Trump thanks Megyn Kelly for debate praise five years after public feud

After a tough round of questions in a 2015 debate, Trump went after Kelly for months

Sometimes it seems like the president is campaigning with a repainted version of his 2016 effort. There’s another dubious Democratic email scandal. He’s still repeating the debunked-to-death claim that Mexico is paying for his border wall. 

But when it comes to journalist Megyn Kelly, his one-time nemesis, things couldn’t be more different — with the president now tweeting his praise of the anchor he once bashed in interviews and on social media.

During the 2015 GOP presidential debates, Ms Kelly pressed the then-candidate about his past record of making sexist comments about women.

This set Mr Trump off for months. Shortly after the debate, he called into CNN to complain about what happened.

"She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions," Trump said in an interview with CNN anchor Don Lemon. "You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

He continued angrily tweeting at the anchor for months, and his campaign manager reportedly called Fox News to threaten her. The network responded, saying “We can’t give in to terrorisations toward any of our employees,” in a statement.

Eventually though, they began a sort of reconciliation, with Ms Kelly interviewing Mr Trump in a made-for-TV special in 2016 that many regarded as much softer and conciliatory than her previously tough questioning of the president.

The anchor, who once had the second most watched show on cable news behind her former colleague Bill O’Reilly, left Fox News in 2017 for NBC, and was a key figure in exposing how former chairman Roger Ailes sexually harassed her and others at the network . Ms Kelly left NBC in 2018.