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Home » Trump as long-form master

Trump as long-form master

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting take on Trump:

Trump is the only major American politician of the last forty years who was professionally formed in the long-form unstructured format before he ever entered politics. That is the entire answer. Everything else is downstream of that fact.

The standard explanations (charismatic, natural performer, good instincts) are descriptions of the result rather than explanations of the cause.

Well, sort of. He’s actually a natural at it, and then he also has honed his skills over time. It’s not either/or. But yes, he’s got more experience in the long-form interview, both hostile and friendly, than almost anyone on earth. That’s not an accident. He’s sought celebrity, and been comfortable with it, for pretty much his whole life.

I agree with a great deal of the article – for example, this:

Widely misunderstood. Trump does not actually have no filter. He has a very specific filter, calibrated over decades, that allows him to say things that sound spontaneous and unfiltered while actually being controlled performance. He says transgressive things on purpose, knowing they will land. He floats trial balloons, watches the reaction, and either commits to the position or walks it back depending on the response. The persona of being unfiltered is itself a filter.

Also this:

The credentialed class is the class of people who have internalized the institutional consequences of saying the wrong thing, and who have organized their public speech to avoid those consequences. Trump did not come up through any of those institutions. He came up in New York real estate and tabloid culture, both of which are environments where shame is a vulnerability rather than a discipline, and where the operators who succeed are the ones who have learned to act without it. He says things the credentialed class would be unable to say, not because the things are necessarily wrong, but because the credentialed class has been trained to feel an autonomic flinch before the words leave the mouth. Trump does not have the flinch.

The absence of the flinch is read by the audience as authenticity, and is read by the opposing class as proof of monstrousness.

Yes indeed. But the author follows it with this:

Both readings miss the structural fact: the flinch is a learned behavior of a specific institutional formation, and Trump did not undergo that formation.

Here’s where I have the same objection I had at the beginning: it’s not just a learned behavior, it’s in sync with Trump’s personality, although it’s also a behavior that’s been honed and refined through practice.

It occurs to me that Spencer Pratt has had some of this type of practice. Not as much as Trump but more than most, having been on reality TV a great deal. And he also didn’t come up through the normal political paths, so he didn’t learn the pussy-footing obfuscation and the art of talking while saying nothing. Here’s an example of Pratt’s skills:

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether people without X can access these tweets and videos. If you can’t see the second one, this might help:

It’s LA, and I doubt Pratt can win. But it would be astounding if he did.

Comments

Trump as long-form master — 13 Comments

  1. Atwood caught onto a great deal of formation, though he missed one particular I believe adds salience: Trump spent many hours (hundreds? thousands?) talking with Rush while playing golf over the years, just hanging out, betting, winning, losing, chewing over what’s what, and what isn’t.

  2. Mark Atwood’s analysis of Trump’s style is brilliant.
    Salena Zito’s maxim about Trump’s supporters taking him seriously but not literally is kind of a distillation of Atwood’s details.
    Definitely RTWT.
    His conclusion:
    https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-apprenticeship?r=7yrqz&triedRedirect=true

    The credentialed class has read Trump as a fluke, an embarrassment, a degradation, a sign of the times. He is something more specific and more interesting: he is the first major American politician whose public persona was built outside the institutional pipeline that selects against the skills the long-form format rewards, and who was therefore positioned to dominate the long-form format the moment the long-form format became politically decisive. The credentialed class did not see this coming because the credentialed class did not understand that the format was about to become decisive. By the time the format was decisive, Trump had a forty-year head start.

    The class that has spent ten years describing him as uniquely unqualified has not noticed that the qualification it is using to measure him is the qualification its own format has rendered obsolete.

    He does it well because he has done it longer than anyone, in venues that selected for it, with no institutional training that would have suppressed the skills he was developing. The mystery is not why he is good at it. The mystery is why anyone expected, going in, that anyone else in the field would have been able to compete with him on this dimension at all.

    They couldn’t. They can’t. They probably won’t be able to until the institutional pipeline that produces politicians changes enough that long-form competence becomes the default qualification rather than a peripheral one.

    On current evidence, that takes another political generation. It may not happen at all.

  3. “Mark Atwood’s analysis of Trump’s style is brilliant.” AesopFan

    Agreed.

  4. If Donald Trump leaves no other legacy, at least he will have cleaned up our National Capitol and made it worthy of its historical stature. Add this to the Reflecting Pool, the Ballroom, the renovation of the Kennedy Center, and other critically mishandled structures. No need to ask “Where did all the maintenance funds go?” – obviously to the Political Learing Centers of both parties.
    https://donsurber.substack.com/p/making-dc-worthy-of-the-usa

    On January 9, 2023, the Washington Post reported that officials announced they were cleaning up Union Station, a landmark railroad terminal in the nation’s capital.
    …

    Trump is very familiar with DC architecture having taken on the decades-long attempt to transform the Old Post Office into a luxury hotel. He did so in two years, ahead of schedule and under budget. That’s the Trump Way.

