almost all of them in the Oval Office and on trips around the world. The other three — Tyler Pager, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Katie Rogers — are experienced White House reporters, but it would be their first major formal interview with a sitting president.

They had prepared meticulously, rehearsing and refining their questions for days with our White House team.