Much to the disappointment of folks at CNN, nobody at the long table—who included NBC’s Lester Holt and Chuck Todd, ABC’s David Muir and George Stephanopoulos, and CBS’s Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan—bothered to ask why the president had gone out of his way to exclude the cable network run by Trump’s former friend Jeff Zucker.

MSDNC isn’t here as well,” Trump quipped—to polite chuckles but zero protests (not even by Meet the Press and MSNBC anchor Todd) from his captive audience, who were there ostensibly for a briefing on tonight’s State of the Union address but instead were treated to a lot of presidential boasting about his poll numbers and the “through-the-roof” stock market, and a lot of gloating about the “fiasco” of Iowa’s Democratic caucuses and the general disarray in the out-of-power party.

Trump made sure to criticize his Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for declining to lower interest rates further. Asked about the exploding trillion-dollar deficits his administration has created, the president claimed that lower interest rates will allow him to reduce the red ink in his second term.

Trump and his lovingly admiring vice president, Mike Pence, sat directly across from each other. The president was flanked by O’Donnell and Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum; Pence, meanwhile, drew Todd and Fox News’ Bret Baier as his lunch partners. Also enjoying the cuisine—but staying away from the offered Chardonnay—were PBS’ Judy Woodruff, C-SPAN’s Steve Scully, CBN’s David Brody, and Newsmax’s Emerald Robinson, formerly a Pizzagate conspiracy theorist at Trump’s favorite media outlet, One America News Network.