Days before she is set to make her highly anticipated morning show debut on NBC, Megyn Kelly got some last minute advice from the current queen of daytime television: You’re allowed to “say no” to the president of the United States.
When DeGeneres asked if she would have Donald Trump on her new show, Kelly replied, “Definitely. I mean, I would not say no to the sitting president of the United States.” In turn, Kelly asked DeGeneres if she would say no to Trump.
“Yeah,” DeGeneres said without hesitation, echoing comments made several months ago to Kelly’s new colleague Matt Lauer. “I would not have him on the show. He is who he is and he gets enough attention and he has his Twitter account and he has ways to get his message across.”
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“There’s nothing I’m going to say to him that’s going to change him and I don’t want to give him a platform, because it just validates him,” DeGeneres continued. “And for me to have someone on the show, I have to at least admire them in some way. And I can’t have someone that I feel is not only dangerous for the country, and for me personally as a gay woman, but to the world. He’s dividing all of us. I just don’t want him on the show.”
It seemed that Kelly, who has hosted both Alex Jones and Vladimir Putin on her Sunday night newsmagazine show, had not considered that point of view before.
In the same interview, Kelly told DeGeneres what made her decide to leave her prominent gig at Fox News after 12 years and join NBC. She said that it wasn’t until she got her own primetime show that she was asked to do “all political” coverage. “I was never a political person,” Kelly said, adding that, “It became clear to me that it wasn’t what I wanted to do.”
But it was the current president who pushed her over the edge.
“Donald Trump has a way of clarifying one’s life choices,” Kelly said of the man who once implied that she only asked him tough debate questions because she was on her period.
“Just as I was sort of wondering if this is where I wanted to be and how I wanted to live, the universe came and shone a light and it was clear to me what I wanted to do,” Kelly added. She said that Bill O’Reilly—“of all people”— told her when she got The Kelly File that cable-news primetime is a “snake pit.” And, she explained, “I didn’t want to be in the snake pit, I just wanted to cover the news.”
“This wasn’t the life I wanted,” she said of her one-sided Twitter war with Donald Trump. “It was just a clarification and an affirmation that I did not want to live like this.”
That being said, if it means big ratings for her new morning show, Kelly seems ready, willing and able to go toe-to-toe with Trump and start the cycle over again.