    To bring Union Station back, Trump cut through the clutter of the Union Station Redevelopment Corp., Congress and the National Park Service—and got the job done using park service personnel to work—much like he is getting the reflecting pool at the National Mall de-Obamanized.

    President Trump launched Operation D.C. Safe and Beautiful last summer to crackdown on crime and beautify the city ahead of our 250th birthday on July 4th. Federal agencies worked with various National Guard units (including West Virginia’s 863rd MP Company and 167th Airlift Wing) to clean up Washington.

    Violent crime fell 29% comparing 2025 numbers to 2024 as criminals scurried like cockroaches once the refrigerator light of the operation hit them.
    …
    123 years ago, the land the B&O and Pennsylvania Railroad built Union Station on was a swamp. Congress let Teddy Roosevelt sell the land to them and the two companies spent five years and $16 million building it. Four years later, they added the Columbus Circle fountain and plaza, which made the Washington Terminal (its official name) a gem.

    But 70 years later, when passenger trains went almost the way of passenger pigeons, the terminal looked terminally ill. On February 23, 1981, the National Park Service closed the building to the public after a leaking roof caused part of the ceiling to collapse in the main waiting room.

    Enter The Ronald. He got Congress to put up $160 million to buy and renovate the station. This was a much bigger project than this year’s cleanup.

    Seven years later, the station reopened as a vibrant festival marketplace with shops, restaurants, and restored Beaux-Arts grandeur—the version most people today remember as the good old days.

    Nearly 40 years later, the place needed a cleaning up. The fountain at Columbus Circle stopped running in 2007.

    But the problem went deeper than graffiti and crime. The station needed permanent change to make it friendly to the public. The Trump administration got the job done and re-opened the renovated Columbus Circle fountain at Union Station on Thursday.
    …

    For the first time in decades, Washington should be safe and clean enough to visit—just in time for the 250th celebration of independence.

  5. Trump’s “authenticity” and that of Mr. Pratt are also bolstered by the likelihood that both of them are 1) telling the truth and, 2) actually believe in what they say, unlike almost every other personality in politics today. I came to understand quite early in my law practise that people telling the truth have far less difficulty in providing consistent answers to questions put to them repeatedly than people who are lying. Hardly a novel concept, but one that is quite reliably accurate. Of course, people suffering from pathological narcissism are quite good at lying and show none of the typical outward signs that they are doing so because they have no shame. Perhaps that is one reason why we see so many of these kinds of people in the field of politics.

  6. This is great stuff. Trump has also perfected the art of hyperbole. He makes outlandish claims about a sub-topic in order to focus national attention on the main topic. The best example is perhaps his “They’re eating the cats and they’re eating the dogs” comment during the 2024 presidential debate. Sourcing for this claim was very tenuous (let’s be honest), but it resulted in 72 hours of media outrage, and all of sudden the entire country knew of Springfield, Ohio and how it had been overrun virtually overnight with 20,000 Haitians, meaning one in every 3 or 4 persons in that town was now Haitian. Which was the real outrage in that episode, of course.

  7. What % of people watch (or listen to) long-form videos, radio programs, or podcasts, as opposed to those who watch 3-minute TikTok videos? Are they the same people at different times in the day, or different sets of people? What are the demographics?

    I’ve written about the psychological & social effects of different kinds of media–Stories and Society:
    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/70061.html

    …maybe start thinking about a post on what kinds of people & organizations create (or co-create, as with a guest on a talk show) media of different types

  9. Bauxite…as if on cue with his whale crusade. Nothing substantive. Just…..Bauxite.

  10. Since most (almost all) politicians and journalists are manipulators, at least Trump is entertaining.

  11. AesopFan

    If you try to convince someone of something are you manipulating them?

  12. @ Richard — IOW, where is the line between persuasion and manipulation?
    It’s hard to tell. I think there is a gradient connecting the two.

    However, anything that makes someone’s conviction (position, policy, action, whatever) dependent on considerations other than reason and evidence, and rational self-interest, might be the tell-tale.

    Emotional appeals are a big one. Threats, especially veiled ones, are another. Insinuations of some nebulous shameful association kind of combine them.
    Lying is a big tell; spinning facts, when unmoored from reality, is a close cousin.

    Force and violence go past manipulation, I think, for the direct targets; however, the “examples” can be used to manipulate other people.

    I posted this link on the Mamdani thread, but it works just as well here.
    https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-ungrippables

  13. I recall how reluctant I was to view the 2016 results for fear of confirming Hillary! had won. I had the disbelief of happiness and checked a few sites before calling my husband to see that Trump had won.

    May LA have that same blessing.

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