Both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump conducted lengthy interviews with Time Magazine this year, but journalist Magdi Jacobs contends that the magazine's interviewers seem to have dumbed down their questions when interviewing Trump.
Writing on Twitter, Jacobs does a side-by-side comparison between the Trump and Biden interviews and flags significant differences in the way that interviewers question the two main presidential contenders.
"Something striking: the substance of Trump and Biden's answers is, of course, quite distinct but, even more than that, one can tell the interviewer has more confidence in the intellectual capacity of one man over the other," she wrote.
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The then pointed out to an instance in which the interviewer asked both men about their positions on defending Taiwan.
"I want to get your thoughts on China," Time asked Trump. "Do you think the U.S. should defend Taiwan if China invades?"
When it came time to ask Biden the same question, however, the interviewer asked a much more detailed question.
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"CIA Director Bill Burns says the President Xi Jinping of China has ordered the Chinese military to be ready by 2027 to conduct a successful invasion of Taiwan," Time asked Biden. "You said on multiple occasions that you would use U.S. forces to defend Taiwan. What does that mean? Is it boots on the ground? What shape would that take?"
In analyzing this, Jacobs said that it indicated that Time interviewers believed they needed to dumb down questions to get a cogent response from Trump.
"The interviewer(s) at Time seem to believe one man (Biden) is capable of answering a complex question containing multiple premises," she wrote. "The interviewer(s) at Time seem to not believe the other man (Trump) is capable of answering a simple unlayered question."
