CBS News Correspondent Robert Costa Talks “Zen Trump” and the Eagles
From editing Pennsbury High’s newspaper to interviewing presidents, Robert Costa has traveled a long road to success.

Years after his time at Pennsbury High in Bucks County, Robert Costa is one of the leading Donald Trump correspondents for CBS News in Washington. In this photo, he’s seated in front of a mural in downtown Yardley / Photograph by Kyle Kielinski
Bucks County native Robert Costa started out covering the Eagles for his high school television station and editing a school newspaper. He later rose through the ranks of the National Review and then the Washington Post and wrote a book with journalism legend Bob Woodward, and these days finds himself a leading political correspondent for CBS News in Washington. Here, he talks about his relationship with the new president and why you shouldn’t assume you know what to expect from Donald Trump 2.0.
I was surprised to see you sign your emails Bob Costa instead of Robert Costa. I assumed that you would have long ago insisted on Robert Costa, given the similarity between “Bob Costa” and “Bob Costas,” the legendary sportscaster.
Well, I go by Bob with people I know. Many out there still believe I’m Bob’s son and that I got my job in journalism due to nepotism. [Laughs]
Do people ever get confused and start asking you ridiculously technical sports questions and then you inevitably disappoint them?
Most of the disappointment happens when I go to check into a hotel and I can tell they are thinking, “Oh, you’re that one.”
Are you officially sick of being asked about this?
No. I’ve been dealing with “Bob Costas” stuff literally all my life. The only thing that has gotten a bit old is when someone says to me, “Hey, your name is like Bob Costas’s” — as if I had never considered it before. Bob and I have actually become friendly over the years. I love sports. And he loves politics.
Is it safe to say you’re still a fan of Philly teams even though you no longer live here?
Always. When I was a kid, I was actually quoted in Sports Illustrated as a denizen of the 700 Level. My parents used to bring me to Vet games, and my awakening to the true spirit of Philadelphia was when someone in the 700 Level dumped a beer in our direction. Then, when I was at Pennsbury High, I worked for the school newspaper and TV station. We actually convinced the Eagles to give us press passes. So there I was interviewing Hugh Douglas and Andy Reid in the locker room. It was wild! And they would put out all this food in the press box, so I would gorge myself on soft pretzels and cheesesteaks. Keep in mind that this was a great time to cover the Eagles. We were always in the NFC Championship.
You live in D.C. now?
Right near Dupont Circle, so walking distance to work at CBS News, which is a good and bad thing. I’ve been in D.C. since 2010.
When we last spoke, it was May 2017, a few months into the first Donald Trump presidency. You were basically the Washington Post’s Donald Trump guy, and you had just taken over hosting Washington Week following the death of Gwen Ifill. What exactly are you doing now?
My day-to-day job has never really changed since I started as a journalist. I wake up and make as many calls as I can, read as much as I can, and get a sense of the story. At CBS News, I am a reporter first, then interviewer and correspondent. I really enjoy doing the CBS Sunday Morning show, which lets me do politics but also stories about the children of Mark Rothko, profiles of people like Killer Mike, and interviews with people like Doris Kearns Goodwin. It’s fun. I also appear on Face the Nation and the CBS morning and evening news.

Robert Costa at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July 2024
CBS Sunday Morning is one of the few shows that everybody in my house can agree on.
People love its identity. There’s a rhythm to it. A comfort to it. The show has a lot of heart. I love that it’s not a soft show, though neither is it a cold show.
My MAGA mom and I were actually on CBS Sunday Morning with Mo Rocca just before Thanksgiving 2016 to discuss with Mo and a family therapist how to survive the holidays with relatives on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Little did we know we’d be finding ourselves in a similar position eight years later.
The holidays can be tough! There’s no such thing as a quiet Thanksgiving anymore.
Tough is an understatement. Why leave such a prestigious publication as the Washington Post?
The timeline is important. I joined in 2014 and went on leave in late 2020 to write the book Peril, with my mentor and friend Bob Woodward. After that was published in September 2021, I went on a book tour and expected to go back to the Post. But then CBS recruited me. I was looking for a new adventure; I wanted to keep broadening my storytelling skills.
I recall seeing your CBS Sunday Morning interview with Joe Biden soon after he dropped out of the race.
That was the first and only time he did an interview in his residence, and I was the first person to interview him on TV after he made that decision. I have been able to build relationships across the board. One of my secrets is that I stay in touch with people when they are not on top. So when the Biden campaign was on the ropes in 2020, I was covering Joe Biden. When Donald Trump was in his political winter after 2020, I kept reporting on him, kept myself within his orbit.

Robert Costa interviewing Joe Biden for CBS Sunday Morning in August.
What was your read on Biden when you sat down with him in August?
He was reflective, at times wistful. And he joked that he maybe didn’t take enough credit for getting certain things done, like the infrastructure bill. He told me maybe he should have put up signs that said “Joe did this.”
Had he stayed in the race, would the outcome have been different?
Hard to say. Impossible, really. What I can say is that the Democratic Party is grappling with how to win working voters. Biden spent half a century very connected to the unions, highlighted by him walking the picket line with UAW in 2023. But if Biden had stayed in the race, he would have faced relentless questioning about his debate performance for months, and that was just a grim reality that he didn’t want to deal with.
When we spoke in 2017, you weren’t surprised that Donald Trump won, and you pointed to a 2015 Alabama rally you attended as the moment when you realized he was going to win. Was there a similar point during the recent campaign?
Ah yes. 2015. I remember it so vividly. It was in Mobile, Alabama, that I realized he was going to use issues of immigration and trade to produce a new movement. He transcended party politics to create an actual movement. I had never seen anything like that. This time around, he was convicted in the criminal case on May 31st. The June 27th debate upends the entire campaign. And then he survives an assassination attempt on July 13th. His ability to come out of the trial, emerge from the debate in a strong political position, and then survive that attempt made for many voters the criminal trial somewhat of an afterthought.

