Katy Tur dropped by Late Night with Seth Meyers the night before Thanksgiving, where she talked about what it was like to cover Donald Trump’s three ring circus of a campaign — which was tumultuous at times for the NBC journalist. Meyers started out by asking Tur if she was less shocked than the rest of the country at the outcome of the 2016 election. “I was not surprised at all,” Tur told Meyers. “I mean when you went to his rallies and you saw the excitement that was there, the enthusiasm that was there, you just knew that every single person that went there because they liked Donald Trump was going to go to the polls, and pull the lever for Donald Trump.”
She continued, “He just had this momentum behind him, they weren’t listening to the day in, day out of some of the more controversial things he said. They were taking him seriously but they weren’t taking him literally like the media was taking him.” Tur then compared the feeling of knowing the outcome of the election to having “Stockholm syndrome.”
To get a feel for how surreal it was covering Trump’s campaign, Tur also a story about a perfectly sweet and lovely hairdresser she met in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The woman had happened to see Tur trying to curl her hair over a trashcan in a dingy bathroom of a bathroom arena, and offered to help her out, giving her a perfect on-air look for the Nightly News. Later as Donald Trump joked on stage about having journalists killed, Tur saw that same woman screaming out for blood in the audience. It’s honestly no wonder she felt like she had Stockholm syndrome.
