Once again, the Brits show us that the key is to ask the same question, over and over, until you get an answer.
They don't want to answer the question, so they answer a different one. It's a problem as old as time when it comes to our friendly neighborhood politicos, but like most things it got significantly worse over the last six years or so. The complete and utter shamelessness of our most prominent public servants was captured most succinctly in speech by Donald Trump's "EXCUSE ME," which he used to interrupt people whose line of questioning he did not like by accusing them of interrupting him. Then he'd say some random crap he thought was more advantageous to him. But even less masterful scammers have learned to either start yelling at their interlocutor that they're a biased hack who hates America, or just start talking about something else.
The main way to combat this, it seems, is to ask the same question over and over. We saw a bit of this when Jonathan Swan of Axios pressed Trump on his COVID response in the summer of 2020, inducing something of a toddleric meltdown. We saw it with Paula Reid of CBS, again on COVID, in the White House Press Briefing Room. (In fairness, Reid did actually interrupt Trump before his "EXCUSE ME" there.) And we got a dose of it again this month, first with an interview Jared Kushner did to promote his book on Sky News. His interlocutor, Kay Burley, again made the case that the Brits (and in Swan's case, the Aussies) tend to be much better at this stuff than we are.
Maybe there's a whole study here in how the British have a monarch to honor and politicians to grill, as opposed to the weird deference Americans seem to have for the elected leaders who serve at their pleasure. But for now we'll just observe that, when repeatedly asked why Trump had a bunch of top-secret documents in his Mar-a-Lago basement, Kushner had no answer. His attempts to make this about previous investigations and the like were foiled when Burley simply asked again why Trump was stacking up national secrets at some trashy club. And for the millionth time, the feds did not descend on Trump's property out of nowhere. He had repeated opportunities to turn this stuff over across months and months, and he refused.
Another example of the form arrived this weekend courtesy of former Senator Al Franken. His exchange on CNN with Republican strategist Alice Stewart was also revealing in that it pointed to the kind of institutional brinkmanship, powered by shameless bullshitting, that Mitch McConnell pioneered well before Trump came on the scene:
Franken laid out the situation simply: Republicans, led by McConnell, refused to give Merrick Garland a hearing in 2016 on the basis that it was an election year and voters should get to decide who would choose the next Supreme Court Justice. Then, four years later, they confirmed a Supreme Court Justice a week before the election. There was zero governing principle in play here besides "Republicans want seats so they can enact conservative policy through the Supreme Court," but Stewart attempted to throw out some smokescreen about how this has happened before to legitimize the power grab. Franken broke down the screen by simply asking Stewart the same question, over and over: When did this happen before? By the end, she was wilting on-screen, exposed for defending the indefensible. Just admit you wanted the seats at any cost!
Anyway, we could all take a page from this in the future. Next time Joe Biden gets flaky at a public appearance, somebody should just keep asking the same question.
