Corner them with their own master’s words.
Aug 12, 2026
What I propose here is whimsical, not because it’s funny, but because it has zero chance of being embraced by mainstream media, especially the newly corporatized, Trumpified variety.
The idea came to me the other day while I was watching MSNOW’s Morning Joe. The guest, GOP Senator Thom Tillis, was waxing on about why he might, or might not, finally vote against Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche.
After voicing some mild reservations about the nominee, reservations he clearly didn’t feel too deeply, Tillis pivoted. He started in on how the Biden Justice Department had supposedly weaponized itself against Trump. He wanted viewers to believe that this stale grievance somehow excused a vote for the thoroughly compromised Blanche.
Pressed on how he could support Blanche despite his doubts, Tillis doubled down on his argument: “I mean, [the Obama] administration weaponized the Justice Department… there are clearly people that probably have valid claims. What I don’t like is something that appeared to [target] the so-called patriots on January the 6th… the Biden administration did over-prosecute people.”
And when one of the hosts tried to draw him back to the central question, Tillis reached for the same distraction again: “I’m trying to find Democrats who stood up to Crossfire Hurricane, or the targeting of businesses through Lois Lerner and the IRS. I could go on and on. But if everybody thinks this dynamic is unique to this administration, they better look in the mirror.”
The interviewers, Willie Geist and Jonathan Lemire, resisted briefly and then moved on to a question about Anthony Fauci. Watching this shuffle step, my memory zipped back to the Edward R. Murrow of my youth, and how he used Joseph McCarthy’s own words to skewer him on a classic edition of See It Now. It occurred to me that a variation on the same tactic might usefully be deployed against Trump-besotted Republicans as we hurtle toward the midterms.
Here’s how it would have worked in that Morning Joe segment. At the moment Tillis tried to shift the subject to the Democrats’ alleged weaponization of the DOJ, imagine that the host, instead of objecting mildly and moving on, had said: “Senator, since you’ve diverged from our agreed topic, let me respond in kind.” Instantly, onscreen, up pops a news clip of Trump saying, on camera, that he loves inflation. (He actually has said this.) Whereupon the interviewer asks, point blank: “Senator, do you love inflation?”
That’s it. If Tillis waffles or grumbles about being asked something off-topic, the interviewer comes back: “The president you support says he loves inflation. Do you support him in that?”
I know, I know. This approach smacks of ambush and would likely ensure Tillis never agrees to a Morning Joe interview again. Traditionalists in the press corps will call it unseemly gotcha journalism. But in case you haven’t noticed, folks, we have a gotcha president, and his supporters are all reading from the same hymnal. Journalism can’t go on behaving as it always has and expect to remain relevant, or true to its biblical mission of keeping power accountable.
What I propose here resembles a technique that interrogators once used to keep VC operatives off balance: changing topics so rapidly that they couldn’t think fast enough to maintain a consistent lie. Those of us who worked for the CIA in Vietnam dubbed it the jump-cut technique. It was perfectly legit. Not torture, not arm twisting, just a way of nudging the subject into owning up.
And please, spare me a lecture about the norms of traditional journalism. I’ve been there and done that. After I left the CIA, I practiced the reporter’s craft, the investigative variety, for thirty-five years, and I have a Peabody and a shelf of other awards to show for it, one or two of which might be deserved. I am not just an aging neophyte whistling Dixie.
I’d argue from that experience that a variation on the jump-cut is entirely justified against interviewees who copy Trump’s own sleight-of-hand for dominating and defeating the press: deflection and whataboutism. It sits comfortably within the interviewing tradition Murrow himself practiced to great effect, turning a miscreant’s own words against him. Only this time it would be turned on the yes-men and yes-women groveling at the feet of the miscreant in the White House.
They’d be forced to embrace or repudiate the one-liners he routinely tosses off that appall the rest of us. There are reams of them, preserved in newsclips, which can be rolled out any time a MAGA guest tries to detour an interviewer into a gratuitous attack on Trump’s opponents.
