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OPINION
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A Lawyer’s Take on Why Kamala Gives Lousy Interviews

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
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AP Photo/Matt Rourke

For most people, it’s hard to put into words exactly why pols like Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and the rest of these commie weirdos are so terrible at interviews. There’s just something about them that you naturally distrust, something that trips off a red flashing light that makes you say, “Hey, this weasel is trying to put one over on me.” Your instincts are correct. You are absolutely right. These weasels are trying to put one over on you. They’re just not very good at it.

As an attorney, I ask people questions for a living. Sometimes, I do face-to-face interviews. Other times, I’m doing depositions of hostile witnesses or of witnesses who don’t appear on the surface to have an axe to grind, but sometimes you find an ax in there and they are grinding it. And then, of course, you ask questions of people in court. A huge part of being a lawyer is asking questions. It’s like being a regime media journalist, except we get paid better and we aren’t ridiculous hacks slavishly degrading ourselves for the benefit of the Democrat Party. Lawyers only slavishly degrade ourselves for the benefit of the Democrat Party some of the time.

I’ve learned a few things after doing this for about 30 years and countless proceedings that might be useful for people who don’t do it every day. Now, keep in mind that those instincts that you have when you watch the pols pretend to answer questions are absolutely correct. God, in His infinite wisdom, has bestowed all upon all of us an amazing bullSchiff detector. We just naturally seem to know when someone’s trying to scam us unless they’re very skilled at it. Neither Kamala Harris nor Tim Walz is skilled at it. They are stumbling clowns. They could have gotten good at it with practice, but they never had any practice. Kamala is from California. All-Man Tim is from Minnesota. These are deep blue states. It’s not like they ever spoke to anyone back home who doesn’t think exactly like them, and they certainly don’t know anyone from the local press who isn’t eager to help them. That’s why when they get asked a question that’s not even hard, like, “What would you do that’s different from Joe Biden?” they not only blow it, but they blow it like Nagasaki times Dresden to the Guernica power.

Here’s a basic truth I’ve learned after countless interactions where I was seeking information. If somebody doesn’t answer your question, he is either an idiot or he is trying to avoid answering the question, or both. Now, some people are too stupid to answer a question. They don’t understand it because they are dumb. I’m not putting Kamala or Tim beyond that. You don’t have to be a genius to be a Democrat. You just have to check the right boxes. But most of the time, when somebody doesn’t answer a question, it’s because he doesn’t want to. There are right ways and wrong ways of doing this. When the Democrat regime media flunkies try to get JD Vance to answer the question about whether Trump won the 2020 election, and he refuses to give a yes or no answer, there is a reason for that. He wants to highlight the fact that there were huge irregularities in the 2020 election and to challenge the false underlying premise that the 2020 election was legitimate and only a crazy, bad person of evil who hates America and is an insurrectionist would ever have any doubts about the 2020 election. Note that this doesn’t apply to the 2000 election, the 2004 election, or the 2016 election when Democrats lie about them. Rejecting a leftist premise is a legitimate and smart tactic for Republicans.

What’s weird is that Harris seems to reject the premise when regime media reporters accept her premises. You ask her how many illegal aliens she thinks should be allowed in the United States every year, and she’s going to start by telling you that she was raised a poor middle-class child, and then she’s going to babble for two minutes about how we need to not be bound by the boundaries that bind us, and she’s never going to answer the question. Again, she may be stupid and not know the answer. Still, more likely, even she knows that the true answer, which is “millions of illegals,” is not going to play well with normal American people who don’t think that the whole Third World should be invited into the United States to form a new voting bloc for Democrats. 

The nice thing about trials is that you have a judge, and if the witness doesn’t answer the question, you object, move to strike the answer as nonresponsive, and ask the judge to direct the witness to answer. Most judges get annoyed with people who don’t answer questions and tell them, “Witness, answer the question.” A dumb witness will not do what the judge says. That will end in hilarity. 

While the court can force somebody to answer a question, You don’t have that ability in a media interview. The best the reporter can do, assuming it’s a unicorn reporter who cares about getting the truth and not about sucking up to the Democrats, is ask the interviewee to answer the question again, thereby highlighting the evasion for the viewers.

I like to tell people that in a deposition, there are five good answers that they can give: yes, no, I don’t know, I don’t remember, and a one-sentence direct answer. When you are being deposed, you don’t want to help the other side. You should answer as succinctly as possible. You don’t want to assist the other side. When being interviewed as a GOP politician by what you can assume is a hostile regime media journalist, you should do things a little differently. I prefer a direct answer upfront, followed by an explanation. This way, you don’t seem evasive, and you get to highlight the facts you find important. For example, “What would you do to shut the border?” Answer: “First, I will reverse all the executive orders that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris reversed. Then I will do these other things.” This shows that you actually want to answer the question. Harris, of course, would proceed to toss an enormous word salad that makes you less informed than you were before she opened her trap.

There are politicians out there who are pretty slick when it comes to avoiding answering a tough question, even on the Democrat side. You can be frustrated by them but appreciate their technique. Obama is like that. The dude is smooth, even though lately he’s become a kind of a bitchy schoolmarm who hassles black men who don’t happen to have an eight-room multimillion-dollar mansion on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard about how much they are disappointing him. Kamala is no Obama, that’s for sure, and thank goodness. Obama was hard to beat – although, considering who we put up against him, I’m not sure he ever broke a sweat. I hope Kamala keeps doing interviews because she’s terrible, and every time she opens her mouth, it makes it that much more likely that Donald Trump will win.

My super-secret email address is Kurt.Schlichter@townhall.com

Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get the newest volume in the Kelly Turnbull People’s Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, the bestselling Amazon #1 Military Thriller, Overlord! And get his new novel about terrorism in America, The Attack!

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