Fox News’ Jacqui Heinrich Talks About New Sunday Show, Working The Trump Beat And How She Handles It When POTUS Lashes Out At Her

Fox News‘ Jacqui Heinrich recently entered the Sunday morning show wars for guests and viewers with the launch of Sunday Briefing, along with co-host and fellow senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy.

The result has been a ratings uptick versus the previous occupant of the 11 a.m. ET time slot, Media Buzz, and beating other cable news networks in the hour.

Heinrich has drawn the most attention this year for being the target of Donald Trump‘s ire, back in March, and for other moments, as when she questioned the president’s display of Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn. “She should be working for CNN, not Fox,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, while chief political analyst Brit Hume defended her as someone who “plays it straight.”

She also drew headlines in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s summit with Vladimir Putin, when she noted that it seemed as if Putin “steam rolled” through the post-summit press conference.

Heinrich, who joined Fox News in 2018, is a member of the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association, and is set to become its president 2027-28. The WHCA has been at odds with the Trump White House over a series of issues, including over the White House press pool. After Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced in February that the White House would decide who is a member of the pool, after years in which the WHCA determined that schedule, Heinrich wrote, “This move does not give the power back to the people — it gives power to the White House. The WHCA is democratically elected by the full-time White House press corps.”

Nevertheless, Heinrich gives the White House credit for Trump’s accessibility, noting that it is a big difference from the Biden years. She also distinguishes questions of Biden’s mental acuity and that of the current president. And as for how she handles it when the president lashes out at her, she says, “I work in the basement of his house. If he wants to talk to me, he knows where to find me.”

Deadline spoke with Heinrich last week in this Q&A edited for clarity and length.

DEADLINE: Sunday Briefing comes on later in the morning, after other shows. How do you think the show distinguishes itself? Does it make it more of a challenge just to get exclusives?

JACQUI HEINRICH: A lot of the other Sunday shows have a very sort of set formula, and the great thing about this show being an experiment, we are able to really play around and see what works and be flexible. We don’t feel like we need to have a panel every day, necessarily. If there’s a day that makes sense to have a panel, there’s nothing to prevent us from doing that. But we’re not approaching this with a model in mind. It’s really news-focused. And so much news comes out of this White House, you could spend an hour on any given topic. So we approached the bookings with an eye toward, what led the week, what is probably still going to be the lead of the week on Monday? How do we drive that conversation forward? How do we unveil some new piece of information?

I think it is somewhat challenging when we have Sunday Morning Futures and Fox News Sunday, certainly, to contend with, and telling the White House, ‘Yes, but we also have Sunday Briefing.’ We need to have someone to talk about X, Y, Z, and we try to be creative in the way that we do it.

We are the people that they interface with every day at the White House. We deal with Karoline Leavitt, we deal with the folks in upper and lower press. And so I think they know our reporting. They know that we know the material really well, and we try to voice what is of interest early on in office. And I think there is an advantage in that. We do see other Sunday show hosts coming in to make their pleas in person here and there, but we get to just do it every day.

DEADLINE: Is there a challenge getting Democrats to come on the show?

HEINRICH: Not usually. There was during the shutdown. Last weekend, we reached out to all 43 Democratic senators, plus Bernie Sanders. So all 44 who voted no on the at-that-point 15 Republican proposals to reopen the government. And none of them wanted to come on the show. A lot of them said, “We would really love to come on — another time.” You know, “Here’s my cell. Please stay in touch. Love watching the show, but [we need] the right time.” I think that is more of a reflection of the party’s sort of split messaging on that than anything.

… I think they’re recognizing also that under the Biden administration, there were a lot of missed opportunities, and I think now, without the de facto leader of the party and no guidance from above on what the strategy should be, you’re seeing more Democratic voices come to the network. I talk to them, and I hear from them, and they’re always surprised that I was talking to so and so, and they said, “Oh my gosh, I saw you on Fox.” And they didn’t think that that person watched Fox, but people do. It’s a huge, huge audience.

DEADLINE: When Trump came back into office, did you ever get the impression that the White House thought you would treat them with kid gloves?

HEINRICH: I don’t think so. I think that they watched my reporting and I made outreach early on, as I do with anyone in that office, to establish rapport, reach out, socialize — communication so that I can get questions answered and get the information out quickly. I think they approached me as a serious journalist, which I like to present myself to be, and I never felt that the people in that office expected maybe anything different. I think seeing the president talk about coverage that he doesn’t like, that’s a little bit different. And that’s his prerogative. But I also think that when I’m doing my job, I’m just concerning myself with, “Have I told the story fully and fairly, with integrity and fairness?” And if I’ve done all those things then I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about it.

DEADLINE: After the Trump-Putin summit, you said that the Russian leader kind of steamrolled the president. What kind of reaction did you get?

HEINRICH: I actually had said a lot more than that, and I never said that exactly. I said that Putin came in and steamrolled, and he did. He came right up to the lectern, and he started speaking first. As the visitor on American soil, that’s unusual. … And [Putin] did his greatest hits, his talking points of why the [Ukraine] war is justified. He made a lot of references to the things that we hear often when they are doubling down on their position not to end the war. And then I’m looking at the president in that moment, wondering what he’s thinking. And it seems to me like he was making a game-time decision on where this should go, if he should take questions or not. He had told the press that either we were going to get a press conference or a Q&A if things went well and there was progress toward a deal or a second summit, a ceasefire. Or if things didn’t go well, we wouldn’t have a press conference. Neither one of those things ended up happening.

We got something different, and the president was unhappy, I think, with the coverage in that moment, looking like … Putin had come in a strong-armed the situation, and somehow pulled a fast one or caught the president off-guard. There has been an admission of that from some cabinet secretaries even, in the weeks since then. You heard the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent say the president wasn’t happy with how things went in Alaska, and more in-the-room reporting about how the exchanges went between the two leaders.

So I described what happened in the room with the context of how one of these usually goes. Typically, the host leader will come out and address the press. And [then a] foreign leader will say a few words, and then they’ll take questions. And then [I followed by] illustrating how the president said things would go, and then explaining that things didn’t go either way, and that we really needed to hear from the administration why the president made that decision to come out and do things in the way that he said was not going to happen. And we pointed to the need to really get the readout from the White House. And I think that the president reacted to a 20- or 30-second clip of an eight-minute report. It is what it is. But I stand by my reporting. And if I were in that moment, I would do it the same way again. I think that everything that I said was accurate.

DEADLINE: To what extent do you do you keep in mind the potential for a backlash against the network? We are in an environment where you hear that instantaneous reaction, if not from the president, certainly on social media.

HEINRICH: Where people get in trouble is when they approach their job emotionally, and I’m not an emotional person. I’m driven by the black and white of my job. Have I asked the who, what, where, when, why? Have I done my due diligence, put together in a fair manner? If I’ve done all those things, then how someone feels about it is not really relevant. Certainly, my question when someone’s got an issue is, well what is their problem? Did I forget to ask something? Did I leave out an important piece of context? If the answer is no, then there’s your answer. So I don’t really think about what the reaction is going to be, because I’m not approaching my job with this sort of feeling that my job is to throw bombs and make waves. I feel like my job is very simple. It’s just to get to facts out to people … In the primetime hours, they talk about how they feel about it. That’s not my job.

DEADLINE: The president lashed out at you on social media. What do you have to be prepared for when that happens?

HEINRICH: I don’t know. I work in the basement of his house. If he wants to talk to me, he knows where to find me.

DEADLINE: Now the White House is also picking who is part of the press pool. How different is that for you? What I mean is, has how much of a difference has that made, having the White House pick the pool versus the WHCA?

HEINRICH: There are a couple of different challenges there. What the White House has done, basically, is they eliminated the wire rotation, and they folded the wires in with the print reporters. By and large, they have been sticking with our rotation. So the wires now join in print, meaning that they don’t get in every fourth day. They get in every 31st day, or whatever it is, because it’s a very big print rotation. They have not locked out of coverage any of our members so far from pooling. The Associated Press is another issue, and they are fighting that legal battle on their own, and we are assisting them, as the WHCA [signed on] to the amicus brief in support.

I think the biggest change has been in the people that they add to the pool, where they have expanded the number of folks who go in the Oval Office. We don’t actually know every day who they’re adding to the pool. … It’s not all new media folks, either. We’ve had our own colleague, Edward Lawrence of Fox Business, request to join the pool, and they admitted him.