Picture how any of these sycophants might react if confronted, live, with lines like these:
On immigrants. At a Durham, New Hampshire rally on December 16, 2023, Trump said immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country,” pouring in “from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”
Follow-up: That phrase, “poisoning the blood,” echoes the language Hitler used about race-mixing in Mein Kampf. Are you comfortable with your president using it? Do you accuse immigrants of poisoning our blood?
On American protesters. At Fort Bragg on June 10, 2025, Trump called anti-ICE demonstrators in Los Angeles “animals” and declared, “We will not allow an American city to be invaded and conquered by a foreign enemy. That’s what they are.”
Follow-up: He called American citizens protesting on American soil a foreign enemy. That’s not a policy disagreement. That’s a president threatening the public with the military. Do you support that?
On January 6th. At a Univision town hall in October 2024, Trump called the Capitol riot, in which roughly 140 police officers were injured, “a day of love.”
Follow-up: A hundred and forty injured police officers. He called that “love.” That’s his word, not mine. Is it yours?
On Iran. In a June 21, 2025 national address, Trump declared Iran’s nuclear facilities “completely and totally obliterated,” insisting “any claim to the contrary is fake news.” By November his own White House was calling the nuclear program merely “significantly degraded,” and reports early this year found Iran enriching uranium again.
Follow-up: Which of his own statements was true, the first one or the third one? No waffling, please. The American people deserve the truth.
None of these Trump statements represent rhetorical excess on my part. Every one of them is preserved on video, dated, and sourced.
Repeated cold, with the quote first, and then the question, they leave a guest exactly two options: defend the indefensible or concede the point. Either way, the interview stops being a vehicle for whataboutism and starts doing what journalism is supposed to do.
But as we head into the midterm free-for-all, that kind of accountability is getting harder to find, because the industry meant to provide it is disappearing into the fog Trump himself has generated.
Bari Weiss has pulled CBS News so far into the pro-Trump, access-friendly camp that 60 Minutes, once the most trusted brand in broadcast journalism, has been gutted from the inside: its longtime correspondent Scott Pelley forced out, a finished investigation into the El Salvador mega-prison CECOT held back before airing, and a $16 million settlement paid to Trump over the editing of a Kamala Harris interview.
David Ellison, the Trump-friendly mogul who installed Weiss, is meanwhile trying to fold CNN into his empire through a proposed merger between his Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. The deal is now pushed back to 2027 while a coalition of states sues to block it, arguing Ellison’s politics make him unfit to be trusted with CNN’s newsroom.
Even the Disney Corporation blinked. It paid Trump $15 million to settle a defamation suit over a stray comment by George Stephanopoulos, then suspended Jimmy Kimmel for a joke about Charlie Kirk’s assassination that offended the White House. Within a week public outrage forced Disney to grow a spine and restore the comedian to the airwaves.
Any way you look at it, bravery and out-of-the-box journalism are endangered species across the media landscape.
My feeling is that the media itself, or more precisely its growing corporatization, bears much of the blame for the emergence and preservation of Trumpism. Fearful and overly protective of the bottom line, the industry—and that’s the right word for it now—has let him cow reporters and control the questions asked of him. He has done this not through outright censorship but through assaults on the press’s ability to operate and thrive, by limiting access to the White House and agencies like the Pentagon, and by wielding threats of libel suits and subpoenas against journalists and their sources.
If we ever needed unvarnished truth, delivered imaginatively but always within the bounds of the law and standard journalistic ethics, it’s now.
The jump-cut technique asks nothing that requires bending either. It draws only on what Trump has already said, on the record and on camera. It puts to public officials legitimate (if unexpected) follow-up questions about a sitting president’s public statements.
That is lawful news gathering.
And confronting a guest with a newsmaker’s own words is wholly consistent with journalism’s ethical tradition, the same tradition Murrow drew on against McCarthy.
So, allowing for the real possibility that the next pro-Trump interviewee will resort to distraction, filibuster, and whataboutism to stave off a hard question, every reporter and news producer should have a newsclip reel teed up and ready, one that forces Mr. or Ms. Dodge-’em to answer for the ugly untruths, wrenching prejudices, and eviscerating libels that routinely spill from Trump’s lips like flecks of venom.