Megyn Kelly Opens Up About Trump: ‘I Wanted Him to Stop’

This is the week Megyn Kelly goes mainstream. No longer relegated to Fox News, the star anchor is bringing her tough-talking brand to the Fox broadcast network next Tuesday night where she will host a primetime special that includes her long-awaited one-on-one interview with nemesis Donald Trump.

To promote the big event, Kelly has been making the talk show rounds herself, first appearing on Live! with Kelly and Michael, where she opened up about her “difficult year,” and now dropping by The Tonight Show, where she tactfully resisted the urge to join in on Jimmy Fallon’s Trump jokes.

After some chit-chat about growing up in Albany and checking out the Kentucky Derby, Kelly and Fallon arrived at the inevitable Trump talk. When Fallon brought up the presumptive Republican nominee’s various tweetstorms against his guest, Kelly said, “I wanted him to stop, and I knew if I could get face-to-face with him he would stop.” She added that it took multiple attempts to get him to agree to a sit-down at Trump Tower.

As she has said before, the pair didn’t address their issues with each other in that initial meeting, but it did lead Trump to agree to the interview that will air on Tuesday.

“I didn’t ask him about any of the tweets or any of the things he said, because I was looking to move past that. You know, I didn’t want to go to the acrimonious place. So we had a normal conversation like candidate and reporter,” she explained. “Then we sat down together for an interview and in that interview we do talk about what happened.”

In a new clip from that interview, Kelly asks Trump if he believes “it’s a journalist’s role to be ‘nice’ to candidates at a presidential debate,” as he seemed to suggest in his tweets after the Fox News debate she moderated in August that precipitated their feud.

When Trump says he only meant debate moderators should be “fair,” Kelly shoots back, “You know, it’s not a cocktail party.”

The last time Kelly sat down with Fallon, she accurately predicted that Trump could very well become the Republican nominee, warning her fellow pundits not to “count him out” so soon. That was on Feb. 4, before The Donald had won a single primary contest. Now, the man who openly mused about her period on CNN is the new standard-bearer for the GOP.