I’m reading “Questioning University Presidents on Antisemitism, Stefanik Goes Viral/The No. 4 Republican, a Harvard alumna with a fraught relationship with her alma mater, had a confrontation over campus responses to antisemitism that resonated across the political spectrum” (NYT).

The NYT writer, Annie Karni, is characterizing an interview with Stefanik:

The moment almost did not happen. It came at the very end of the five-hour hearing of the House Education and Workforce Committee, after Ms. Stefanik had already tried four times to pin down the trio of administrators. She repeatedly tried and failed to get them to agree with her that calls for “intifada” and use of slogans such as “from the river to the sea” were appeals for genocide against Jews that should not be tolerated on campuses.

They had parried her grilling with lawyerly answers that, on their own, would not have made international headlines, but then they fell into Ms. Stefanik’s prosecutorial trap.
In an interview, Ms. Stefanik said she prepared for her final, viral round of questioning alone, during a break.

“Those questions were prepared by myself, with a pen and paper, at the end of the hearing,” she said, adding that she had studied the universities’ codes of conduct before the session.

“I thought, ‘How can I drill down on this and ask this question in such a way that the answer is an easy yes?’ And they blew it.”

Ms. Stefanik said she had anticipated a different line of follow-up questions, assuming the answer to her opening salvo would be clear-cut.

The “prosecutorial trap” lay ahead. They didn’t fall into that trap! 

“I thought M.I.T. and Penn would answer it ‘yes’ and Harvard would be forced to say ‘yes,’” she said. Ms. Stefanik said she had planned to follow up by asking what disciplinary actions had been taken on campus in response.

They tripped and fell on the way to what Stefanik says she believed would entrap them. They wouldn’t answer “yes” to what was, according to Stefanik, supposed to be the easy question. 

“I was so stunned,” she said, calling the responses “pathetic answers.”

Permit me to assume for a moment that the 3 university presidents are not fools. I would credit them with foreseeing where Stefanik would go if they answered the set-up question “yes.” We didn’t get to see the set of questions that the NYT article only gestures at — “what disciplinary actions had been taken.”

That was the trap, if you follow Stefanik’s own account.

The 3 presidents chose to tumble into the non-trap and even persistently to decline to climb out of it. All 3 saw that as their best option. They looked awful in that non-trap, but they took shelter in it because they predicted the deadliness of the real trap.