It is only sort of true to say that you know what you're going to get when Donald Trump sits for a television interview. It is true in the sense that, after a decade spent alternately threatening and occupying the White House, everyone knows how he is going to act. There is some more uncertainty when it comes to what Trump is actually going to do, but even these variables aren't notably variable. He is going to act like Donald Trump, or some version of Donald Trump. This is something that can be prepared for, to some extent.
If he is being interviewed by someone from one of the television channels he likes, Trump will be drawling and digressive in his familiar toastmaster mode, the tone he puts on when he is Making Some Remarks before an audience that he senses is eager to applaud him. "A little secret," he told Fox News' Laura Ingraham while showing her around his increasingly cluttered and gilded Oval Office, "throughout the years, people have tried to come up with a gold paint that would look like gold. And they've never been able to do it." No, Ingraham agreed, in a tone of hushed awe, while the Fox camera focused on a dorky little golden cherub above a door. "That's why it's gold." He sounds like he's talking in his sleep, murmuring through a dream in which he is doing exactly this sort of thing. That's one version.
The other version emerges in situations where Trump knows he might get asked a question he doesn't want to answer. These interviews are shot and staged differently, and not quite in the ways that presidential interviews generally have been. He will be in a room that is too big or stuffed with Trumpy doodads and signifiers—glossy wood and gold, picture frames and trophies and bad art, flagpoles clumped uncannily together like the seven fingers on a AI-generated image's hand. You will, for some reason, always be able to see Trump's entire body in a chair, squatting and heaving and canted in an uncanny way that might remind you of Blanka from Street Fighter wearing a suit. In close shots, you will always be able to see Trump's bottom teeth. The diction is different, brittle with distress and umbrage; he is immediately flustered and aggrieved, always, as if surprised—or not surprised, but offended and a little disappointed—that this nasty man or woman has not asked, not even once, whether that is real gold on those cherubs or just gold paint.
Trump's frustration in settings like those clearly has something to do with his supreme sensitivity to lèse-majesté, but it seems grounded in a more foundational frustration, which is that interviews like this are not designed to do the things that he wants interviews to do. For someone so steeped in and warped by television, Trump has an oddly stilted and inert sense of what it should be like. He understands that good TV is when he shouts at an underling and they go away or when he comes up with a really good idea that saves everything; he was casting himself in the lead of stories like this long before he got into politics. But what Trump actually prefers is something far more dramatically slack than that, a sort of endless rolling Entertainment Tonight segment in which some correspondent visits him on the set of his latest blockbuster, or just footage of him pointing and golfing with leering Robin Leach voiceover ladled over it. This is not what television is, but it is what Trump has always dreamed it would be: all those other stories about other people replaced by something much more luxurious and high-quality, for instance him sitting at a big table while everyone laughs at his jokes and thanks him, or him walking a news host around some gaudy space and pointing out the various fixtures, or him roping one perfect drive after another down the dead center of the fairway as a grateful nation puts its differences aside to shout "get in the hole" with one voice.
When Trump got upset with ABC News anchor Terry Moran during their interview earlier this week, it transparently had less to do with any of Moran's qualified and exceedingly polite attempts at correcting whatever weird lie the president had just told than with a breach in what Trump understood as the principle of the thing. "Terry," Trump said at one point, "you can’t do that—hey, I'm giving you the big break of a lifetime. You know, you’re doing the interview. And I picked you because, frankly I never heard of you, but that’s okay. But I picked you, Terry, [and] you're not being very nice." At some level, Trump was mad that Moran had briefly deigned to correct the lie that Trump was telling about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man Trump's oaf cadres had renditioned to a torture gulag in El Salvador—in this case, about a hilariously specious interpretation of some of Garcia's tattoos, which Trump had misunderstood in an idiotic and apparently permanent way. But the "you can't do that" bit is the thing, the sound of a wrestler upset by his opponent's unwillingness or inability to play his scripted part, and put the champ over.
It is worth pausing for a moment to note how odious and stupid all this is. What we are talking about is the President of the United States going on television to smear a migrant, with the smear in question being the result of the president's inability to parse a very obvious bit of reactionary shitposting that had percolated up through social media's various toxic strata of influential bigots and mutants and arrived at Trump's desk when some aide printed the image on a piece of copy paper and handed it to him. That image purported to show that the migrant's tattoos—a pot leaf, a smiley face, a cross, and a skull—corresponded to the letters MS-13; it did so by superimposing those characters above the corresponding tattoo. Trump believed, or just said, that those superimposed characters were also tattooed on the migrant's hand—"and they looked, and on his knuckles he had MS-13." It is axiomatic that no one close to Trump corrected him on this; they would not have been close to him if that was something they were inclined to do. The whole cabinet that Trump has cast is people who live like this—reckless, stupid, proud, strange, unaccountable people who are not so much incapable of learning as they are fundamentally uninterested in any perspective and allergic to any truth but their own. It is less that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has disproven the germ theory of disease to his own satisfaction, for instance, than that he thinks it would be much more interesting if he came up with his own, more correct answer. The whole government is this, now, a collection of free radicals lurching, thirsty and bored, towards metastasis.
