Donald Trump faced a tough round of questions on Wednesday night at NBC’s Commander In Chief Forum when Matt Lauer lobbed him open-ended question after open-ended question—more akin to something you would ask a third grader than a potential president. While Lauer pounded away at Hillary Clinton about her emails during her first question, his first query of Trump was:
What have you experienced in your personal life or your professional life that you believe prepares you to make the decisions that a commander-in-chief has to make?
Yeah, that was a doozy, Matt. This was basically the equivalent of, “Why do you want to be president one day?” Open-ended questions are usually a gift to candidates—allowing them to answer however they want. In a situation where a journalist only has 30 minutes with a candidate and he’s covering something as complicated as foreign policy, this is child’s play. Wonder how many more truly illuminating questions we can nail Trump down on. Oh, here’s another:
You recently received two intelligence briefings ... Did anything in that briefing, without going into specifics, shock or alarm you? … Did you learn new things in that briefing?
Wow. How about this, “What did you do at school today, Donnie?” Ok, moving on, surely we’ll get to something meaty soon.
Will you be prepared on day one, if you’re elected president of the United States, to tackle these complex national security issues?
Now we’re getting down to it! “Have you completed your homework, Donnie?” For real, this went from bad to worse—it was by far the easiest set of questions I have ever seen asked of a presidential candidate. The inquiries didn’t test his knowledge of intricate foreign policy issues, they didn’t nail him down on specifics, they didn’t hold Trump’s feet to the fire in any way on his major flip-flop of the day—a decisive move away from the isolationism he has touted like a badge of honor to a more hawkish foreign policy posture. That happened the same day, for goodness sake. It was there for the taking and Lauer passed on it.
Instead of exhibiting the hyper-control around timing that he did with Hillary Clinton—interrupting her multiple times—Lauer let Trump ramble on long enough that the GOP nominee slipped into portions of his stump speech.
When Trump asserted that he had always been against the Iraq War, Lauer failed to note that he had in fact told Howard Stern otherwise during a 2002 interview.
And finally, Lauer wondered if Trump was prepared for the “emotional burden” of making critical foreign policy decisions.
If he had dropped the mic right there, we could have all laughed it off as an elaborately staged joke of an interview. Unfortunately, Lauer was serious. Either he didn’t know enough to ask the tough questions or journalists have such low expectations for Trump that they’re questioning him on a curve. Either way, it was one of the worst exhibitions of journalism this cycle, at the very least, and the country is worse off for it.