openpolitics.com

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.

.. 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.

.. 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.

.. 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.
.. 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.

.. 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.”

.. 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.

.. 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.