Yesterday a CNN anchor, Brianna Keilar, was interviewing Michael Cohen, special counsel at the Trump Organization.
"Cohen blasted her word choice. "I've got to stop you for one second. There's no shake-up. Look at the words that you use and you blast at the bottom in your banner," he said on CNN's "Situation Room." "There are no desperate measures.
The campaign is on its way to victory, and yet you still use these ridiculous words in order to incite something. Please understand that nobody is buying into it anymore."
The following exchange then occurred:
Keilar: "Well let me ask you about this -- so you say it's not a shake up, but you guys are down. And it makes sense that there would ... "
Cohen interjects: "Says who?"
Keilar: "Polls. Most of them. All of them."
Cohen: "Says who?"
Keilar: "Polls. I just told you -- I answered your question."
Cohen: "Which polls?"
Keilar: "All of them."
Really? An attorney, one of Trump's attorneys asks a question, gets a direct answer and repeats the question. Was the man on drugs or drunk?
Watch for yourself. (It's the second video on the linked page.) Who willfully agrees to be interviewed on national television and does that?
I don't think it is unreasonable to ask for more specifics on the polls after someone has made a declaration based on polls. The guy could have asked the questions better. The talking head could have given a more detailed response.
Isn't this pretty much the sort of reporting one expects on TV?
Well, I'm not sure just what you mean to say. By way of analogy, I'll try to illustrate what it seems like you're getting at.
I could show up at for a meeting with a potential client. They may say to me that my firm isn't very highly regarded in, say, technology implementations. I might then ask by what measure to which they reply, according to all the executive surveys that were published last year. Now in my mind, given that it's my business to know my firm, my industry, and my firm's place in it, I should know what surveys the client is referring to. I may reasonably ask if they have any particular one in mind, but if they reply "all of them," I should pretty well know what they are referring to, which basically means reports/surveys taken/published by the likes of Forrester, Gartner, and other major consulting firm evaluators.
So, yes, Mr. Cohen wasn't out of line to the first time ask, "Says who?" That alone wasn't and isn't a problem, even though his merely asking does raise a flag regarding the nature and extent of his being on top of his game. He can "lower the flag" by responding in some way that indicates he is "on his game" enough that when the host says that it's all the polls that show Trump being behind it means, at a minimum, all the major polls and that there's no need to cite "this" major poll or "that" major poll.
But that's not what that man did. He repeated the question. Doing so made him seem to be somewhat dissembling, evasive, perhaps argumentative, perhaps completely out of his depth, maybe half asleep, or, perhaps drunk or high on something, of some combination of those things. The behavior/response Mr. Cohen gave just isn't consistent with being a lucid professional having a simple, sincere and mature conversation.
Now can I, as you have, propose a host of exceptional circumstances to mollify the implications of the man's behavior? Sure I can. The thing is that to actually accept any of them, something extraordinary needed to have been going on, or I need to dig deep within myself and find a lot of "Taylor Coleridge."
