[Correction: The original version of this piece referred to Jim “Harper” rather than Jim Halpert.]
I watched Trump’s interview with Jonathan Swan on HBO’s Axios, and it’s worse than I thought it would be. Not worse for Trump, not worse for Axios, but worse for us. And not worse for us because Trump is worse than we thought. We’re worse than we thought.
Trump’s performance in that interview will strike many people as one of the most concrete examples of the degradation of the government under his administration, and it was definitely one of the most clear examples of how ill-informed and inarticulate Trump can be. I submit however that the most important takeaway is how much Trump reflected the rest of us.
In 2014 I presented a paper at the Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association’s convention in Baltimore. It was on our conflicting perceptions about legal loopholes and technicalities when they appear in fictional universes; mostly a bit of fluff, but I find thinking about those topics entertaining. Next to me was another person (I believe a PhD student) presenting a paper on I-cannot-remember-exactly-what, but I recall that in her presentation she used a quote from Derrida. It was apparently important enough to get its own slide in her PowerPoint deck. During the Q&A, an audience member asked her to explain the quotation, and she had to admit that in fact she had no idea what it meant.
On May 22nd, Joe Biden sat down for an interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box. To lead off the interview, Andrew Sorkin asked Biden about his plan to roll back Trump’s tax cuts and if he would do so immediately upon taking office even if the country was still reeling from the economic impact of the pandemic. In a move we’ve all come to expect from politicians, Biden sidestepped the issue and launched into answering a different preferred question. To his credit, Sorkin reeled Biden back in and restated the question. In fact, he followed up a second time. Rather than answering, Biden appeared flustered and went on the offensive asking Sorkin rhetorically to defend Trump’s tax plan. It took Joe Kernen interjecting towards the end of the 23-minute interview asking the question for the fourth time for Biden to finally answer.
During the Democratic presidential primaries, Elizabeth Warren repeatedly refused to answer direct questions about whether her healthcare plan would raise middle class taxes; she would dodge the specific question and instead just say that the middle class would enjoy a net economic gain. When she appeared on the Late Show, Stephen Colbert expressed the public’s frustration with her refusal to comment on middle class taxes and pointedly asked the question. The moment it was clear Warren was refusing to answer, he cut her off and called her out over it, even going to so far as to spoon-feed her a palatable way to explain the plan in total without dodging the tax question. Warren still refused to answer. A month later, in a post-debate interview with CNN, John King tried to get a straight answer on middle class taxes, and like Colbert, he fed her an answer that would both address the tax issue while also making it clear that the middle class would benefit, noting that Bernie Sanders had made that exact pitch successfully. Warren continued refusing to answer.
To be fair to Warren, the difference between her inability to answer a direct question and Trump’s is that Trump couldn’t respond because he didn’t know the answer; Warren couldn’t respond because she did. In either case though, the refusal to answer simple, direct follow-up questions told us a great deal. It told us Trump doesn’t understand fairly complex ideas, and that Warren doesn’t trust the public to understand fairly simple ones.
What made Trump’s interview with Jonathan Swan truly distinct was not Trump’s inability to answer a basic follow-up question; it was the theater of Trump’s printed charts that looked more appropriate for a 5th grade science fair and Swan’s Jim Halpert-esque reaction shots. It was distinct not because it revealed something we didn’t know, but because it managed to have Trump unwittingly play himself in a Monty Python parody.
The inability of a politician to answer a substantive question that goes beyond their prepared script is the norm. But, it’s not just the norm for politicians trying to control a media narrative. It’s the norm for most of us when it comes to political or social policy questions. When it comes to the issues that get us most the heated we’re unable to answer basic questions like “what do you mean by ____?” or “how do you know ____?”
Proponents of diversity training and implicit bias training cannot answer basic questions like “does this actually help?” (Research suggests it does not, and can instead make things worse.) People arguing that public school teachers are underpaid are unlikely to be able to answer a question as simple as “How much are they currently being paid?” That seems a prerequisite to being able to say the amount is too little. (The average is about $62,000.) The next time you hear someone saying we need to overturn Citizens United, ask them the very obvious follow up, “What was the ruling in that case?” They’ll likely be able to answer, but it’ll be a wrong answer – though you probably won’t be able to tell it’s a wrong answer because odds are you don’t know what the case was about either. Hardly anyone does, but that doesn’t stop us from thinking it’s the single most important thing to change in order to repair our democracy. Not understanding a pithy-sounded Derrida quote doesn’t stop us from leaning on it in a presentation at an academic conference.
In response to Trump’s interview with Swan, CNN offered this headline: “Jonathan Swan reveals the simple secret to exposing Trump's lies: basic follow-up questions.” That’s an accurate assessment, but it ignores the broader context. The secret to exposing Biden is also to ask basic follow-up questions. The secret to exposing a supposed policy wonk like Warren is to ask basic follow-up questions. The secret to exposing academicians who are holding court on topics beyond their narrow areas of research expertise is to ask basic follow-up questions, and the same is often true for those speaking on the areas they’re supposed to be expert in (myself included).
It’s follow-up questions all the way down. The secret to exposing your friends on Facebook who are making “agree or unfriend me” declarations is to ask basic follow-up questions, though you should be prepared for them to lash out angrily rather than to actually explain their position.
My takeaway from the interview wasn’t how little Trump knows about the issues or his inability to express his point of view or answer a simple question without going on a tangent about his ratings. I already knew all that about him.
My takeaway wasn’t thinking “My god, he’s terrible,” (even though I did have that reaction). It was “He sounds a lot like us. We’re terrible.”
Of course one yuge distinction between us and Trump is that he’s expected to be informed on these issues. Another distinction is that he’s expected to talk about them. One thing we ought to all have in common though — from Trump down to us shlubs making angry, ignorant declarations on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit — is the expectation to not act like we understand and care deeply about issues when we can’t answer a basic follow up question.
I looked up the Citizens United case on wikipedia and it read exactly as I remembered it. You never explicitly stated the common misconception or the actual facts of the case, so I'm curious: What specifically were you talking about in that paragraph? What falsehoods do large numbers of people apparently believe about Citizens United?