Josh Pate YouTube
ESPN college football personality Josh Pate seems to be taking his interview with President Trump bombing a bit personally, as he has not only turned off comments on the YouTube interview but also claimed that most of the negative feedback are from bots. At the time of this writing, Pate’s interview with Trump hasn’t even cracked 30K views on YouTube.
Based on the early returns, Josh Pate’s interview with Donald Trump has fallen flat both statistically and intellectually. If the end game of the business is views than the juice may not have been worth the squeeze for Pate, as the interview has not even cracked his top 150 videos while simultaneously costing him thousands of YouTube subscribers.
Comparatively, a video about the top 10 college football programs from earlier this month has over 37,000 views.
ESPN’s Josh Pate doesn’t believe the negative feedback to his interview with President Trump despite turning off the comments on his YouTube channel
Last thing on Josh Pate and Trump interview — He did irreparable damage to his reputation for a group of people that trusted him to remain an apolitical voice of CFB. And he did it all for a live stream that did not even break the top 150 of his most-viewed live streams. pic.twitter.com/au03PPMfeV
— Colt (@dimpledwonder) February 24, 2026
If you were subbed to Pate and liked his show, couldn’t you just choose not to watch the Trump interview? 6000 unsubs is crazy. pic.twitter.com/IdsgRPwOIp
— Uncle Lou (@crazyunclelou) February 24, 2026
The interview consisted of Pate lobbing softball questions at Trump who largely ignored them and rambled about his knowledge of college football. For example, after Pate asked “which college football games Trump decides to attend?” — hint: the answer is SEC games — Trump said:
“I’ll look around and say, well, South Carolina is good,” Trump said 4-8 SC Gamecocks. “And Georgia’s good. I like Georgia. I like this Georgia team. I like your quarterback, by the way. I like Gunner [Stockton]. He’s going to be a great quarterback. I’m telling you, he’s already a great quarterback, but he’s only going to get better.”
Trump — who also added that “certain people, players, and teams” such as Nick Saban and Urban Meyer — never answered Pate’s question about deciding which games to attend.
When the positive feedback is so overwhelming that you turn off comments on all your social media pages pic.twitter.com/wgTNHHxWpo
— H𝐎mer (@OregonHomer) February 23, 2026
Pate, however — despite turning off the comments on his YouTube and TikTok links — claims that most of the negative feedback (95%) are from “bots.”
“No, they haven’t been coming after me. An army of Twitter bots has come after me, but if you have access to some of the tools we have, you know who is and isn’t real on the internet. I’d say over 95% at the time of airing today, the pushback we’ve gotten online has been from fake accounts,” Pate said after the interview.
“So the actual feedback we’ve gotten from the concept of bringing the president on the show has been 10-to-1 positive when it comes to real people voicing their feedback. And then there’s been a sliver of outright negative.”
pic.twitter.com/szC0UVMhHI I mean listen to this. It’s incredible coping good lord.
“95% giving negative feedback are bots”
“10 to 1 of the REAL people gave good feedback to having him on”Props to his team for getting rid of the bots that follow him I guess
— GOcrazy (@GOcrazyFutbol) February 23, 2026
Pate, after beginning his career in sports media at affiliates for ESPN Radio and NBC Radio, joined CBS Sports in 2024 before joining ESPN as a contributor last year. He also hosts The Locker Room: CFB with Will Compton and Taylor Lewan as part of their Bussin’ With The Boys brand.