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Gotcha questions

Part of me hates ‘gotcha’ questions – even when the person being got is Donald Trump ... and more ... what they tell us about President Bush II

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Part of me hates ‘gotcha’ questions – even when the person being got is Donald Trump It turns out the would-be leader of the free world doesn’t know his Hamas from his Hezbollah. But how many of us can honestly say we do? Protesters in New York take issue with Donald Trump’s ‘racist’ platform. Protesters in New York take issue with Donald Trump’s ‘racist’ platform. Photograph: Erik Pendzich/Demotix/Corbis Contact author @MarinaHyde

Know this: the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas is one of Donald Trump’s known unknowns. Whether it was an unknown unknown 48 hours ago is unclear, but all you need to know is that the US presidential hopeful has now declared he will know it “when it is appropriate”. Given that it would probably be an eeny-meeny-miny-moe situation before he decides which of the two countries to bomb, the pair of them can probably live with their own Z-listery for now.

Or are Hamas and Hezbollah not, like, countries? Not even Hugh Hewitt – the conservative talkshow host who asked Trump to name the two leaders of these militant whatever-they-ares – dared to ask the Republican frontrunner that one. Like the death of that Spinal Tap drummer, perhaps, some things are “best left unsolved”.

For his part, Trump professed distaste for “gotcha questions”. As well he might. If knowledge were power, the only thing he’d be running is a fever.

More shamefully – and Trump does not feel shame, which is a genuine superpower for real-life humans – I have to admit that part of me secretly hates politicians being asked gotcha question as well. Not all of me:a significant percentage feels that delicious rush of schadenfreude when one of them thinks Africa is a country, or can’t name a single novel, or something.

But there are many times when the embarrassment is just too great. Not Trump’s embarrassment. As I say, so radioactive is his self-confidence that the embarrassment is not his at all. But the vicarious embarrassment, or the sheer excruciating awkwardness of it all, can feel unpleasantly overwhelming for the beholder. I know a lot of people who get this way about Borat, and who – when Sacha Baron Cohen’s creation is at his most horrifyingly revealing of an interviewee – actually have to leave the room or bury their head in a pillow until it lets up a bit.

Obviously, I think white supremacists should be exposed as idiots. And obviously, I think Donald Trump ought to be within bluffing distance of Middle Eastern politics. But sometimes the reality is a little too rich for the blood. Take Sarah Palin. Clearly, Madam was horrifyingly entertaining on one level. But I was able to enjoy Tina Fey’s version of her rather more for its being at one remove.

Quite how much reality you can bear is a matter of personal taste and fortitude. And it can, as we know, get very real. George W Bush started two major wars – and I still have no clue if he ever found out the answer to the Hamas/Hezbollah question.

The one indication we have on his thinking was an overheard microphone moment at the G8 in 2006, when he outlined his diplomatic vision for Lebanon. “What they need to do,” he explained to Tony Blair, “is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit.” I remember reading that at the time and thinking: Jesus, is that it? Is that how this stuff gets fixed? (A question to which the answer, if the intervening years in the region are any indicator, is a resounding no.)

You’d have hoped that America would have had a bit more to go on than body language

It was the same soon after that, when Bush held a dinner at the White House for Hamid Karzai and Pervez Musharraf. Remember: to Bush, Musharraf was like that fact you’ve been told a thousand times but just can’t keep a hold of. (Please don’t picture the Bush memory palace as an outhouse with a single swinging lightbulb. I’m pretty sure there was a backroom of some sort.) The first sight of the lacuna came before he was elected, when an interviewer asked him to name the leader of Pakistan. “The General,” Bush squirmed. Pressed on a name he could only flounder, with that poker tell of a smirk: “We just call him the General”.

By the time he was inviting whatsisname to dinner, though, and tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan were at their most dangerous pitch for some time, Bush had found a different way to be across things. “It’ll be interesting for me,” the American president explained to reporters, “to watch the body language of these two leaders to determine how tense these things are.”

Wait! The body language? Or rather, Dubya’s reading of said body language? Look, I have no wish to discredit body language, that rigorous modern science, which is largely practised by self-styled experts in the Daily Mail attempting to divine the state of a celebrity couple’s marriage from a single red-carpet photo.But you’d have hoped that at that stage in the rolling crapstorm of its early 21st-century foreign policy America would have had a bit more to go on than that. I understand it still retained a state department, for instance, and the CIA.

Still, the fact that body language was our best lead certainly explains a lot of what came after. (That said, perhaps I am being unfair. Collectors of historical trivia may care to know that the official White House menu for that night listed one of the courses as “fondue”; and if there is a dish on this Earth more set up for examining the aggressively complex political dynamics of the various skewer-holders, then I should like to hear of it.)

As for the rest of us, perhaps the virulence of our reaction to high-profile incidents of cluelessness is a poker tell itself. The best comedy of embarrassment mocks deficiencies we like to think we are above but which we have not, perhaps, entirely eradicated. One of the reasons The Office was so brilliant and near the knuckle was that David Brent’s blundering on issues such as race was a grotesque version of the clumsiness many of us are capable of in smaller ways, and wish to God we weren’t. Is there not something of this in the glee with which many have set upon Trump’s ignorance? How many of those crowing would have been able to name the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, had you whipped their internet-enabled devices away from them the second they found out he couldn’t? Of course, they are not running to be leader of the free world (though not so as you’d know it from the self-regard of most social media accounts). But perhaps the virulence of the attack suggests a certain self-defence. Indeed, given that I have just written an entire column on the subject, I assume you have already divined that, in a spot quiz, I could have named the leader of Hamas but not of Hezbollah.