Trump-speak: love it or hate it
I’m often struck by how artificial most politicians are when they speak. So little of what they say seems unguarded, natural, spontaneous, or sincere. Everything is strategic.
That doesn’t mean that everything a politician says is effective as a tactic. What it does mean, for so many of them, is that it is a tactic rather than the utterance of what appears to be a normal human being speaking his or her mind.
I was thinking this while I was analyzing one of Nancy Pelosi’s statements for my previous post today. I found myself in a sort of awe at how much she packed into a couple of seemingly simple sentences: so much hypocrisy, so much unctuous fake nobility, so much artificiality, a little hidden dagger, so many hidden messages. You might say I was reading too much into her statement, but I don’t think so.
It’s not just Pelosi’s statements one can parse that way (I tend to see it more on the left, but it certainly exists on the right). Obama was a master at it. One difference, though, is that when Pelosi speaks I can almost see the wheels in her head turning, but when Obama did it, it was more smooth. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons he was able to succeed in his run for national elected office, and why Pelosi always kept her election bids to re-election in her safe district and made her power moves for advancement within Congress itself. Perhaps she’s too obviously contrived to have won national office.
Perhaps that was Hillary’s problem, too. Maybe she should have kept her power moves within the government structure itself, too, and not sought national elective office from voters. She was just so artificial—among other things—whereas her equally strategic husband had perfected the art of seeming natural.
So, where does Trump fall on this spectrum? The first time I ever watched him give a political speech—and this was back when I thought he’d be a disaster for the right—I was impressed by a number of things and wrote:
Anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m not a Trump supporter, but that I also get his appeal. Watching him speak at length, I “got” it even more. He makes all other politicians look boring and stilted (hey, many of them are boring and stilted). He makes it all sound so simple—just as Obama did, but in a completely different direction and with a completely, and I mean completely, different style. Populist appeal is a neat trick in a man who’s a multi-billionaire and who grew up in enormous wealth and graduated from Wharton. But he’s got it, and although I’m sure he carefully nurtures it he manages to make it look natural.
When I started writing this post, I hadn’t looked back at that quote yet. I had planned to say a certain thing today, but as I read what I wrote in that post of three and a half years ago, I find it’s the same thing. All this time has passed and that aspect of Trump hasn’t faltered: he makes all other politicians look boring and he looks natural doing whatever it is that he does.
That’s an art, and in addition to any art of the deal, it’s one of the arts that got him elected. It’s also something that lends itself to misinterpretation. Some people think he’s stupid, but I’ve never (even when I was very much against him during the primaries) said or thought that he was stupid. He also has unusually keen intuition, which can be more precious than intelligence, and certainly doesn’t always go hand-in-hand with it.
Trump’s enemies on left and right (and he certainly has them on both sides) tend not just to dislike what he does. In fact I’m not at all sure that his enemies on the right hate him because of what he does; I think they hate him in spite of it. But those who really really really dislike Trump seem to dislike him in very visceral and personal terms. One thing the ones on the right don’t like is his lack of intellectualism. Another thing his enemies on both sides don’t like is that they interpret the seeming naturalism of his speech as meaning that he is someone who says whatever pops into his head, with no filter and little thought. I think nothing could be further from the truth.
I think what’s happening is that Trump is every bit as strategic/tactical as any politician, perhaps even more so. But he also seems to be authentic when he speaks; he seems to be himself, whatever that means. He projects a naturalness and spontaneity. I think this combination of strategy and everyman-type naturalness is utterly unique to Trump. I’m not sure where it comes from. Perhaps it’s because he is a man who is strategic to his core: it comes naturally to him. Perhaps he just has a populist gift. Perhaps he is sincerely strategic, if that makes any sense.
But whatever it is about, I think that, without that trait, Trump would not have been elected president.
At NRO, VDH has just published an excellent response to a ludicrous attack from Gabriel Schoenfeld at the worthless new website of never-Trump foolishness, The Bulwark. The piece is quite long, but well worth reading, and most of the commenters seem to be in agreement with him.
Whenever Nancy Pelosi speaks, my reaction is , “Liar”. She does not come across as honest. I don’t understand how she became as successful as she is. The same is true of Chuck Schumer. It baffles me how people who radiate dishonesty can get elected, and hold such power.
Oh yeah. One of the things I dont like about Trump is his lack of intellectualism. This is a moment in this country where intellectualism would really be needed. You need to explain to the vast masses of uninformed people what makes capitalism, the Constitution and the rule of law superior over what the left and their media outlets pump out 24/7 and not be the willing poster boy for everything the left says you should despise about capitalists.
You also failed to mention maturity. He also seems to lack that quality pretty often. He also seems to lack a moral compass when he could certainly use one.
Trump is about the only Republican candidate I’d vote for because we arent being offered anything better and the other side is far more horrible.
In the long run, this isnt my idea of “winning”, but have to concede that “perfect” candidates just dont pop up when you need them.
The GOP right hates the people who support Trump. He has the right enemies. I think that was a big factor in his win, as it was for the Tea Party. The Tea Party got hit from both sides. Obama sicced all the federal agencies on them, not just the IRS, The woman who organized “True the Vote,” in Texas, had the EPA and OSHA also harassing them.
Then the GOP stiffed them on their issues.
Maybe it’s just me but I think his communicating is getting better. I thought his comments earlier about Boeing were perfect. Balanced all sides while making clear to me anyways his personal feelings.
Scott the Badger:
They only have to win their primaries and then they are home free. They are in safe districts or relatively safe states, and they start climbing the power ladder within the Party, in House and Senate. They just need to gain power with their Congressional peers not to be popular with people in general, just popular enough in their districts (or for Schumer, states) not to be primaried.
I think the single greatest mistake people make when listening to Trump speak is this: They interpret his words as self-revelatory.
In other words, they think Trump has an inner map of the world, his own firmly-held convictions about what is and isn’t true; and, they think that when Trump speaks, he is sharing with us part of what he thinks is true about the world.
I don’t think he does that at all.
I think that Donald Trump views public speaking in much the same way that a curious, fearless, intelligent, methodical kid views a brightly-colored instrument panel full of unlabeled buttons. He finds a button that he hasn’t pushed previously, thinks, “I wonder what’ll happen if I push this?” …and pushes it. Then he observes the outcome. If he likes the outcome — if he finds that his actions have influenced the world around him in ways he finds useful — he pushes the same button again, or experiments with similar-looking buttons in roughly the same part of the instrument panel.
When Donald Trump says Ted Cruz’s father shot JFK, or whatever, he isn’t asserting something he inwardly believes to be factual, and proposing that we too should believe it.
Nor is he making a joke, exactly (though there’s no doubt he finds the outcome personally amusing).
Nor is he lying*, at least not in the way that most of us lie**. (I’ll explain what I mean by that, below.)
No, he’s just pushing buttons on reality to see what’ll happen.
A lifetime of doing this has given him an unusually canny instinct of what kinds of button-pushing will produce outcomes that he finds useful or entertaining.
But you absolutely CANNOT parse the meaning of his words, and then believe that THAT represents what Donald Trump believes to be true about the world.
That would be the error of thinking Trump uses speech for self-revelation. He just doesn’t. He regards the use of speech for that purpose as a “rookie mistake.” (Why, he reasons, would you give your competitors, against whom you are negotiating, an easy-to-read map of your motives and business plans?!)
The only way to guess at what Trump thinks is true — since he has not yet once opened his mouth to tell us — is to look at his actions. What has he done, what has he achieved? What does he keep trying to achieve?
It is THAT record, and only that, which provides insight into the man’s worldview.
* = Trump is definitely lying in the sense of “asserting verbally things he believes to be false”; but, not in the sense of “hoping that people will believe them to be true on account of his having asserted them.”
** = When I say that Trump is not lying “in the way that most of us lie,” I mean two things:
1. For Trump, it’s irrelevant whether an English-language assertion coming from his mouth (or his Twitter feed) happens to coincide with his internal understanding of reality or not. Now, if he were attempting either to disguise that understanding or to reveal it, he would need to check his words against it. But he doesn’t care whether it’s something he internally believes to be true or internally believes to be false. All that matters is, “What does the uttering of these words, taken as an action performed to manipulate reality, achieve?” It is more like spellcasting than communicating. It’s not relevant whether the “magic words” to get what he wants happen to be “abracadabra” or “Kim Jong Un’s a sweet guy, really” or “Ted Cruz’s dad killed JFK.” Only the spell-effect matters.
2. Most of us, when we lie, are lying to deceive the hearer, so that the hearer will not believe something about us: Something we believe to be true, but which we don’t want the hearer to believe to be true.
But, again, that’s not why Trump says things he believes to be false. (It’s probably exactly why he passes large payments to former sex-partners to get them to keep quiet. But that’s an action, not a Twitter tweet or a speech.)
No, Trump doesn’t care whether hearer believes what he says or not. He’s not trying to convince the hearers. (Not by the strict dictionary-definitions of his words, at least. His projected persona and mannerisms are another matter.)
Again, it’s just spellcasting. (I mean that figuratively, of course. I don’t for a minute think that Donald Trump is a secret Wiccan.) It’s not relevant whether the words convey meanings (which can be either true or false). It’s only relevant that they make desirable things happen.
That’s my take on Donald Trump.
I’m not sure what his internal worldview is. I’m not sure whether it agrees substantially with mine. I don’t think anyone knows for sure, unless he happens to open up with his children, in locked rooms when the drapes are drawn and nobody else is around.
All I can say is this: Whatever his internal worldview happens to be, it leads him to do and pursue policies which (mostly) I hoped the next president would do and pursue.
The Democrat alternative, by contrast, is likely to be an existential threat to most of what I hold dear.
Easy choice.
“That would be the error of thinking Trump uses speech for self-revelation.” [RC @ 4:14]
This would be why some point out that AOC seems to be operating the way Trump does (BTW, I like your analogy to the room filled with buttons). She may be just as un-smart as people claim based upon what she says, but IMO the jury is still out on that. Like Trump, her speech may well be tactical, not self-revelation or communication.
“Easy choice”.
That’s precisely it, in a nutshell.
(The previous administration has made it so.)
Easy choice, and exactly why I voted for him. The alternative was unacceptable and far worse. And since my vote, he has done far more for policies I favor than I hoped he would.
With Griffin, I think he’s getting better at it.
“Only connect.”
Henry James
That “easy choice” has got to seem that way to more than just us. That “easy choice” must also be how most of the electorate see’s it. If that doesnt happen, it’s not going to matter that the choice was easy for you.
Sorry. I have to “only correct”.
“Only connect.” is E.M. Forster – not Henry James.
Come to think of it – my correction is very un-Trumpian.
“I found myself in a sort of awe at how much she packed into a couple of seemingly simple sentences: so much hypocrisy, so much unctuous fake nobility, so much artificiality, a little hidden dagger, so many hidden messages.”
It’s not possible to be that artful without the intent to deceive and without the awareness that deceit is the only way to support a position.
“It’s not just Pelosi’s statements one can parse that way (I tend to see it more on the left, but it certainly exists on the right). Obama was a master at it.”
Obama fell apart when speaking extemporaneously. Would Obama have been elected if he wasn’t black? “I mean you’ve got the first sort of mainstream African American, who is articulate and bright, and clean and [a] nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man,”
I agree with neo’s assessment of Trump’s intelligence. As for Trump not being an intellectual, an old fashioned word comes to mind in that regard, I find Trump to be ‘canny’.
By definition; stupid people cannot be canny.
“She does not come across as honest. I don’t understand how she became as successful as she is. The same is true of Chuck Schumer. It baffles me how people who radiate dishonesty can get elected, and hold such power.” SCOTTtheBADGER
The secret to their success is simple; they tell their constituents what they want to hear. Many people, perhaps even most want to be told what they want to hear. Certainly that was the primary factor in Trump’s election; finally a Presidential candidate was “telling it like it is”… though in Trump’s case, what we wanted to hear was someone being honest about the reality of our world, rather than what is wished to be true.
“One of the things I dont like about Trump is his lack of intellectualism. This is a moment in this country where intellectualism would really be needed. You need to explain to the vast masses of uninformed people what makes capitalism, the Constitution and the rule of law superior over what the left and their media outlets pump out 24/7 and not be the willing poster boy for everything the left says you should despise about capitalists.” Harry
That didn’t work for Sen. Cruz, nor has he had much if any success in that regard since then either. Ignorance + indoctrination + apathetic disinterest are not corrected with soundbites. Reagan’s pithy sayings had zero effect upon me, it took Clinton’s conman sliminess and daily assaults from Rush on the radio to start to crack my liberality and allow my earlier, inner libertarian to reemerge, resulting in my starting to question my liberal attitudes.
“In other words, they think Trump has an inner map of the world, his own firmly-held convictions about what is and isn’t true; and, they think that when Trump speaks, he is sharing with us part of what he thinks is true about the world.
I don’t think he does that at all.” R.C.
I agree but think that you confuse a lack of principles, of “firmly-held convictions about what is and isn’t true”… with how Trump operates; does what is claimed to be true, intuitively resonate with his core? If so, he embraces it, if not he rejects it. It’s very Zen Buddhist.
“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them” George Orwell
Nor is Trump a brainless monkey haphazardly pushing buttons.
From Newsweek’s: “JOE BIDEN’S BIGGEST GAFFES: QUOTES, BLUNDERS THAT COULD HURT A 2020 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN” https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-gaffes-quotes-2020-election-1323905
“Joe Biden admits it: “I am a gaffe machine,” he said in December 2018. He turned his confession into a dig at Donald Trump—“But my God, what a wonderful thing compared to a guy who can’t tell the truth”—but if the former vice president decides to enter the 2020 presidential race, he might regret some of his stumbles.
President Trump said he’s eager to battle Biden for the White House.
“I hope it’s Biden,” he told a group of television anchors before his State of the Union address.
“Biden was never very smart. He was a terrible student. His gaffes are unbelievable. When I say something that you might think is a gaffe, it’s on purpose; it’s not a gaffe. When Biden says something dumb, it’s because he’s dumb.”
Harry – speaking as someone who only voted for Trump because he wasn’t Clinton, and who has since been something between “won over” and “grudgingly forced to accept that a lot of the result has been good, on balance,” I’ve come to disagree about Trump’s being NOT the perfect candidate for our time. At least somewhat, anyway.
I think we conservatives have fallen into two traps: the usual one, in which we grow sclerotic because, after all, it’s our job to hold the line against change for change’s sake, and the “intellectual” one, in which we start to think of a big swath of the nation as… well, as deplorable, not to put too fine a point on it. Not every Revolutionary patriot was a polymath. Not every military member is a military historian. Not every rural voter is Lincoln-in-training. But for gosh sakes, not every so-called “intellectual” has two brain cells to rub together, from the available evidence. Trump forced us to look at ourselves, the whole body of the American electorate, in all our sometimes dubious glory – and realize that as a nation we’re still like the guys in “Stripes”: a bunch of misfits with a wide range of abilities, talents, and interests, and we still get the job done. And Trump is Bill Murray.
Hmm. A “Stripes” reboot…
“He also has unusually keen intuition….” I don’t think I’ve seen anybody but you talk about his intuition.
As somebody who has had a several-decades-long interest in Myers-Briggs (and, therefore, Jungian) typology, I did a quick Google for “Trump MBTI”. Though, of course, there is disagreement, it seems like Trump is quite widely perceived to have MBTI type ESTP, which (theoretically) means he ought to have very poorly developed intuition.
I think you see something in him, his personality, and his behavior, that others have missed.
“Perhaps he is sincerely strategic, if that makes any sense.” – Neo
Makes as much sense as Salena Zito’s observation, which is: a lot.
“The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”
Obama was really good at reading scripted lines off the TelePrompTer as though he was actually speaking impromptu. His verbal tics that we all got so used to hearing that we didn’t hear them (like “let me be clear”) were just filler to make his speech sound natural. RobotamaTer.
Obama’s speeches were useful for insomniacs because the sonorous, smooth, scripted delivery of pabulum could lull you to sleep. No chance if that with Trump! The tonal changes alone will keep you awake and attentive to say nothing of the idea bombs constantly dropping from above.
” I find Trump to be ‘canny’.
…
By definition; stupid people cannot be canny.”
Yes. Trump has an abundance of “street smarts”. He is above average intelligence though not rocket scientist. But rocket scientist IQ doesn’t do much good unless you are actually a rocket scientist.
This gift to look and sound natural I often observed in several psychopaths, very strategic and scheming but capable to convince themselves, at least superficially, in the bullshit of their own making. I do not think Trump is a psychopath, by the way, but he has a common trait with them: he loves himself so much that he always believes the stuff he is pronouncing at a given moment, even if the next second he is going to tell something quite different. The difference is that there is nothing artificial in his self-love, it is absolutely genuine and sincere and so can infect his audience.
It is a common belief among actors that even the best actor cannot outplay a live dog at the scene: no human can be as organic as a dog. Except for Trump: he can outplay any dog when being in the focus of attention of a multitude. This is the secret of his success in negotiations, a real Art of the deal. The trick is just being Trump, and nobody can outshine him in this discipline.
When I musing about which literature character is the most close to Trump, I always recollect Khlestakov from Government Inspector. The same love for hyperbole, for outlandish assertions pronounced with an utmost sincerity, an imagination capable to create an alternative reality and believe in it with all the fervor and self-assurance. The Swamp has all the good reasons to fear and hate him, like utterly corrupt local government Khlestakov visited.
Life often imitate art. Another literary character reminding me Trump is Mr. Cool from a brilliant novel by my close relative Ilya Ehrenburg, “The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Six Disciples.” Mr. Cool is a real estate mogul, he builds and runs brothels everywhere this is legal, has a vocabulary of six years old. The hero, Julio Jurenito, adopts him as his disciple, among other personages impersonating caricatures of the typical representatives of their nations. And the quintessential American is Mr. Cool, who reads only two books, the Bible and his checkbook. The whole extravaganza is a parody of New Testament, on one hand, and of “So Zarathustra spoke”, on the other hand. See nytimes.com/1964/01/19/archives/a-soviet-writer-who-throughout-his-life-has-worn-many-masks-in-many.html
Occam’s Razor: Trump “seems authentic when he speaks; he seems to be himself, whatever that means. He projects a naturalness and spontaneity.” because he is authentic, he is being himself, and he is natural and spontaneous.
All the counter examples you mention, the “boring and stilted” communicators, are seen that way precisely because they are, as you say, faking it (contrived is your word) and us listeners have learned to identify it when we hear it.
ELC: I’d peg Trump as an ENFJ. (He gets too much done to be a P, he’s too emotional to be a T, and, yes, he seems to be pretty intuitive.)
Trum roleplays as clown for a reason. Some Leftists and Americans are scared of clowns for some reason.
https://www.indastro.com/astrology-articles/donal-trump-horoscope-vedic-astrology-prespective
This is his Vedic birth chart interpreted by Indians.
Notice his ascendant, moon, and sun locations and interpretations.
Millionaires don’t use astrologers but billionaires do. Also US Presidents, Reagan, and other world leaders.
Hilarious? You humans were always more hilarious than clowns, don’t you all realize that.
Trum’s abrasiveness is often the same reason I am “ornery”. It is to ensure that those with eyes see not, those with ears hear nothing, for it is Veiled against the unworthy.
Also US Presidents, Reagan, and other world leaders.
Reagan never used an astrologer. His wife did. Reagan wasn’t one to be contentious with family members and just let it slide.
Each First Lady organizes the East Wing somewhat differently and there’s a different deal between the East Wing and the West Wing. Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosalynn Carter, and Hellary were policy advisers to their husbands. Most are not. Mrs. Reagan didn’t do policy. However, she was quite energetic about organizing state dinners and other public events. She was also the functional supervisor of the president’s appointments secretary and the deputy chief of staff in charge of public relations (a man who worked for the Reagans on-and-off for 19 years and was more of a son to them than their actual sons). Mrs. Reagan set the President’s schedule and she consulted an astrologer to do that. The president’s chief of staff was irritated by the whole fandango and irritated by the amount of time he had to spend remonstrating with Mrs. Reagan over the phone.
I think R.C.’s analysis is excellent.
Ancillary point: the people who say “Trump lies all the time–1984 is upon us” completely miss the point of that book. I suspect many of them haven’t actually read it. The horror of the book is not that the government tells lies but that it can rewrite history to support the lies, compel you to say you believe them, and eventually, if necessary, to make you actually believe them. It is not Orwell’s world, it’s the opposite of Orwell’s world, when most of the major media and a large proportion of the people shout “He’s lying, and here’s the proof!” every time Trump opens his mouth. What we designate by “political correctness” and related terms is where the real 1984 encroachment is happening. The penalties, formal and informal, for refusing to say that a man is a woman because he says so are the true thing itself.
I think maybe you guys are digging too deep. Trump is a real estate developer, of whom I have known many. To a developer, the project is the thing. If you have flatter, you flatter. If you have to browbeat, you browbeat. If you have to tell the truth, you tell the truth, and if you have to lie, you lie. The important thing is to get the project done, then move on to the next one. You have to have street smarts, unrestrained ambition, and no fear of failure. That’s Trump.
Dennis Miller, who is way smarter and funnier than any of the current crop of Late Night buzzkillers, recently observed that, like him or hate him, Trump’s “inner voice” and his “outer voice” are exactly the same. Meanwhile, the inner voices of Clinton/Obama/Pelosi, et.al. have never even sat down together over a cup of coffee with their outer voices. Perhaps that explains why Hollywood always leans so far Democrat… it requires deft acting skills to be an acting member of the Democrat Party.
FOAF on March 14, 2019 at 2:28 am at 2:28 am said:
…but rocket scientist IQ doesn’t do much good unless you are actually a rocket scientist.
* * *
And many of them are not very smart about anything outside of rocket science (although some are; like everything else, each subset of humanity has a norm & distribution).
}}} Some people think he’s stupid, but I’ve never (even when I was very much against him during the primaries) said or thought that he was stupid.
This is The Left’s modus operandi. They think ANYONE who disagrees with their positions has a single-digit IQ. Ford was stupid, Reagan was stupid, Bush I was stupid, Bush II was stupid, and Trump is stupid.
This is one reason they are so easy to beat. They are so certain of their being smarter, better, brighter that they continually underestimate their opposition.
Reagan never used an astrologer. His wife did. Reagan wasn’t one to be contentious with family members and just let it slide.
Unless the official White House astrologer backs your statement up, your credibility is null given your lack of access to this field.
This is one reason they are so easy to beat. They are so certain of their being smarter, better, brighter that they continually underestimate their opposition.
If they were so easy to beat, why did you sit around doing nothing about the Leftist sex slavery rings, child pedo rings, and transgender victims? 3 year old isn’t a victim to transgender surgeries is your counter, is it.
You underestimate the power of evil and yet talk about others continually underestimating their opposition. That’s such a C act.