President Trump Interviewed These Four People for Supreme Court Nomination

RELATED: Here’s who Trump should pick for the Supreme Court

Hugh Hewitt on Donald Trump: I Don’t Think It’s a Gotcha Question to Ask About the Forces Surrounding Israel

HotAir.com:

Equal time for a man dismissed this morning by a grumpy Trump as a “third-rate radio announcer” because he asked him about the differences between Hamas and Hezbollah. That wasn’t me running through a random checklist of names to see if I could trip him up, Hewitt tells CNN here. It was me trying to lead him into a discussion of the strategic threat facing American and Israeli interests. A man with presidential ambitions should be able to talk semi-intelligently about that in 2015, no?

Matt Welch wonders: Is there any reason to think that a deeper knowledge of foreign policy before becoming president leads to a better foreign policy as president?

I don’t think there’s a straight line between better knowledge as a candidate to having more success abroad once in office, but I doubt Hewitt would say so either. The questions he asked Trump were really proxies, I think, for testing how seriously he takes the threat from jihadis. As a general but certainly not firm rule, the more worried you are about Iran, ISIS, and expansionist Islamist groups, the deeper into the weeds you’re willing to go to learn who they are. (Interestingly, Rand Paul the most dovish candidate in the GOP field and a strident Trump critic otherwise, sided with Trump today in knocking Hewitt’s questions as gotchas.) That’s also why, I assume, Hewitt presses nearly every candidate he interviews about whether they’ve read “The Looming Tower,” Lawrence Wright’s book about the rise of Al Qaeda and 9/11. He’s probing their intellectual curiosity about jihadism, I take it, as a measure of how alert they are to the risk and how committed they’d be as president to defeating it. How’d Trump do on that metric?

The correct answer, I think, is “voters won’t care.” Like I said last night, how you view the sufficiency of Trump’s answer depends almost totally on how seriously you take Trump as a candidate to begin with. Here’s Josh Rogin, picking through the Hewitt interview to build a case that Trump not only doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he seems unconcerned about correcting that problem:

Trump also suggested he would, as president, dismantle the system of deterrence that currently underpins our strategy toward potential major adversaries. When asked by Hewitt what he would do if China sunk a Japanese ship, Trump said it was a secret. “You don’t want to let people know what you’re going to do with respect to certain things that happen. You don’t want the other side to know,” he said. “I don’t want people to know my thinking.”

That answer is Trump’s go-to response whenever he seems to get into trouble answering foreign policy questions. He has said he doesn’t want to telegraph his plan to defeat the Islamic State — which he nonetheless described as “very beautiful” — although at other times he has promised to surround its oil fields with American troops, or to bomb the fields and later send in Exxon to rebuild them…

More likely, the truth is that Trump has no defined worldview, does not understand how diplomacy or warfare works, and has no real plans to solve the world’s problems. Other Republican candidates similarly have little foreign policy experience, but at least they are trying to study up. When Chuck Todd of “Meet the Press” asked who he consults on foreign policy, Trump replied that he watches “the shows.”

Yes, cheer Trump-haters. He’s a doofus whose doofus fans are actually celebrating his doofus-ness!

RELATED: Limbaugh: Hewitt’s Questions to Trump Help Push Narrative That Republicans Aren’t Bright

The Gay Wedding Gotcha Question That Isn’t

TheFederalist.com:

It started with Marco Rubio, but the “would you attend a gay wedding” question is one that is rapidly being applied to the entirety of the potential 2016 field. Thus far, Rubio has said yes, Ted Cruz has demurred, and Rick Santorum stands alone as a “no”. John Kasich says yes, he’d attend a loved one’s gay wedding (and also that he’s waiting for a signal from God on whether or not to run). And Scott Walker one-ups them all by saying: I already did.

This has all the hallmarks of being a gotcha question that really isn’t, along the lines of last cycle’s “should states have the right to ban contraception?” questions from George Stephanopoulos. It’s not about whether you believe in federalism. It’s not about the philosophical interpretation of the roles of states or the rights of citizens. It’s a question designed to test your allegiances. It’s being asked this cycle by reporters because of the obvious tension within the Republican coalition between the social conservative base and the need to appeal to general election voters who are increasingly fine with gay marriage. As such, just like the 2012 contraception question, it’s not about a pressing policy issue. It’s about trying to find a subject where the natural voter’s response is “what? Don’t be ridiculous”, but Republican candidates’ responses will be a fifteen minute discourse on the finer points of Griswold v. Connecticut.

“Would you attend a gay wedding” is a matter of personal conscience. But that’s why it’s such an obvious opportunity for turning the question back on the actual policy battle at issue, a bit of ju jitsu I haven’t seen from any of the respondents yet. The whole point is that it’s your decision whether to attend or not. 

Conservatives and (most) libertarians believe people ought to be able to decide whether to freely associate with others themselves, not be dragooned by the force of government into mandatory associations as the secular left maintains. The entire point of religious freedom laws in Indiana and elsewhere is that we want to give people who say “I cannot in good conscience participate in this ceremony” the right to defend themselves in court based on their deeply held beliefs. That used to be a bipartisan principle, and now it’s effectively a monopartisan one – but it’s the right principle. A Republican Party unwilling to defend it has been reduced from a party founded on the idea that no man should work and toil and earn bread where another eats it… to one only ready to smash their clay fire pots and raise a sword in the air for the cause of the Keystone Pipeline and the Medical Device Tax.

Hugh Hewitt has probably done us all a favor by teeing it up on a radio show that will feature appearances by every 2016er early on, as opposed to leaving it until the debates. The downside is that just means that the question will have to be updated by the time everyone’s answering questions on stage. I’d suggest something like “Would you send your kids to a school that teaches the Bible says being gay is a sin?”, or “How many Sam Smith albums do you own?”, or “Would you order a pizza from someone who wouldn’t cater a gay wedding?”. Only once the voters know your stance on bigot pizza can they be fully informed as to which side of Culture War 4.0 you are on.

This is a test. It is an early test. It should be easy for Republicans to pass it.

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