If you have the skill and desire to use it, how has Trump been immune? He throws you high fast balls over the middle with regularity. You should be having more fun than Babe Ruth at a home run contest...
It would be easy because Trump tends to elide entire thoughts when he is speaking and it is easy to isolate odd sounding statements from their context. It’s a kind of verbal shorthand that we all use but it can be fodder for opponents when you are a candidate.
In the Paterno example his meaning can be made to sound like he doesn’t know that Paterno is dead, that’s he’s endorsing pedophilia, or as our amateur Alzheimer’s diagnostician insists that he’s on the road to dementia. I remember the press trying the same thing on Eisenhower, but in Ike’s case he used it to his advantage, see Fred Greenstein’s Hidden Hand Presidency.