A question that had hung over Wednesday's debate was how Donald Trump would deal with his obvious lack of knowledge in the realm of
everything foreign policy, specifically because in his recent appearance on moderator Hugh Hewitt's radio show he badly whiffed a question about Iranian's Quds Force, conflating them with the Iraqi Kurds, before dismissing the whole thing as a
gotcha question.
Surely such a bobble would spur Trump to bone up on foreign policy a little, or at least that specific question a little, knowing the gaffe was going to come up. Or, you know, not.
First, he boasted about how Hewitt—a co-moderator of the CNN debate—had since apologized and said that "Donald Trump is maybe the best interview anywhere that he's ever done."
"I will say this though," Trump continued, "Hugh was giving me name after name—Arab name, Arab name, Arab—and there are few people anywhere, ANYWHERE, that would have known those names. I think he was reading them off a sheet."
So his advisers have yet to get him to the point where he understands that Iranians are not Arab, and Trump is still not entirely convinced that conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt wasn't just pulling the names from an exceptionally esoteric
Jeopardy category.
Again, though—Donald Trump's support is not predicated on knowing buggerall about foreign policy, or domestic policy, or anything else. His supporters already have a keen idea that Donald Trump is an outsider with little to no actual policy experience; they don't care, because Donald Trump's support comes from people who themselves don't believe there's as much to this policy nonsense as the political class sniffles about. They, too, believe that knowing the difference between Quds and Kurds is a gotcha question; the answer is that everyone in that general region is bad, and "policy" doesn't need to get any more detailed than that. Call it the curse of knowing so little that you don't know what you don't know.
In other words, this is tea party politics. The professional politicians are chumps who can't be trusted: Let's specifically start getting people in there who don't know a damn thing about the so-called "issues" and then we'll finally be able to get things done. This is the Ted Cruz approach to government, where shutting down the government for the sake of an unattainable goal is proof not of incompetence, but of purity. If Donald Trump inserted talk about the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah into his stump speech tomorrow, many of his supporters would consider it an act of betrayal. They don't care, and don't want him to care. He insults McCain; his supporters lap it up. He says one offensive or racist thing after another; his supporters love him more for it. This is what taking it to Washington or taking it to the politically correct or taking it to Mexico/China/Russia/andsoforth looks like, in the Republican id.
So how do you whittle down support for a candidate whose "base" consists of people who actively don't care that their candidate has no political experience, no policy expertise, and whose political "debating" skills are those of an insult comic? I'm not sure there's a gotcha moment to be had in that mix. He may be able to coast through the race on bluster and pomp for a good long while now, at least until the rest of the field consolidates into a credible anti-Trump alternative—and that, too, seems a long, long way off.