The Washington Post, on last night's town hall encounter between CNN's Anderson Cooper and bizarro world's Donald Trump:
"It’s the argument of a 5-year-old!" Cooper admonished [Trump] after he said Ted Cruz was responsible for starting the ugly and unpleasant exchange about the two candidates’ wives that dominated the news cycle last week.
"Excuse me. You would say that," Trump responded. "That’s the problem with our country."
A few days ago I heard the Post's Dan Balz note in an MSNBC interview that attempting to parse most any Trumpian sentence would be one helluva nightmarish task. Which is true. Yet even Trump's easily parsable ones can be more baffling than his characteristic gibberish. What's "the problem with our country"? A journalist's objection to an infantile argument.
Continues the Post:
Cooper continued to press him.
"Excuse me — no no, no," Trump responded again.
By our count, Trump said "excuse me" 18 times over the course of the one-hour event.
And there you have it — Trump's real rhetorical magic: the simple, excuse-me, excuse-me dismissal of any direct question or noted objection, such as "answering" a question about nuclear weapons and ISIS by raising the quite possibly unrelated issue of Jeb's "low energy." It's so simple it's brilliant — long practiced by pols, but not this simply or brilliantly.