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.
Is Everything Wrestling?
the rest of the world has caught up to wrestling’s ethos. With each passing year, more and more facets of popular culture become something like wrestling: a stage-managed “reality” in which scripted stories bleed freely into real events, with the blurry line between truth and untruth seeming to heighten, not lessen, the audience’s addiction to the melodrama. The modern media landscape is littered with “reality” shows that audiences happily accept aren’t actually real; that, in essence, is wrestling.
.. The way Beyoncé teased at marital problems in “Lemonade” — writing lyrics people were happy to interpret as literal accusations of her famous husband’s unfaithfulness — is wrestling. The question of whether Steve Harvey meant to announce the wrong Miss Universe winner is wrestling. Did Miley Cyrus and Nicki Minaj authentically snap at each other at last year’s MTV Video Music Awards? The surrounding confusion was straight out of a wrestling playbook.
..In politics, as in wrestling, the ultimate goal is simply to get the crowd on your side. And like all the best wrestling villains — or “heels” — Donald Trump is a vivacious, magnetic speaker unafraid to be rude to his opponents; there was even a heelish consistency to his style at early debates, when he actively courted conflict with the moderator, Megyn Kelly, and occasionally paused to let the crowds boo him before shouting back over them. (The connection isn’t just implied, either: Trump wasinducted to the WWE’s Hall of Fame in 2013, owing to his participation in several story lines over the years.)
.. Ted Cruz’s rhetorical style, with its dramatic pauses, violent indignation and tendency to see every issue as an epic moral battleground, was sometimes reminiscent of great wrestling heels. The way Rick Perry called Trump’s candidacy a “cancer” that “will lead the Republican Party to perdition” before endorsing Trump and offering to serve as his vice president: this was a tacit admission that all his apocalyptic rhetoric was mainly for show. Pure wrestling, in other words.
.. (In wrestling, it’s considered a cardinal sin to genuinely hurt your opponent, thereby limiting their ability to work.
.. to analyze each narrative not just through its in-world logic (“this guy will win the championship because he seems more driven”) but by considering external forces (“this guy will win the championship because he is well-spoken enough to represent the company when he inevitably shows up on ‘Today’”
.. So when I think of how politics and pop culture are often compared to wrestling, this is the element that seems most transferable: not the outlandish characters or the jumbo-size threats, but the insistence on telling a great story with no regard for the facts. Donald Trump can claim there were thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering when the World Trade Center came down.
.. When everything becomes a story, the value of concrete truth seems diminished. There’s too much going on in the world to dive this deep into something as frivolous as entertainment, you might say.
.. And ultimately, we can’t expect that post-truth culture will somehow collapse because of its perfidiousness. The WWE, for instance, now tells its story without challenge: It’s outlasted all its major competitors and holds the rights to the very images wrestling’s history is made of.