“CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil will interview President Donald Trump on Tuesday after the president tours a Ford plant in Michigan, according to two sources, marking the most high-profile booking for the host after a troubled start to his evening news tenure.
The White House informed the press pool on Tuesday. CBS News declined to comment on the interview, while the White House did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
Dokoupil confirmed the interview in an X post on Tuesday. He said the two discussed the protests in Iran, the economy and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who announced on Sunday he was under federal investigation.
The two will speak ahead of Trump’s speech to the Detroit Economic Club on Tuesday afternoon, and the interview will air on Tuesday’s “Evening News” broadcast. Dokoupil is currently on his “Live From America” tour, broadcasting his show from nine U.S. cities as part of his inaugural two weeks as the show’s anchor.
The booking comes after a rocky start to Dokoupil’s tenure that has seen tepid ratings, the ousting of a longtime producer and a bevy of criticism in media circles over his congenial coverage of the Trump administration.
Days after critics mocked Dokoupil’s insistence that news coverage relied too heavily on “academics or elites,” he was criticized for his interview with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that allowed the secretary to reiterate administration talking points on the U.S. operation in Venezuela this month with minimal pushback after the Pentagon pushed out media outlets from the press corps. His first weekday episode was also marred by technical difficulties.
Dokoupil’s minimal coverage of the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, a segment that split the middle on Trump supporters who assaulted law enforcement officers and Trump’s verbal attack on Democrats, was also roundly rebuked. The segment came just before Dokoupil walked through a lighthearted segment about AI-generated memes of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and called him the “ultimate Florida man.”
“Marco Rubio, we salute you,” Dokoupil said.
Dokoupil drew some praise for his interview with White House border czar Tom Homan, where Dokoupil pressed Homan on whether he believed there had been any overreach from Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the wake of one killing a woman in Minneapolis last week. But the criticism rose again after Dokoupil ended a broadcast last week by claiming that Americans needed to “find a way to live with people who are genuinely different from us, to try to be fair to them,” prompting attacks over another “both-sides” argument.
His efforts to enact CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss’ new vision for the network and the show have borne little fruit in the ratings. Dokoupil’s first weekday “Evening News” broadcast last week drew 4.4 million viewers and 596,000 viewers in the advertiser-coveted 25-54 age demographic, behind both ABC’s “World News Tonight” and NBC’s “Nightly News.”
It was also a decline from the “Evening News” debuts of both the two-anchor combo of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois last year and Norah O’Donnell in 2019.
