Donald Trump hasn't changed. That was my big takeaway from watching his performance on this week's Meet The Press, where Kristen Welker started her new stint as host of the program by scoring a blockbuster interview with Trump. This is the first such interview he has given in a long time: on network television which is not part of the right-wing echo chamber. And it went about how you'd expect (assuming you haven't been in a coma for the past eight years). Trump flooded the zone with lies, distortions, conspiracy theories, and general blithering, and the poor benighted host simply couldn't keep up. So two big takeaways, really: Donald Trump hasn't changed, and (sadly) neither has the media.

NBC actually did have the opportunity to do a proper job. Trump pre-taped the interview on Thursday, meaning they had multiple days in which to present it with the proper context. They failed to do so, even if Welker did occasionally interrupt the footage to try to interject a few facts. But the problem -- as it always has been -- is the sheer volume of untruths issuing forth from Trump's maw. Trump reminds me of the mythological Hydra of Lerna, a monster Hercules had to kill as one of his twelve labors. The Hydra had multiple serpent heads and the problem for anyone trying to kill it was that every time you lopped off one of these heads with a sword, two more immediately grew back in its place. Trump is like a Hydra on steroids -- while any interviewer is pressing him hard in an attempt to debunk some lie that Trump has just told, Trump has moved on and has spouted six or seven more lies, most of which are more outrageous than the initial one. Trump was in fine form this weekend, "flooding the zone" of the interview with unadulterated bovine excrement, much faster than Welker could shovel (although we seem to have slipped into another metaphorical Herculean mythological labor -- the cleaning of the Augean stables...).

The only way to adequately counter Trump's performance would have been jarring. After just about every answer Trump gave (or perhaps after every sentence he uttered), the screen should have been frozen while a crawl at the bottom or a list at the side was provided to itemize all the things Trump had just lied about. Then the tape could have rolled again, until the next group of falsehoods had to be fact-checked. It would take an enormous amount of time (compared to the actual interview itself), but it would indeed be the proper context for what Trump had to say.

Welker did try, to give her some credit. She did push back on a few of Trump's lies, and ultimately she did get him to directly answer a few questions (most of her questions were just danced around or ignored by Trump, however). She made some news and she kicked off hosting the historic television franchise (which loves to remind everyone that it is "the longest-running show on television") with some style and feistiness. But NBC and Welker did generate some criticism for having Trump on her first show, both before and after it aired. Before, people made the argument that Trump shouldn't be given free media time since, after all, he is a serial liar who was at the center of the worst attack on American democracy since the Civil War. Criticism afterwards hinged on the same theme I've used here today: Welker just wasn't very effective at countering Trump's lies, therefore he successfully got away with muddying the political waters once again.

As to the first, Welker tried to defuse this argument at the end of her first program, in the roundtable segment with other journalists. She asked New York Times reporter Peter Baker the following:

Big picture, Peter Baker, I'm giving the final word to you. We have gotten criticism for just sitting down with former President Trump. He is the former president. He is facing four indictments. As journalists, just set the scene and backdrop why there is still news value and value from the public to hear from him?

Baker responded:

It cannot be that a person can run for president of the United States, be a front-runner in his party, and possibly win without ever being challenged by a tough, independent interviewer, and that's I think an important part of our system. Obviously, the challenge for us because he's going to spout out one thing after another and fact-checking in real time is a real hard thing, and what you've done here is edit it and make sure people understand what’s real and not.

Others didn't grade Welker's performance quite as positively. On The View this morning, Ana Navarro had a different take on it all:

I wish she [Kristen Welker] had not done a Trump interview as her first one. Because I think nobody ever wins with a Trump interview. Nobody looks good because it's just, like -- it's like interviewing an insane person. Actually, it is interviewing an insane person.

At the very least, interviewing Trump is talking to a person who is quite willing to say things that are completely insane. No amount of preparation is enough, in other words. This is why, as HuffPost pointed out, Trump was able to repeat one particularly noxious lie eight times without being adequately called on it. Trump was speaking about his position (which is malleable) on abortion, and he claimed that the radical Democrats wanted to be able to "kill the baby after birth." He even got specific at one point: "You have New York State and other places that passed legislation where you're allowed to kill the baby after birth." The strongest pushback Welker said to Trump in response was: "Democrats don't want that." Not: "This is a total lie, no state in America allows that," or: "This is completely untrue, nobody anywhere is pushing for laws to allow killing a baby after it is born," but just a weak: "Democrats writ large are not talking about that."

Welker and Baker are right, in one sense. Donald Trump is not just running for president, at this point it looks like he has an absolute lock on the Republican nomination. This is due to his fellow Republican candidates also having no clue about countering Trump's volcano of lies (even candidates like Chris Christie who think they do know how to attack Trump haven't gotten the chance, with Trump skipping the first two GOP debates). If Trump does wind up being the nominee, even while facing 91 felony counts in court, he will be newsworthy. He is newsworthy now. If he were some fringe candidate pulling in one or two percent in the polls, the media could easily afford to ignore him. But he's topping 50 percent (and sometimes 60 percent) in recent polls of the GOP base. Nobody else has even come close to laying a glove on him. Which means he cannot just be ignored by serious political journalists.

But they've got to get better about how to present Trump to their viewers. Trump has not been on television constantly of late (the way he was throughout his presidency), in fact the only times he has dominated coverage was while he was surrendering himself to various jurisdictions for all his federal indictments. But all of that is changing, as we draw closer and closer to the first primary, early next year.

It's not like anyone in the political media doesn't know what to expect. As mentioned, they've had eight years to get used to it. Trump hasn't changed, at least not stylistically. The Washington Post pointed this out (in an article that also attempts to debunk a few of the lies Trump told to Welker):

The only thing that's changed over the past eight years, really, is that everyone should know the playbook by now. We should know that [Donald Trump] will 1) flood the zone with things that are burbling on the right-wing fringe, 2) make sweeping promises without much follow-through and 3) reject any criticism out of hand, spinning it into a reason to praise himself.

I would only add one to this list: "4) and when challenged directly on the truthfulness of anything he has said, he will quickly pivot to attacking the media at large, as well as personally attacking the interviewer -- especially if it is a woman or a person of color."

Trump hasn't changed one iota. The media has had eight years to learn what to expect from him. And yet, sadly, they haven't changed either -- at least not to the degree that is truly required. It is still early in the primary campaign process, so they've still got some time to get up to speed and shift their tactics. Whether they will or will not manage to do so successfully is still a very open question, though.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant