​Josh Pate remains firm in his choice to feature Donald Trump on his show. Speaking at Barrett Media’s Audio Summit earlier this month, Pate traced the decision back to a lesson from 2020, when he had just joined 247Sports and COVID-19 shut down live sports. He observed that the biggest misstep he watched from other hosts during that period was assuming audiences wanted political commentary woven into game coverage. Pate took the opposite approach, insisting that his show grew specifically because he avoided that mix.
“I learned then, man, keep this stuff out of your commentary,” Pate said. “It does not matter who in your space criticizes you. It does not matter who in your space tries to tell you, ‘No, no no, it is my responsibility to tell you what your responsibility is with your platform.’ Ignore it. Listen to your audience. That’s the north star. That’s the lighthouse in the fog. And they’ve said unequivocally, ‘Don’t want it. We know where to go if we do want it.’ And your YouTube college football channel is not where we want to go.”
So when the White House reached out five years later, the decision took him about five minutes. “The President of the United States called and wanted to do a college football show. I’m gonna do it, and it’s going to piss a lot of people off,” Pate said. “It may end up being a bad look. It may very well end up being that. But hindsight’s not a weapon. Instinct is your weapon, because no one actually ever makes a decision with the benefit of hindsight. Your critics are the only ones who have the benefit of hindsight.”
This stance echoes his February defense of the booking on X as an “auto-yes 1000% of the time,” arguing that anyone expecting political discussion would be “sorely disappointed.” What Pate did not anticipate was how brief his window with Trump would be. The two spoke off the record before cameras rolled, around the moment the United States faced tensions with Iran. Trump indicated that the SCORE Act—the House bill establishing federal rules for NIL and athlete compensation—had been on the back burner and admitted he wasn’t as prepared on the topic as he should have been. Pate left the conversation with a president who showed up to discuss a subject he hadn’t been briefed on, despite the White House having requested the interview in the first place.
“If I know I’ve got 10 minutes here, do I risk asking a deeply detailed question that he will spend eight minutes answering? You didn’t even have an interview at that point,” Pate said. “I’m not like a traditional interviewer. My interviews are with Ryan Day and Kalen DeBoer, not with Donald Trump normally. So it went the way it went.” The result reflected the challenge: Awful Announcing’s Sean Keeley noted that Trump spent much of the segment on an unrelated, incoherent tangent about NFL kickoff rules after Pat, ostensibly, for better SEO.