It is one of the defining Trump things that any belief that makes it into his mind will bump around in there forever; his understanding of the world is the sum of those things, thousands of permanent and perpetual irritants cut free from any context or facticity, smashing into each other and echoing forever inside of his luxuriously appointed skull. They drop bowling balls on the cars; there is no such thing as gold paint; they looked at his hand and the proof was right there. None of this, of course, is new. None of the beliefs are new, really, and nothing that Trump will do between this moment and his last one on earth will be new, or surprising in the least. It's just a matter of which echoes are ringing most loudly at that moment.
This presents a pretty decent argument against interviewing him on television, at least outside of the Exclusive: Trump Breaks Silence On Crown Molding In Oval Office stories on friendly media. It can be difficult, at this moment, to understand what elite news media is for, and what it is trying to do. For ABC News and Terry Moran, the chance to talk to the President of the United States is a chance to Make News, but also everyone knows what type of news it will make, and that it will not be very useful or interesting. "The best a reporter can hope for is an unintentionally revealing quote or two," Bill Grueskin writes at Columbia Journalism Review. "Exactly what Moran elicited about the promises big law firms made to stave off Trump’s wrath. 'They paid me a lot of money,' Trump said of the supposed pro bono millions. 'They just signed whatever I put in front of ’em. I’ve never seen anything like it.'"
If there is something new in that, it is solely in terms of a colorful new description of a familiar story. If that's the standard, then there is no sense pressing Trump any further; reach into the urinal for the shiny nickel at the bottom of it and the reward will be exactly those five cents. More to the point, though, there is no point in pressing Trump any further, because he is lying in a way that is so unsophisticated and profound as to be impenetrable. Whether Trump believes any of it is immaterial and, more than anything else, uninteresting. That Moran pushed back a bit on this particular lie and some others clearly flustered Trump, but flustering the single most readily flustered man in American political history is not much of an achievement. An interview with the president that is only this—an old story in weird new words, some images of the man himself scowling and blustering and blinking his eyes a lot, a futile attempt to blitz through a list of Important Questions that Trump is both unwilling and unable to answer in any meaningful sense—is manifestly not worth doing. Not just because it does not contribute anything new, but because those answers will only ever make those Important Questions seem more unknowable.
Trump understands the rhythm of television in the way that only someone profoundly warped and wounded by it can; where any other finer and more human thing might have been within him there are now just gallons of flat, room-temperature Access Hollywood exclusives sloshing about, a whole dead ocean inside. The lies that he tells are boring because there is just nothing to them; they're meaningless, unattached to anything, something that They Did or They Saw that he heard somewhere. It's not even bullshit; it's just gossip.
But Trump also knows where those sounds fit within the broader rhythm of a television interview, and if he understands what noises to make and when much more readily than he grasps what any of those sounds might signify or "mean," the interplay of those noises will still more or less assume the conventional shape. This does Trump a very big favor—everything looks and sounds much more fucked up and stupid than you'd expect, but you can still see the outline of a Presidential Interview in there, just with any residual social value replaced entirely by lead and chalk.
That it will make anyone watching it at the very least more confused and in some meaningful ways more stupid—if it will, through letting Trump fill all those familiar spaces with a heady, sewage-forward stew of carcinogenic gossip and nonsense, lead those viewers into that impenetrable and subjective Trumpian incoherence—seems much less important to the media organizations producing it than that it all continue to look how it's supposed to look, and unfold more or less in the ways that it has always unfolded. There are things that a sufficiently dedicated and prepared journalist could do to mitigate this. Stop the interview to not just contest but disprove an obvious lie, for the sake of the viewer if not for the liar hunched in the opposite chair. Contextualize all that conjecture and insinuation. Ask the question and just keep on asking it until it is actually answered, as Hamilton Nolan once suggested. If he walks away, which he might, then he walks away. The job is not to simply fill the container, but to fill it in a useful way.
That those actions will necessarily will break up the rhythm of the thing is important, and not an accident. All throughout the culture, familiar institutional shapes are currently being put to depraved and unfamiliar use; the familiarity of those institutions has served as a sort of cover, although there is only so long that people will be able to abide the contradiction of, for instance, a National Institute of Health that is dedicated solely to making and keeping them sick. A reckoning of that size and shame would necessarily take time to land, but it is coming uneasily into view, everywhere and every day—the shapes and beats that contain and define the everyday are still in place, and they are terribly, unmistakably empty.
