The Trumps: Aren’t they just grand? CNN hosted a special town hall with the fam Tuesday night—Donald, Melania, Eric, Don Jr., Ivanka, and Secret Other Maples Child (Tiffany)—to show Americans what it’s like being a Trump. CNN is doing this with each of the presidential candidates and their families this week. Which is fine. The voters like their candidates humanized; they want to know what the would-be president is like off the stump, hanging around at home. The voters are creeps.
But these splendid Trump family members are also adults who serve as prominent surrogates for the campaign. Well, maybe not Tiffany, who’s finishing up college. But Eric, Don Jr., Ivanka, and Melania are all well-coached Trump spokespeople, and they deserve tough questions, not an hour to go on at length, straight from the talking points, about the perfection of their father, without any real pushback.
There were some interesting nuggets to be gleaned. We learned much about the nuts-and-bolts process of How a Trump Thought Becomes a Tweet. When he’s in his office, Trump said, he “shouts out” tweet language to “one of the young ladies” who works there. After 7 p.m., though, Trump is the master of his own account.
One New Yorker asked Ivanka whether this campaign would hurt her friendship with Chelsea Clinton. Yet another asked Ivanka how her father dealt with her conversion to Judaism. Only on this last one, weirdly, did Ivanka seem to be genuinely uncomfortable answering, saying it was a very private matter about which she does not speak. (Please, people, keep it respectful, by pressing, say, Melania about whether she intends to spawn again, as one questioner did.)
The only relatively decent question of the night came when someone asked Melania whether she was upset with how Donald Trump speaks about women. Melania said that dearest Donald “treats everyone equally.”
This was the sort of opportunity that Anderson Cooper could have used to stir things up in a useful way for the voting public. He could have followed up by asking how she squares that sentiment with Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States. That could have gotten this smiling panel of cosmopolitans in the sort of uncomfortable position they deserved.
Some other fairly obvious questions that Cooper or the audience members could have asked:
- When the Trumps were going on about the great values that Father instilled in them as children, Cooper could have asked about whether one of those values was inciting violence at public events. Did he ever teach them to incite violence, or that violence was an appropriate response to protests?
- This one for the boys only: Did Father teach them to brag about their penis size on national television? Would they like to do so on this occasion—and if not, why not?
- How does everyone feel about their father’s continued employment of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who’s been charged with battery against a female reporter?
Smile, kids!