Costa with his book Peril at Commonplace Reader in Yardley in November / Photograph by Kyle Kielinski
You recently spoke at a college and described Donald Trump as the calmest you’ve ever seen him. I couldn’t believe it, but you actually used the phrase “Zen Trump.”
When I’ve spoken with Trump lately, he’s been very calm. When I spoke with him on Election Day, he was someone very comfortable with how he ran his campaign. And he is comfortable now with power. In 2016, he was still getting used to how government worked. He’s now 78, he’s done this before, he knows where the levers of power are, and he knows what he wants to do. He has no hesitation nominating people he believes will be loyal. He’s just … comfortable. When I speak with him, there’s none of that frenetic energy I detected when I spoke with him at the start of his first presidency. Even though the political sheen of his presidency is as this outsider coming in to disrupt, he now has the insider sense for how it all works.
Many are scared of what this Trump presidency is going to mean, what he’s going to do. Are people overreacting? Is the fear overblown?
The last thing I would ever do is predict how Trump 2.0 is going to play out. That would be a fool’s errand. What I can say is that there is a real reactionary aspect to his governance, and there is a real sense of wanting to have command of the situation. He wants to be at the center of activity and discussion. We all know that sometimes he uses tough words to exert his power. But we’ll see. He might encourage rivals and past enemies to come to the table. I’ll take it day by day, but, based on my past experiences with him and my many conversations with him, it’s clear that he wants to be the piston of Washington and not someone just watching from afar and letting aides run the place.
It seems there’s a fair amount of mutual respect between you and Donald Trump, that you’re not on his journalist kill list. Hypothetical: He calls you in a few months after firing his press secretary and asks you to come on board.
I have zero interest in being a press secretary or aide to any politician, no matter their party. I love being a journalist. I’ve been writing about Donald Trump for over a decade. In 2013, I was one of the first, if not the first, to write about him thinking about the presidency. People thought I was crazy. In 2014, I was one of the first to write about him gearing up for a presidential run. That was on the front page of the Washington Post. People couldn’t believe it.
I imagine you at Georgetown parties with people asking you all kinds of questions about Donald Trump, the way Dominick Dunne used to hold court with high society during the O.J. Simpson trial, which he was covering for Vanity Fair.
There are no Georgetown parties these days. [laughs] But I tell people to keep an open mind. Yes, he’s promising mass deportations and sweeping tariffs and major overhauls to the tax code and ending the war between Russia and Ukraine. But he’s also completely unpredictable and not driven by an ideological compass. That variable means that the Trump presidency is very hard to read or get ahead of.

Robert Costa with date Kelly Court and John Mayer at Pennsbury High’s prom in 2004 (photo courtesy Robert Costa)
You’re only 39 and you’ve already had quite the career. How much did Pennsbury High shape who you are today?
More than you can imagine and more than anything else. People tell me I talk about Pennsbury too much. But there was nothing more formative to my career. I was editor of the newspaper, president of student government; I worked at the school TV station; I booked Maroon 5 and John Mayer to play at our school — without having any connections. We just had so much fun. And I graduated the year Facebook came out, so we were able to navigate high school without social media. Our fun wasn’t online. It was outdoors, in basements, in cars, at parties. And people weren’t pretentious.
Bucks County has been in the news so much in the past decade. It’s a curious place. Such natural beauty. Places like New Hope. Celebs like Bradley Cooper and Leonardo DiCaprio hanging out. And then, lots of school board drama. Book bans. Drag queen hysteria. Parents equating mask mandates with Satanism. How do you describe Bucks County to people not from there?
It’s a prism of America. Not a place you can understand just by driving through New Hope or watching some video of a school board meeting on social media. I am glad I grew up in a place that has so many different political views. That informs how I operate as a reporter. People can, in good faith, have different perspectives. You have to listen to your neighbor and not expect that everyone has the same view. Isn’t it wild to think that someone might think something different than you?
Back to that college speech you gave the other day: You seemed to suggest that this narrative that we are suddenly a divided country incapable of civil discourse might be a false narrative, that maybe we were never civil to begin with.
The point I was making, if you read history books, is that America has dealt with turbulence, discontent, and anger countless times. Upheaval is nothing new. Tranquility is not the norm. People will have different political views. And people will fight over them. Hopefully not violently. But they will fight.
On a lighter note: You’ve been away from Bucks County for many years at this point. What does Bucks County have that D.C. urgently needs?
Ugh. I cannot get a decent bagel down here. And while you have so many great mom-and-pop Italian restaurants in Philadelphia and Bucks, everything in D.C. is either a slice of floppy pizza or fine-dining Italian. There’s very little in between. But … I do have a Wawa one block away and get Wawa coffee and hoagies anytime I want.
Thank God for small miracles.
Truly.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Correction: A previous version of this interview stated that Robert Costa covered the Eagles for the newspaper at Pennsbury High.
Published as “News Maker” in the February 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.