You Have to Grind This Motherfucker Down
The only correct way to interview This Guy has never been tried.
Again, last night, on CNN. We have to see it all again, from this guy. Stoop shouldered, puffy midsection, rich suit buttoned unflatteringly over his gut, big red tie hanging down to his dick. The sculptured wispy hair that curves into horns from a certain angle, the palms out hand gesturing, the thing where he pulls down his bottom lip and lets his bottom row of plastic teeth shine and takes a dramatic pause before making a dumbass point. The weird fluctuations in his voice from trilly to gravelly to breathy, the painted eyelids that sit uncomfortably in a pale tanning booth puddle, the lies. And the crowd. The pink-cheeked enraptured crowd. The retired lawyers and insurance agents and young guys with bad haircuts in Men’s Wearhouse suits who never had the benefit of reading a good book in their lives. The pathetic crowd, with such a low bar for entertainment. The same crowd that used to cheer for the lions to eat the slaves in gladiator times. This is the best they can get now.
And the words. The torrent of words, pushing forward through any air or brains or other words in their path. Not sinuous, sly words, but instead just loud, maximal words, the most words, the biggest words, words like a whole rugby team running full speed into a wall for fun. Words from a bad sitcom, a lowest-common-denominator show with scab writers aired in laundromats to bored people slumped in chairs who will take any stimulation they can get. Words that do not connect to one another sentence by intelligible sentence, but instead just leap out brashly, showing themselves off phrase by phrase, each standing proudly alone, and independent, and irrational.
“I’m not talking about terminating the constitution. I’m talking about cherishing the constitution,” he said. “Things are happening that are very positive,” he said. “Drill baby drill,” he said. “They don’t even speak English in that Chinatown,” he said. “She’s a wack job,” he said. “They’re destroying our country,” he said. “Many people were killed,” he said. “Cold, blank range, they shot her,” he said. “That thug.”
And the reporter, meek and gesturing, standing in a firehose and trying to catch a futile drop. Saying “Mr. President” to the swollen declaiming half insane man who would not stop talking. Saying something was not true, and then getting defiantly blown away by an empty tidal wave of nothingness, as the crowd cheered. We want transgression! We want fantasy! We want blood! Doesn’t matter who the reporter is. Always the same. If he picked her up and choked her and slammed her to the stage and planted a foot on her chest and raised his arms, he would get the loudest cheers of the whole night. This is pro wrestling, and he is experienced. He knows it, and the crowd knows it, but the people who are paid to analyze it never quite seem to get it. He is an idiot savant, a professional in a sea of self-serious amateurs. A big dumb rhinoceros ramming his head into the side of a Land Rover over and over to the squealing delight of the tourists within.
There is only one way to properly interview this guy. It has never been done to the best of my knowledge. It can be, though. He will show up for it, like a moose to a salt lick. Here is how it’s done: A table and two chairs and no audience. Him, his shifty padded ass in the chair, and an interviewer. An interviewer who is not a patsy or a pushover and who has been in fistfights and whose professional veneer is something cultivated to cover a deep sense of rage. You sit there and you ask him a question. He says his bullshit. You let him say his bullshit just long enough to determine that he is not answering the question. Then you break in and ask him the question again. You let him say his bullshit again, to launch off on a wild tangent, to do his faux outrage and accusations and all that. When it is clear he is doing that, which will not take long, you break in and ask him the question again. You put the question to him clearly. You let him blah blah blah and then you put the question to him again. Don’t let him run off down a side path forever. You let him speak until it’s clear he won’t answer and then you ask again. Cut off his mic, if necessary. He won’t like that. Doesn’t matter. Ask the clear question again. When he doesn’t give a clear answer, ask it again. The same question. Ask it again. Ask it again. Ask it again. Ask it again.
I don’t care if you need to spend the entire hour-long interview repeating the same question in a calm, clear, and forceful way. In fact this would be fine. With each passing round of question-and-no-answer, his petulance will increase, as will the evident absurdity of this stupid, cowardly man. Keep asking the question until you get an answer. If you never get a real answer, you will not move on from that question. You will sit across a small table in close physical proximity and let him wave his hands and whine and then you will put the question to him again. You will break him. Break him. You have to follow him down every turn of the rhetorical maze until there is nowhere else for him to go. First he will bloviate, then he will get annoyed, then he will get truly angry, then he will get frustrated, then, at last, he will be faced with his own helplessness. This is where he will break. Maybe he will get up and storm out, a contemptible little baby, unable to answer a single question. Fine. Maybe he will scream himself hoarse with accusations of bad faith and bias and conspiracy, retreating ever further into an ever more obvious cocoon of stubbornness and fear, a scared, small man, unwilling to face anything so terrifying as reality. Fine. Or maybe he will, after all of the gnashing of teeth and rending of shiny ties, answer the question. Fine.
The point is that you are there to get the answers to questions. You don’t leave the question without the answer. You don’t let him pound you with loud and empty words until you just move on because it seems best. You don’t say, “Well sir, that’s just not true,” and then move to another question. You don’t say, “Well, we have a lot of other questions to get to.” You don’t let him build a fortress of stupidity that you feel unable to pick apart with tweezers. His entire hurricane of lies will blow right past you if you just sit there calmly, unmoving, and then, when the breeze dies down a little bit, ask the question again. And ask the question again. If the entire thing descends into an Andy Kaufman-esque spectacle of moody silence, a standoff with a mute and angry refusenik, fine. That’s fine. You have one job and it is not a complicated one. Your job is to get the answer to the question. Did you get an answer? A real answer? No? Then you ask the question again. That’s all.
If and when you get your answer, you move on to the next question. And repeat.
Until we get this, we will just get what we got last night, over and over and over again. Might as well not do that at all. “Well sir, the facts say you’re just incorrect on that, Mr. President.” What the fuck is the point. That is not worth doing. It’s not worth scheduling that sort of thing and planning it and finding a crowd and airing it on national television. In fact it is detrimental to the health of our sickly democracy to do it. All of this fretting by journalists and pundits and cable news network chiefs about How To Cover This Man at This Fraught Time in Our History is unseemly. Put that motherfucker in a small chair and turn the thermostat in the studio up. Make that motherfucker sweat. Bore in. Stay there. And stay there. And stay there longer than him. He can’t fucking last. He is destined to fold. Have a little fucking nerve, please. You ask the question. And you ask the question again. Eventually he will either pass out, or cry, or answer the question. Fine. We have all the time in the world.
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I have followed This Fucking Guy from Iowa to West Virginia to Pennsylvania to DC and ultimately discovered that None of This Garbage Is Important. Go join a union.
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This is THE BEST thing I have ever read about this man -- and it reads like a monologue from my new favorite movie (which is half NETWORK, half RAGING BULL). This piece deserves to go viral as hell. And I will personally tell both my followers to read it.
Okay, I've subscribed. You won this motherfucker over.