The exchange also showed that no matter how much you plan or how compelling the “impeccable third party” may be, you can run into a defensive and angry buzz-saw response when you accuse or confront. People will bluster, bloviate, or evade. You need a strategy to assert control that goes beyond crossing your legs and hoping the person doesn’t storm out of the room. Sometimes you can’t worry about being polite.
Demanding Answers
When you adopt a true adversarial approach, you raise the stakes. Asking with righteous indignation can quickly create enemies. Jorge Ramos has no problem with that. He’s not trying to make friends.
One of the most famous Latinos in the United States, Ramos is a powerful and principled anchorman for the Spanish-language network Univision. He has been called the Hispanic Walter Cronkite—except Ramos has more than a million Twitter followers and goes toe to toe with world leaders in ways Cronkite would have found unthinkable. Ramos has gotten roughed up, shut down, and thrown out because he relishes confrontation in the service of accountability. He sees it as the foundation of democracy, transparency, and legitimacy.
“I feel a mission,” he told me. “The most social responsibility we have is to confront those who are in power. That creates a balance of power in our country and our world.”
Ramos is well aware that his confrontational style may infuriate and alienate the person he’s interviewing, especially if it’s someone in power. “I always assume I will never talk to that person again,” Ramos says.
But even Ramos was surprised when he got thrown out of a roomful of reporters as he tried to question the most unlikely of presidential candidates, billionaire businessman Donald Trump. Having concluded that Trump’s position on immigration was bigoted, ill-informed, and indefensible, Ramos showed up ready to hurl barbed questions and take on the man who was leading in the polls and would become the Republican nominee.
Trump made headlines when he declared that Mexicans were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” He called for a wall along the Mexican border. He promised that if elected, he’d deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. He said children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants shouldn’t be U.S. citizens, though the Constitution grants anyone born in the United States full and instant citizenship. For Jorge Ramos, a Mexican American who immigrated to the United States as a young man, these were insulting positions he wanted to challenge directly.
At a crowded news conference in Dubuque, Iowa, Ramos stood.
“I have a question about immigration …” That was about all he got a chance to say.
“You weren’t called. Sit down,” Trump barked.
Ramos wouldn’t budge.
Trump turned to call on someone else, but Ramos persisted.
“I’m a reporter, an immigrant, and a citizen,” Ramos said, “I have the right to ask a question.”
Trump signaled a burly security guard to usher Ramos out of the room.
Ramos protested loudly. “Don’t touch me, sir. You cannot touch me. I have the right to ask a question.”
In all his years confronting Latin American dictators and strongmen, he had never been ejected from a news conference.
After several minutes and some prodding from other reporters, Trump changed his mind and allowed Ramos back in.
“Good to have you back,” Trump said with a straight face.
“Here’s the problem with your immigration plan,” Ramos stated. “It’s full of empty promises. You cannot deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. You cannot deny citizenship to the children of these immigrants …”
Trump jumped in.
“That’s not right,” he asserted, saying that an “act of Congress” could change the status of the “anchor babies” born in the United States to undocumented migrant parents.
Ramos tried another tactic, asking, “How are you going to build a 1,900-mile wall?”
“Very easy. I’m a builder,” Trump said dismissively.
And on it went for nearly five minutes. Ramos asserting, arguing, asking, Trump dodging.
Looking back on it, Ramos said he probably got thrown out because Trump was unnerved by the basic premise of his question—that Trump’s policy was built on “empty promises”—and aggravated by Ramos’s decision to stand. But theatrics are often part of confrontation.
“We knew we had to do two things as journalists,” Ramos explained to me. “First, to stand up. If you ask a question sitting down, it would be a completely different balance of power. And second, we knew that I was only going to have a few seconds to ask the question. I purposely made the decision that I was going to continue asking the question regardless of what he was going to be doing.”
Ramos concluded that the spectacle was worth it. He made his point and put the issues on the record for all to see.
“I did my job as a journalist and the audience—especially Latinos—know exactly what kind of candidate Trump is. The big lesson is, never stop asking questions. I would have failed if I had sat down at that press conference in Dubuque, Iowa,” he said. “I did not sit down. I didn’t go. I did not shut up.”
Confronting Power
Ramos’s confrontational style is deeply rooted in his experience and youth. His autocratic father left little room for discussion or dissent and had rigid ideas about what his boy would become—an engineer, an architect, a doctor, or a lawyer. But young Jorge had no interest in those fields. Making matters worse, he regarded his Catholic school as a straitjacket. Home was often a battlefield.
“Growing up, I learned to confront the most powerful man in my world, my father,” he said.
At school, he challenged another father, the priest to whom the students had to confess their sins. This priest was also in charge of discipline—often harsh, physical discipline. Ramos saw this as an incredible abuse of power.
Why do you do this?
How is this moral?
He challenged the priest directly, telling him “It wasn’t right for an old man to hit a small child.”
As Ramos grew older, he became acutely aware of another abuse of power: his country’s corrupt politics. Again, he felt a duty to question it and expose those responsible. But, again, he collided with a culture that considered itself above challenge and certainly not accountable to a young reporter. In his first job in Mexican television, Ramos clashed with his bosses and with the censors who wanted the stories told their way. At age 24, Ramos moved to Los Angeles to study journalism at UCLA and pursue a career in the United States. He has been asking his questions ever since. He asked Fidel Castro why there was no democracy in Cuba. He asked Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez about his abuses of power and broken promises. He grilled former Mexican president Carlos Salinas about his role in the assassination of a political rival. He asked Colombian president Ernesto Samper about allegations that he was on the take from Colombian drug lords.
He did not make many friends. After one assignment, Ramos returned to the office to find a chilling gift—a funeral spray of flowers. They had been delivered anonymously shortly after he received a death threat. But Ramos wants to make people in power feel the heat, to challenge them directly on their broken promises, flagrant contradictions, and outright lies.
Ramos counsels that confrontational questioning must be approached from a position of strength. “Questions can be used as weapons. If you’re going to confront someone in power, there has to be an element of aggressiveness.” You must have the courage of your convictions and realize this isn’t a popularity contest. “Whenever I go into an interview I assume two things: If I don’t ask the question no one else will, and I’m always assuming this may be my last exchange.”