I have mentioned several times that interviewers tend to ask poor questions of politicians. Often they are wordy and vague, allowing the responder to pick a bit that they already have a pat answer for. Another is asking about inferences (which can be obfuscated) instead of questions of fact (which are harder to evade).There are so many clips of people asking creepy Donald Trump questions that he ‘answers’ (actually deflects) by ignoring the question or challenging the premise or attacking the questioner.

This happened recently when he faced off against the editor of Bloomberg News who asked him about import tariffs. Creepy Trump says that he loves tariffs, calling it “the most beautiful word in the dictionary” and insists that they will raise so much money that they will pay for anything and everything that he promises to do, such as tax cuts, the border wall, child care, or whatever. He seems to suggest that this will cause no pain to people because the tariffs would be paid by the exporting country and thus those countries will be paying for his programs. It is ridiculous, like his claim that Mexico would pay for the construction of the border wall which of course never happened.

The reality is quite different. How import tariffs work is quite simple. They are a levy imposed on any goods that are imported into the country and they are paid to the US Customs and Border Protection agency by the importer. The importer has to then recoup at least partly the extra cost of the goods and this is done by increasing the price of the items. So in effect, the money raised by these tariffs is ultimately coming from US consumers in the form of a tax, similar to a sales tax. The only possible harm that may come to the exporting country is that the US may import less of the item due to the increased cost, leading to lower demand.

This chain of inferences is well-known to pretty much everybody. The problem is that questioners keep asking creepy Trump about the end point of that chain, that tariffs are effectively a tax on US consumers (which is true) and this enables him to flatly reply that it is not (which is false). Since there is rarely enough time to walk through the chain of inferences, we are left with two contradictory assertions and thus less knowledgeable viewers may be left with the idea that this is a matter of opinion. This enables him to evade the question.

What they should ask him is the starting point of that chain, a simple question of fact: Who does he think is paying the tariffs to the CPB? If he really is that ignorant about how tariffs work and says that China or other exporting country pays it, that would expose him immediately. If he says that the importer pays the tariff, he could be asked how the importer recoups the extra cost.

It is usually better to ask questions of fact rather than inferences because those are harder to evade. Creepy Trump will still try to do so, of course, but it will not be as easy.