'Trump is an absolute bewilderment. I haven't seen him live. But he's one of the worst public speakers there has ever been. Whether he’s reading a script or not, it’s so patent what he is.”
I've always read transcripts of speeches rather than listening to them live because I wanted to understand the arguments being made, without being affected by the rhetorical flourishes. If you read the transcript of a Trump speech, it's almost incoherent. If that's what "Gandalf" is doing, I completely understand where he's coming from.
Yet the first time I heard Trump speak in 2016, at an airport where I couldn't get away from the monitors, I realized that he was definitely going to win. At the time the polls said he was 95% certain to lose. Nevertheless, I was sure about it.
The style transposes as incoherent because he's in dialogue with the audience. He constantly stops, interrupts himself, begins a new line of inquiry based on the feedback he is getting. As a transcript you can't understand what he even thinks he is talking about. As a member of the audience, it's obvious.
He is in fact an excellent rhetorician just because he's not on a script. He talks with people rather than to them. It's so different from ordinary politics that it just doesn't make sense until you immerse yourself in it once, and then it is clear why and how it works.
16 comments:
Suppose after that immersion it’s gone take a lot of soap to get the Trump stench off
You poor abused baby
We don't really allow anonymous comments. You can use a pseudonym, but you have to give a name you'll stand by. Cowards aren't welcome here, and wouldn't understand the company well enough to enjoy it anyway.
If you read the transcript of a Trump speech, it's almost incoherent.
Not necessarily, and certainly not always. In any event, the transcripts are useful--critical, even--in understanding the press' distortions of his words.
One example: the press claim that, in Trump's early on Charlottesville speech his "good people on both sides" phrase applied to the extremists (in the press' distortion, only the right-wing extremists) present in the crowd. A reading of the transcript of that speech makes clear that Trump was referring to the discussions/debates over which statues, if any, should be torn down.
Aside to "Anonymous" above: sign your name, or sign your consistently used nom de guerre. It's what's for...commenting.
Eric Hines
You can see this difference in a lot of situations: coaches talking to teams, siblings talking to each other, people working alongside one another. Imposing the strictures of a set piece on such conversations is usually done expressly to make someone look bad, rather than actually listen to them.
It's a cheap trick, basically. The first thing a public speaker is told is to consider his audience. Um, yeah, there's a concept, eh?
An astute post.
I have an acquaintance who swooned over Obama's oratory.
The cadence! The tone! So measured! Yet free from the teleprompter, hardly a great speaker. He has simply learned to recite.
Like him, or not, Trump got elected as, and this cannot be over emphasized- the first president since Eisenhower who is not a professional politician. Which means he has no strings attached by the national parties- that must be terrifying to them, especially as they have looked through every trashcan in his life for something, anything, to get a lever on him- and failed. Now they resort to obvious legal distortions and persecutions, with unknown consequences. We are well out of the Representative Republic box here..
One other thing comes to mind-skill sets- we all have them for one thing or another-
A politicians primary skill set is manipulation of other people by any means necessary. Persuade, threaten, deal, cajole, wheedle, argue, arrest, blackmail, bribery, anything to exert control over another.
The first thing a public speaker is told is to consider his audience.
That's another thing the press can't stand about Trump: they're not his audience. He's not only not speaking to them, he actively goes around them--Twitter, Truth Social, rallies--to speak directly to his audience, which is us People. His skill at bypassing the press goes so far as his ability to use press interviews to speak to us People and not to the interviewer or his/her colleagues. Pressmen as disparate as Christiane Amanpour and Howard Kurtz have lamented Trump's bypassing the press as gateway and Trump speaking without the press filter.
Trump got elected as...the first president since Eisenhower who is not a professional politician.
General officers may not be politicians in some sort of classic sense, but they are political animals. The higher they go as generals, too, the more traditional their political skills and techniques become. They're almost classic politicians when they operate in an international environment where they no longer can simply compare collar insignia to get their way. Eisenhower was a quintessential example of that last.
Eric Hines
Eric, agreed on general officers- I was giving him the benefit of the doubt.
for interest, who would you say was the last non professional politician elected president prior to Trump?
A long, long time ago I was on a forum where the admins had set it so that if someone posted anonymously, it was put up as "Anonymous Coward". This, in turn, led to some funny handles like one guy who posted under "Anonymous Cowherd."
Personally, I think Grim has his finger on the phenomenon of Trump-speak...if we want to call it that. He talks with us instead of down to us.
And yes, everyone on this Earth knows the man's shortcomings (egotistical, brash, arrogant, boisterous, unapologetic) but within that is, a part of all of us.
In all the things we aspire to be, he isn't really it...or is he...when we've had enough ;-)
nmewn
What I really mean to say is, sometimes trying to be >the honorable gentleman<, in a fight where, the opponent, the referee and judges are soundly against you, one might need some rather unorthodox tactics in order to come out of the fight as the victor.
The ends do justify the means...sometimes.
nmewn
E Hines and raven
I expect that when you're running business at the level Trump has, and especially in the jurisdictions (New York and internationally) and industries (gaming and entertainment) where he's made the biggest splashes, he's had at the very least up close and personal involvement with politicians. Much like Eisenhower's experience running the Allied effort in WWII. IIRC Trump needled Hillary about their prior relationship in one of their debates.
raven, sadly, I'm not that conversant with our line of Presidents. I'd hazard, though, that George Washington was more so-so officer and a pretty good businessman before the politics of leading the Continental Army and chairing the Constitutional Convention gave him some political skills.
Abraham Lincoln comes to mind. Maybe his pre-President political career was short enough to count as not very political.
I base those on their not being focused on a personal political career enough to count as "professional politicians."
Eric Hines
"Personally, I think Grim has his finger on the phenomenon of Trump-speak...if we want to call it that. He talks with us instead of down to us."
If you really want to have the sense of it, read his 'mean tweets' in the manner of Hulk Hogan or WWF-era World Wrestling. It's a very populist thing, and the same people love or hate it as love or hate professional Wrestling.
Which is not the worst thing, but I think he learned his political rhetoric from his time at WWE.
Trump fights. I do not know about others, but I was really done with most of the republican candidates simply rolling over in the face of obvious distortions and lies. He has a lot of faults, but he fights. He made a lot of mistakes, but he fights.
There are damned few who have the stones to do what he is doing- mostly, they are much lower ranked players in the play- a few, a very few journalists, a few mid level political candidates, nobody with Trumps prominence. I sure wish he was a Constitutional conservative, but right now, he takes the fight to the opposition-that is something nobody else can do, at that level.
An aside- Took a little weekend camping trip and ran into some military unit doing a team bonding-solo land nav.sort of thing in brutal terrain- very obviously the point of the spear, infantry, all very fit,a bit older than one would expect, almost all white males, although I do not know about such things, I would guess maybe some elite outfit like Rangers. Anyway,the thought that many of the politicians we have would throw those young men's lives away for nothing really pissed me off.
raven
He has a lot of faults, but he fights. He made a lot of mistakes, but he fights.
That's what won me over to Trump. Trump doesn't accept supinely the insults that Dubya, McCain and Romney did.
I get the impression that most Democrats are not aware that Trump's fighting qualities endear him to many of his constituents.
That is, Democrats in general are not aware that their incessant insulting of the Republican standard bearer have increased the dislike of run-of-the-mill Republicans have for Democrats.
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