My distaste for Trump is well documented at this point, but when I read this evening about Hugh Hewitt’s interview of Donald Trump, I was struck by how terrible Hewitt’s whole line of questioning is.

Hewitt – who gave Harriet Miers a “solid B+” and thought that was good enough – has essentially declared that Al Gore would have been a better President than George Bush. That’s how incompetent the establishment’s favorite radio host is at criticizing Donald Trump.

Remember the gotcha games they played with George W. Bush? And how Al Gore was supposedly to be a better President because he allegedly could have named Aslan Maskhadov, then-President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria? Now Hugh Hewitt is playing the role of Andy Hiller.

Then-Governor Bush had it exactly right, after getting Hiller to admit that he could not name the Foreign Minister of Mexico, either: “What I’m suggesting to you is, if you can’t name the foreign minister of Mexico, therefore, you know, you’re not capable about what you do. But the truth of the matter is you are, whether you can or not.”

It turns out Bush was a better President than Gore would have been, regardless of whether he could name Maria del Rosario Green Macias for the Daily Double, as she was then the Secretary of Foreign Affairs for then-President Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico. Oh, by the way, she was due to leave office after Bush won, but before Bush was inaugurated, a fact that seemed to escape the attentions of both Gore and Hiller. Zedillo’s term was ending November 2000, and so his Foreign Minister’s name would never matter to a President Bush.

And that’s precisely the point Trump made to Hewitt: playing Quiz Bowl now isn’t going to matter when the specific names involved are going to be changing from now to January 2017. And it’s true: spending a week learning a bunch of Arabic and Farsi names would not make him a better President, than he would be right now. Whether you like him or not, that’s the fact.

I’m not sure the establishment is capable of stopping Trump. It’s no wonder Jeb Bush is falling apart in the polls. If this is what they think is a heavy hitting attack on Donald Trump, they don’t even have a clue anymore. They’re completely out of touch with how we used to win elections.

Photo by Ninian Reid on Flickr