CBS’s interview with Donald Trump was an abdication

The elephant in the room is that he lies all the time

When you sit down with someone who constantly says things that aren’t remotely true, you have a choice to make: Do you confront them? Or do you enable them?

Sadly, in her interview with Donald Trump broadcast on Sunday, CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell – like so many journalists before her – chose to do the latter.

(Here’s the interview as broadcast; Here’s the full transcript of the 90-minute exchange.)

It was hardly unexpected. Given CBS’s abject surrender to Trump in a bogus lawsuit last summer, and its new Trump-friendly leadership, the man had no reason to fear confrontation.

But confrontation is the only way any journalist will ever start chipping away at the key, underlying questions about Trump that the public deserves answers to. Among them:

• Is he delusional, or is he a liar, or is he both?

• Is he being fed false information from his staff, or is he just making stuff up himself?

• Is he mentally competent?

• Does he know basic facts?

• Does he understand the terms he uses?

• Does he have any actual policy views, or is it all just about accruing personal power?

• How profound is his racism?

What Should Have Happened

The first step should have been to push back on the things Trump said that were flatly incorrect.

Zeteo’s Mehdi Hassan has compiled a short list of some of Trump’s most outrageous assertions, along with the fact-checks O’Donnell should have made on the spot. Here’s a fact-check from CNN’s Daniel Dale, who points out that the vast majority of Trump’s false claims have been previously debunked – so fact-checking in real time wouldn’t have been hard.

Seeing how Trump responds to being confronted with reality would have been informative. (Keep in mind that journalists are the only members of the public who get close enough to burst Trump’s protective bubble.)

But beyond that, my view is that a sit-down interview with Trump shouldn’t focus on topical questions. Trump is too adept at responding with rambling, zombie talking points that tell you nothing at all.

A sit-down interview should focus on Trump’s lack of credibility, and on assessing his intellectual and mental state. Here are some of the questions that O’Donnell should have asked:

• Where do you get your information? For instance, you say that 25,000 American lives are saved every time the military blows up an alleged drug boat off the coast of South America. That’s completely absurd. Around 80,000 Americans total die annually from drug overdoses — and most of them from fentanyl, which does not come to the U.S. from South America. So who told you that? Or did you just make up that number yourself?

• Who told you it was legal to blow up those boats without any form of due process? Every legal expert we’ve talked to says it’s a clear violation of domestic and international law. And why blow them up rather than interdict them?

• Are there any limits to your presidential power? Be specific.

• Do you really believe that the 2020 election was stolen, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary? It’s simply not true. Why do you persist in this lie?

• Tell us in your words what you think happened on January 6, 2021. (Followed up by the well-established facts to the contrary.)

• Who pays for tariffs? Are you aware that it is not the exporting country, but the U.S. importers?

• You often say that Venezuela emptied out its insane asylums and sent the residents to the U.S. There is no evidence of that whatsoever. Are you perhaps confusing insane asylums with political asylum? Do you understand the concept of political asylum?

• How is it a national emergency that Brazil prosecuted its former president for staging a coup attempt?

• Are you aware that grocery prices are up since you took office?

• What is your health-care plan?

• Why are you cancelling so much federal cancer research? Who is for that?

• Every reputable poll shows that your job-approval ratings have fallen into deeply negative, almost unprecedented levels. Do you deny that?

• You have called a number of Democrats “communist.” How do you define communist?

• You initially said the new White House ballroom would not impact the existing building, but – shockingly -- you ended up razing the entire East Wing. Why did you lie about that?

• Why are you only welcoming white immigrants to this country?

• Why do you keep referring to accomplished Black people as “low IQ?”

• Are you aware that the “IQ test” that you so often talk about is actually a test to assess the early signs of dementia? Why did you call it “very hard”? And why do people keep giving you that test?

• Why were you given an MRI at Walter Reed Hospital?

• What is the population of the United States?

• How old is Barron?

Not the First Time, Not the Last Time

I’ll be honest: I’ve written variations on this column before. The most recent was in May, when Time Magazine failed to confront Trump about his lack of credibility: “The pushback Trump should have gotten from Time.” The first was in 2017: “Free advice for the next journalist who gets an interview with President Trump.”

There’s a reason I repeat myself, however. Trump doesn’t often sit down with a non-sycophantic interlocutor. So every time he does so, and is treated like a normal president, is a tragically lost opportunity for the public.