Trump the Destroyer...

How Donald Trump Destroyed the Interview

A century-old political institution may have met its match.

By Jack Shafer

The interview is the Niagara that fills the news ocean. A quick check of the front page of the New York Times, a scan of any 30-minute block of CNN, or a few clicks on the POLITICO home page establish it: For generations, the interview has been a linchpin of the Fourth Estate, a way for journalists to assemble the authoritative story of who our leaders are, sort the false from the true, and hold power accountable. Conducted in person, over the phone, via email, and over Skype, the interview has become indispensable to the free press and especially to political journalists, who depend on it to X-ray politicians for the truth.

But in 2016, the interview appears to have met its match: Over the past 12 months of the presidential campaign, Donald Trump has dulled its power with his systematic evasions, contradictions and deceptions, making a general mockery of the form. Thanks to his skills at quibbling, his talent for the nonsequitur, and his willingness to reverse himself inside a single sentence, Trump has figured out how to soften rather than sharpen public discourse every time he is interviewed, blurring it into yet another form of meaningless PR, and—if he continues—destroying a journalistic institution in the process.

The latest example was his most-hyped appearance yet, his one-on-one prime-time interview with Fox News Channel anchor Megyn Kelly. In any normal cycle this meeting would have culminated in a campaign-defining shootout. As an attorney, Kelly brings to her news interrogatories a mindfulness that makes other journalists look slack, something she proved in the first Republican debate when she prompted Trump to overreact by confronting him with his own misogyny. From the starting gun, he undercut it completely. Trump even opened with a lie, when Kelly asked him to confirm what he had conceded to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in April—that retweeting an unflattering photo of Ted Cruz’s wife Heidi had been a “mistake.” Trump denied it—“Actually, I didn’t say it that way,” he said, when of course he had said it exactly that way. Kelly bore down on him, contesting the lie. But from his experience, Trump knows that even tenacious interviewers will give up and move on to the next question if faced with repeated categorical denials. He dug in deeper with that time-sucking ploy of his that occupies the semantic territory between double-talk and filibuster. Kelly moved on, her lawyerly spirit broken by his word-scramble, and the interview degenerated into a soft-focus meeting between frenemies.

That was only the latest example of Trump sabotaging a Q&A. He sabotages interviews not because he hates to be interviewed. More than any candidate running for president this year, he loves to engage the press in conversation. What he refuses to do is to be pinned down by and defend his own comments, repeatedly denying having said some easily verifiable thing. If Trump has been anywhere on an issue, chances are he’s been everywhere, expressing wildly incongruous positions on abortion, on immigration, on refugee issues, on health-care policy, on defeating ISIS, and more. The interview has gone from invaluable franchise into another forum for his lies. “Play [the tape] for me. Because I’d like to hear it,” he told the Washington Post over the phone this week when told he had claimed to have raised $6 million for veterans. But before the tape could be cued and played, Trump exited the Post interview, presumably to lie to a journalist holding on another line.

As a candidate, Trump’s fibs make entertaining copy. But as president, not even the cynics will be laughing at his fictions—and it’s worth thinking just how much this damage matters to America.

The interview enjoyed a central place in journalism for more than a century and a half before Trump arrived to corrupt the form. According to scholar Michael Schudson, the interview emerged as an American journalistic convention in the 1860s as the press transitioned from serving as the political parties mouthpieces into genuine diggers of news. The historical record of those earliest interviews is sketchy, Schudson writes, with the term “interview” being applied to “any kind of meeting and conversation between people,” even if it didn’t result in verbatim quotation. The interview gave journalists an almost unique mechanism to enquire and to test—that is, extract useful, newsworthy information from sources, and to get them to confirm what is already thought to be true. Its aggressive nature caused one English correspondent to liken the interview to a “modern and American Inquisition” in 1871.

The interview also changed the nature of presidential politics. At one time, getting a president’s views on the record meant quoting one of his speeches. Presidents would talk to reporters about the issues, but generally forbid them to quote the conversations because interviews seemed too familiar and undignified. That changed in 1867 when President Andrew Johnson, on the verge of being impeached, summoned correspondent Joseph B. McCullagh to the White House to hear and broadcast his side of the story. “The damn newspapers are as bad as the politicians in misrepresenting me,” Johnson told McCullagh, asking only to be quoted accurately. What Johnson instigated soon spread across the land, on to Europe, and eventually conquered all of journalism.

The interview became indispensable to journalism not because it works as a truth detector, but because it established useful ground rules for news reporting. As an act of “impersonal surveillance”—Schudson’s term—the interview put news subjects (politicians, potentates, captains of industry) on notice that their words and action were being noted and recorded for posterity. This surveillance, in turn, creating a sort of “impersonal social control”—Schudson’s coinage, again—that kept some sort of semblance of order in the house of truth. Yes, news subjects could still use the interview form to lie, but at the price of being found out and humbled and shamed. Even Richard Nixon, as wily a liar ever to submit to an interview, could not escape its censuring power, as David Frost wore him down in a set of 1977 interviews and got him to apologize for his transgressions.

Trump has defeated the interview by ignoring the impersonal social control it thrusts upon its subjects. Adopting a policy of maximum self-contradiction, he made a practice of reversing himself when expressing something as fact, frustrating his monitors. For example, one day in March he told ABC’s Good Morning America that he had seen a TV ad criticizing him. Minutes later he told NBC’s Today program that he hadn’t seen the ad. One day he says he’ll pay for the legal fees of supporters who punch protesters, the next day he says, “I didn’t say that.”

One day he tells Fox and Friends that Ted Cruz’s father was somehow implicated in the assassination of John F. Kennedy—”I mean, what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald, shortly before the death—before the shooting? It’s horrible.” The next he’s denying that implication to a reporter: “Of course I don’t believe that [about Cruz’s father]. I don’t believe it, but I did say ‘Let people read it.’ Speaking about the use of nuclear weapons at an MSNBC town hall in March, Trump set some sort of record in contradicting himself in one screwy sentence, saying, “I’m not going to use nuclear, but I’m not taking any cards off the table.”

What of Trump’s reputation for being a liar? “I don’t lie, I mean I don’t lie. In fact, if anything, I’m so truthful that it gets me in trouble, OK? They say I’m too truthful. And, no I don’t lie,” he told Greta Van Susteren in February. As my colleagues Michael Kruse and Noah Weiland documented earlier this month in a lengthy piece, almost everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth is provisional. Give him a few minutes, a couple hours, or even several years, and he’ll reverse most of what he has previously said.

Of course, Trump isn’t the only politician whose views turn elastic. This video supercut, for example, traps Hillary Clinton reversing her views on big issues over several years. But Clinton’s shifts aren’t directly comparable with Trump’s. It takes her months and sometimes years to revise her views, and most often the changes are guided by political calculation. Plus, interviewers make her forfeit a measure of credibility every time she switches views, as when she changed from being against gay marriage to being for it. But Trump’s are so frequent as to be arbitrary. Does he not remember from day to day what positions he’s taken? Or does it not matter to him what his position is, just that he has one?

Trump consistency about being inconsistent seems almost calculated to destroy the accountability that comes with being interviewed. It has already managed to displace the usual policy wonkery and debate of issues with something showier and more grand. A Trump political rally seeks to focus collective emotions, not make reasoned cases for one set of policies over another. To borrow a page from the rhetoricians, Trump rejects logos (the appeal to reason) when making his pitch and goes directly to pathos (the appeal to emotion) as he strives to elicit tears, laughter, and ultimately agreement from his supporters.

In dismissing logic and consistency for pure emotion, Trump has created a powerful reality-distortion field in both politics and journalism. The field doesn’t actually permit Trump to “get away with” lying in interviews: If you query his supporters, most will concede their man’s many fibs. In their minds, though, the “truth” matters less than what’s in Trump’s heart. It’s not that truth and fact don’t matter to them—it’s that truth and facts don’t matter enough to affect whether you want to vote for him. In an environment in which political success is almost totally detached from information, the “truth-finding” interview is becoming one of the first casualties.

By rejecting the authority of the press to judge him, Trump has debilitated if not destroyed the power of the interview, befuddling a press corps that still believes it can bring him down with one more gotcha, one more “Pinocchio“, one more “Pants On Fire“ from the fact-checkers. Trump is laughing at them now.