By Rich Lowry
Wednesday, May 07, 2025
Years and years ago, a television executive sent me to do
a media training.
We looked at some clips, including one where I was
convinced that I and the conservative host I was teamed up with had lost a
debate to a progressive. The host got a very basic factual question wrong, and
the progressive called him on it, and I assumed that was game, set, and match.
Oh, no — to the contrary, the trainer explained. Without
realizing it, the host made a wholly erroneous rejoinder to the progressive,
who was nonplussed, hesitated, and said “um” once or twice.
In that moment, when an extremely certain (but incorrect)
statement was matched up against a faltering (but correct) statement, the
extremely certain statement prevailed going away.
Good news: We had won, after all!
That’s how it goes on TV, which is highly sensitive to
nonverbal cues and rewards an unshakably confident bearing. This is why, for
instance, Bill O’Reilly never lost a debate on his old Fox show (he wasn’t the
aforementioned host, by the way). His guest might have been better informed and
might have been right about whatever was the question of the evening, but no
one could out-dominate O’Reilly on his own turf.
President Trump, too, never loses an exchange on stage or
during interviews. He is The O’Reilly Factor squared, liberated from the
confines of a studio and bestriding the world with an utterly impregnable
confidence that gives him an advantage in almost any circumstance.
Consider Trump’s MS-13 back-and-forth with Terry Moran of ABC News during a 100-days interview. The
president seemed to be suggesting that the alphanumeric “MS-13,” pretty clearly
added to a photo of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s knuckle tattoos for the sake of
explicating what each image meant, were also tattooed on Abrego Garcia’s
fingers.
Moran contested this but didn’t want to get bogged down,
so he was the one who appeared a little skittish, while Trump came back to the
question again and again, spoke with total assurance, and upbraided Moran for
his alleged unwillingness to acknowledge reality.
The average viewer, judging by the standards that people
use when watching TV, surely would have thought Trump sounded right, just like
my TV host in the clip mentioned above.
This is why Trump can do any interview at any time and
not worry about getting cornered or looking particularly bad. Two of his big
100-days interviews were with Moran and Kristen Welker of Meet the Press,
not journalists you select as a Republican president if you are defensive and
afraid.
On Meet the Press, Trump bulldogged his way through
everything, no matter how awkward.
Whether he’s contradicting himself, advancing an
unpersuasive argument, or defending a falsehood, there’s never a doubt that
Trump is in control.
There’s a different way of achieving the same result. JD
Vance appears in control because he usually knows more than his interviewers.
Trump is simply in control.
The president wouldn’t be where he is now without this
quality, but it permits him to get away with mind-bending leaps of logic and
reality-denying assertions that distort his movement and degrade the country’s
political conversation.
Trump’s confidence also gets him only so far; it can’t
overcome how people are feeling about matters affecting their daily lives (the
fallout of Covid in 2020 and perhaps the fallout of the trade war, if it is bad
later this year).
That said, Trump is a media trainer’s dream — all
overwhelming confidence, all the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment