{"id":107715,"date":"2018-03-19T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2018-03-19T12:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=107715"},"modified":"2018-03-18T15:59:52","modified_gmt":"2018-03-18T15:59:52","slug":"vladimir-putin-outwitted-megyn-kelly-by-weaponizing-incompetence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/03\/vladimir-putin-outwitted-megyn-kelly-by-weaponizing-incompetence\/","title":{"rendered":"Vladimir Putin Outwitted Megyn Kelly by Weaponizing Incompetence"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The Trump Administration can learn from the Russian President about how to turn bumbling ignorance into an advantage. Photograph by Alexei Druzhinin \/ TASS via Getty<\/p><\/div>\n

13 Mar 2018 – <\/em>Over the weekend, NBC released a nearly hour-long interview<\/a> with Russian President Vladimir Putin that the reporter Megyn Kelly conducted over two days, earlier in March. At the same time, the Kremlin dropped its own version<\/a> of the conversation, an apparently unedited video that came in at nearly an hour and a half. It seems that both NBC and the Kremlin thought they had something to boast about. Kelly had scored a rare sit-down interview with the Russian President (the last American to have had the honor was Oliver Stone, whose sycophantic interview with Putin was released by Showtime, last summer), while Putin had succeeded in fending off all of Kelly\u2019s questions. The technique employed by the Russian President deserves note: he mounted a defense by incompetence (with additional help in derailing the conversation provided by an incompetent interpreter).<\/p>\n

Kelly spent a significant portion of her allotted time trying to pin Putin down on the topic of election meddling. \u201cWhy did you allow it?\u201d she asked early in their discussion of the interference. Putin responded by saying that his interlocutor shouldn\u2019t assume that he or anyone else in the Russian government knew what happened.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven if we suppose\u2014I don\u2019t know if they did something or not\u2014but I simply know nothing about it,\u201d he said. \u201cIt has nothing to do with the position of the Russian state.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kelly looked taken aback. \u201cYou are up for re\u00eblection right now,\u201d she said. \u201cShould the Russian people be concerned that you don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on in your own country?\u201d<\/p>\n

The ritual Russia will undertake on March 18th can hardly be called an election\u2014its outcome is preordained<\/a>. Still, Putin is, in his own way, campaigning nonetheless, and the interview with Kelly is part of his campaign. Kelly\u2019s question assumed that seeing their leader as competent was important to Russians, but Putin\u2019s objective was different\u2014he simply aimed to showcase his ability to evade the questions posed by the sleek American reporter.<\/p>\n

\u201cLook, the world is large and diverse,\u201d he said. \u201cSome Russian citizens have their own opinions about what\u2019s going on in the United States\u00a0.\u2009.\u2009.\u00a0At the level of the President and the government of the Russian federation, there has never been and there is not now any meddling.\u201d In other words, Putin is too important to think about such silly things as American elections.<\/p>\n

Kelly protested again.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have no idea!\u201d Putin said emphatically. \u201cThese are not my problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few minutes later, Kelly tried to get Putin to admit at least an awareness of Russian information warfare. She mentioned that Andrey Krutskikh, a Kremlin adviser, reportedly warned, in a 2016 speech<\/a>, that Russia had something that would enable it \u201cto talk to the Americans like equals.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI sometimes think that you are kidding,\u201d Putin said. \u201cSome person said something about our work in some sphere\u00a0.\u2009.\u2009.\u00a0I have no idea what he said! Go ask him what he meant. Do you really think that I control everything that\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe is an adviser to the Kremlin!\u201d Kelly exclaimed, apparently exasperated. \u201cOn cyber!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo what? We have two thousand staff! Two thousand! Do you really think that I keep track of every single one of them? Look, there is Peskov sitting there, my press secretary. Sometimes he just runs off at the mouth and I am watching television and thinking, What is he saying, who told him to say that? So, you see, I have no idea what he said. Ask him. You think I should comment on everything that cabinet or government employees say? I have my own job to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think when it comes to our two countries you know exactly what\u2019s going on,\u201d Kelly said. But there was no way she could prove that Putin knew anything at all about anything.<\/p>\n

The Russian President was not merely pleading ignorance as one would plead ignorance of, say, a conspiracy to commit a crime. Putin was performing<\/em> ignorance, strategically. Someone who is incompetent cannot be held accountable. Every time Putin said that he didn\u2019t<\/em> know something, what he was really saying is that he refused<\/em> to know. He wielded his lack of interest, lack of expertise, and even (if he was to be believed) lack of ability to supervise his own press secretary like weapons.<\/p>\n

Putin\u2019s performance of incompetence is markedly different from the incompetence that is characteristic of the Trump Administration. American governmental incompetents are just as difficult as Putin to hold to account, but they are not militantly incompetent\u2014at least not yet. For example, in an interview with \u201c60 Minutes\u201d that also aired over the weekend, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos tried to appear to be competent, and failed<\/a>. Asked by her interviewer, Lesley Stahl, if she had visited underperforming schools in her home state of Michigan, DeVos answered, \u201cI have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming.\u201d She didn\u2019t say, \u201cWhy should I?\u201d But she will probably soon learn that an incompetence offense makes a great defense.<\/p>\n

Where incompetence is prized, it is ever-present. Take the recent apparent poisoning<\/a> of the Russian defector Sergei Skripal, in the U.K. This attempted assassination was carried out in such a way as to fail to kill the target, while still managing to expose as many as five hundred other people to the poisonous agent. On Monday, British Prime Minister Theresa May laid the blame for the attempted murder on the Russians. Back in Moscow, Putin once again employed the ignorance defense. Approached by a BBC correspondent<\/a> about Skripal during a visit to the Krasnodar region, in southern Russia, Putin said, \u201cLook, we are here working on agriculture. As you can see, this is aimed at improving living conditions\u2014so why are you talking to me about some sort of tragedy?\u201d Why, indeed. The deflection focussed on the reporter\u2019s poor timing but left just enough room for Putin, should he wish, to claim later that he\u2019d never heard of the poisoning. \u201cFigure it out for yourselves first, and then we can discuss it,\u201d he added, by way of asserting his trademark lack of curiosity.<\/p>\n

Kelly\u2019s interview with Putin was additionally affected by incompetence in a way that neither participant probably understood: one of the two interpreters kept mistranslating. At one point, Kelly asked Putin about Donald Trump, Jr.,\u2019s statement<\/a>, from 2008, that \u201cRussians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.\u201d The interpreter rendered this much-reproduced phrase as, \u201cWe have a lot of investment in Russia.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s nonsense,\u201d scoffed Putin. An absurd exchange followed, with Putin acting annoyed and Kelly surprised at the outright denial of something that she didn\u2019t ask about.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou think the world revolves around you,\u201d Putin said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not about me,\u201d Kelly said, \u201cIt\u2019s about what Donald Trump, Jr., says.\u201d<\/p>\n

This gave Putin another chance to use the ignorance defense. \u201cYou think that we all know what Donald Trump\u2019s son said,\u201d he said, once again stressing that he was too important to concern himself with the babblings of the Trumps or their countrymen.<\/p>\n

Kelly brought up the anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny, who has been denied the right to run for President because he has been found guilty of fraud on trumped-up charges. Kelly asked why Putin wouldn\u2019t just pardon Navalny in order to allow him to run, but the interpreter rendered \u201cpardon\u201d as \u201cpartner,\u201d asking Putin why he couldn\u2019t \u201cpartner\u201d with Navalny. Putin proceeded to answer that question.<\/p>\n

For the final version that aired on NBC, the network replaced the Russian interpretation with its own, perhaps unwisely, lending the interview an illusion of logic and creating sense where it was lacking. Then again, Kelly herself seems to have missed the central feature of her conversation with the Russian President. In an interview<\/a> with MSNBC\u2019s Chris Matthews, she acknowledged having been out-manipulated by Putin, who, she said, \u201cis the smartest man in every room.\u201d It\u2019s true that Putin has run circles around every American interviewer he has encountered, reducing Charlie Rose<\/a> to a silent head-bopping puppet, apparently getting Stone to ask questions pre-scripted by the Kremlin, and plunging Kelly into a surreal, lost-in-translation exchange. It may console the NBC anchor to think that Putin defeated her by being smart. In reality, though, he deployed ignorance and incompetence. He may unwittingly have provided American television viewers with a foregrounding of their own future: it\u2019s likely just a matter of time before the Trump Administration, which possesses incompetence in droves, learns to weaponize it.<\/p>\n

___________________________________<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Masha Gessen, a staff writer, has written several books, including, most recently,<\/em> The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia<\/a>, which won the National Book Award in 2017.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 newyorker.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

13 Mar 2018 – Over the weekend, NBC released a nearly hour-long interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin that the reporter Megyn Kelly conducted over two days, earlier in March. At the same time, the Kremlin dropped its own version of the conversation, an apparently unedited video that came in at nearly an hour and a half.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":87880,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}