Eric Trump's Post-Debate Interview Was A Disaster

As the son of a presidential candidate, you would think Donald Trump's son would have been trained on how to answer questions from the press regarding his father's campaign controversies. But Eric Trump's disastrous post-debate interview on CNN showed that his surrogacy skills may not be up to par. When asked whether his father pays federal income taxes by CNN's chief political correspondent Dana Bash, Eric refused to directly answer the question for almost two minutes. "We pay a tremendous amount of taxes," he answered, and then began attacking Hillary Clinton's actions. Clinton "has never signed the front of a check once," he told Bash.

At one point, Bash even commented, "You haven't been in politics that long and you're doing the pivot quite well." Eventually Eric said "of course" his father pays federal income taxes, something which the Trump campaign itself has not directly stated, before returning to the topic of Clinton controversies.

This isn't Eric's first difficult press moment; during a Tuesday morning interview on Fox News, he called Illinois the home state of Trump vice presidential pick Mike Pence. (Pence is actually from Indiana, where he is the current governor.) Eric covered up for that one by calling it a "slip of the tongue."

Unfortunately for Eric, nothing can cover up the reactions of Twitter users to his post-debate interview.

Many people pointed to how Eric would or wouldn't know the answer to this question in the first place.

But we all know sales and income taxes aren't the same, right?

Refusing to directly answer the question at hand seemed to be somewhat of a theme of the vice presidential debate as well. Moderator Elaine Quijano had to frequently remind the candidates what the topics they were supposed to be discussing were, something she brought up herself when she told the off-topic candidates they should have been speaking about North Korea.

Hopefully Eric will come up with a better way in the future to deflect difficult questions than insulting Clinton, who he at one point said has “lived off of the government her entire life.” We'll likely have a chance to see whether he's improved after the next presidential debate on Oct. 9.