It’s different, in a sense, that the wires are not there. I think that’s the greatest difference. They’re not there on a daily basis. And we continue to advocate for that because they service — you know, the AP alone has 5 billion readers a day. We think it’s important that they get back into a daily rotation. All of our newsrooms across other mediums run, of course, on either AP or Reuters wires. But I think that even if they wanted to make a change, they’re not going to until that legal case plays out.

DEADLINE: One thing I see a lot, especially online, when it comes to the White House press corps, is why isn’t the press giving the same level of scrutiny to Trump’s mental acuity, as they did for Joe Biden.

HEINRICH: What do you mean? What has jumped out at you as needing more coverage?

DEADLINE: I’ve seen citations when Trump started talking about his uncle and the Unabomber, when he talked about Tylenol, various digressions, and you’ll see online a lot where they’re like, “Why isn’t this getting the attention that Biden got when he would make these types of drifting off in speeches?”

HEINRICH: We have such access to the president. We see him multiple times a day, and asking questions [to him] multiple times a day. I think that that is inherently different from Biden. Whenever we had an opportunity to put questions to him, it was obviously very choreographed. The events were short. … Two questions, that’s it, and we saw how that went.

We’re talking about two different things here, where you have a president [who is] very accessible, versus the president is very inaccessible, and the staff around that inaccessible president were also not always accessible. … Certainly, there’s been coverage of the [current] president’s health when it has become obvious, like when he has bruises and things like that, and the White House had to come out and address why. In some images, you could see evidence of medical treatment, and they did. But again, that conversation only happened because we were in the room taking pictures of him at these Oval Office events, where the photographers are three feet from him, taking pictures of his hands.

DEADLINE: Is the White House struggling with how to how to address the affordability issue?

HEINRICH: I think they are finding their footing, for sure, and we’ll see how this plays out when the administration tries to message that things are actually better than they feel. It didn’t work out so great for Joe Biden’s presidency.

Now there are differences. Certainly the president is right that inflation has come down — we are not talking about 9 1/2 percent inflation like under Biden — but prices have not followed. And I think the challenge for him is when people are pointing to the cause of that, and it involves things like a discussion about his tariffs, and whether or not those are driving up prices, I think that is going to be a hard conversation for him to have … because he has often pointed to his tariffs as being the most consequential authority that he has. … I think it’ll be a continuing challenge for him, just like it was a continuing challenge for Biden. I think the difference is this administration does feel, even if the president certainly sees something one way, it tends to listen to its base a little bit more, because they tend to be more vocal about cost-of-living issues. You’re seeing some Republicans adopt that acknowledgement in their responses to things, and I think that’ll be a robust conversation that they’re having at the White House. How do you address this challenge going into the midterms, and how you message best around it?

DEADLINE: What do you make of the Jeffrey Epstein email release and how the White House has been handling it? The president is irritated with it.

HEINRICH: He has been irritated with this story for a long time. It’s one story that I think they can’t make go away, and I think that’s sort of a problem of their own making, in a sense. You did have members of the administration — [Attorney General] Pam Bondi, for one. I don’t want to single her out. There are many others. Alina Habba, who’s now acting U.S. attorney in New Jersey. Don Jr. — campaigning about Democrats covering up for pedophiles.… I think that the challenge now is the decision not to release anything else, and the desire for that decision just to be final, but the inability to sort of quiet the masses on that. I do think, though, that you can certainly read it the other way, which is the Democrats had this all along, and you can sort of laugh off their obsession with it at this point, because if they really thought it was that important, why didn’t they go through with it when they had control? He does seem irritated at the fact that it’s the one narrative that he can’t seem to get away from when it rears its head.

DEADLINE: The one thing the White House keeps on saying is that they are the most transparent administration— in the recent past or in history. Do you agree?

HEINRICH: I think that they can be. I think we certainly have a lot of access, and when we ask for information, we often get it. But I think that there’s a difference between the White House and Pentagon, for instance. I think that their definitions of transparency are a little bit different. I’m happy with the level of access that we have, and have never felt like I couldn’t get the information that I needed. I’m not sure that’s consistent across all the agencies, but I think that we have a really great thing going for now, covering the White House.