Trump Jokes About Cheating On NCAA March Madness Bracket With Fox News Reporter
President Donald Trump joked with Fox News Senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy about cheating on his NCAA Basketball March Madness bracket.
The 2025 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Men’s Basketball Tournament — also known as March Madness — has been brutal to brackets, the predictive forms that have become a cultural touchstone year after year.
Trump spoke to reporters on the South Lawn as he departed the White House on Friday for a weekend that included an NCAA event, and after handling a foreign policy question from another reporter, he took questions from Doocy.
His first question for Trump was whether he filled out a bracket:
REPORTER: Can you give Putin a deadline for the ceasefire?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Not a deadline, but I think we’ll have one. I think, you know, they’re going at it pretty heavy right now, as you probably saw, both of them. But I think we’ll have it done fairly soon.
PETER DOOCY: President Trump, did you fill out a NCAA March Madness Bracket?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I didn’t, I should have. Have there been upsets, a couple, right?
PETER DOOCY: Too late now?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: A little bit late. I should give you one, but maybe backdate it, right?
That would be a conspicuous attempt if Trump tried it. As of Saturday night, there were only 3 perfect brackets remaining after a string of early upsets, according to the NCAA:
We began the day with 181 perfect brackets. No. 4 Purdue’s 76-62 win over No. 12 McNeese took out 40 brackets and the biggest bracket buster of the day came when No. 10 Arkansas knocked off No. 2 St. John’s, 75-66, eliminating 118 more.
The final 23 brackets were gradually diminished throughout the day, including the last perfect brackets from the Men’s Bracket Challenge Game, CBS, Yahoo and X’s BCG. USA Today’s final bracket was eliminated Friday.
In the women’s tournament, the NCAA says “fewer than 3,000” perfect brackets remain:
The tournament began with approximately 5 million brackets across major online games (Women’s Bracket Challenge Game, ESPN, CBS, Yahoo and USA Today). Friday ended with about 83,000 perfect brackets left and fewer than 3,000 are advancing to the second round, according to publicly available date. Last year, around 1,300 advanced into Sunday’s action.
Watch above via C-SPAN.
