“I just don’t want to talk about that right now,” says Donald Trump. “Everybody knows my views, and I think my views are very plain.” The Republican frontrunner has perfected the art of saying something outrageous and then deflecting any criticism or attempts to get any deeper reflection on his views and policy proposals from opponents and the media.
How does he do it? A recent debate with Ted Cruz sheds some light. When Cruz brings up the fact that Trump used to donate money to liberal politicians, Trump just yells, “I funded you,” aka an irrelevant fact, over and over. He then starts taunting Cruz by saying, “Go ahead,” interrupting him with this phrase every time Cruz wants to talk. Eventually, the moderator, Wolf Blitzer, gets so frustrated with the back and forth that he moves on to the next question, and Trump doesn’t have to face up to anything, in this instance, funding Democrats before restyling himself as a Republican.
Just like he’s an expert at being provocative, Trump is an excellent avoider, whether it comes to proving his claims that the Mexican government is sending criminals as illegal immigrants into the United States and about what he thinks that David Duke, former head of the Ku Klux Klan, endorsed him.
Other people have picked up on this tendency. Marco Rubio once sarcastically said, “Let’s see if he answers it,” when a debate moderator prepared to ask Trump a question. But look at where Trump is compared to Rubio now.