I get sick and tired of liberal-progressive Democrat -voting smart-asses, like Ezra Klein at "Vox", and other leftist "intellectuals" telling people that Trump speaks like a backward eight - year -old, and is too inarticulate to be a President of the USA. That he lacks the erudition and sophistication of a speaker like Barack Obama and is an embarrassment to the American nation.
The other night I tuned in to watch a MAGA/KAG rally and when Trump came on stage , the first thing he said was: "Is there anywhere you would rather be, anything that is more fun than being at a Trump rally!" The big, 20,000+, crowd in the stadium gave their answer a deafening cheer, and I was thinking I would love to be there myself. I watched every Trump MAGA/KAG rally and thought to myself wow, this guy is a great entertainer and a great political speaker, he can be really funny at times, but when he is talking about serious issues EVERYONE is listening intently to every word he utters.
So. I was thinking to myself: "What makes Trump such a great orator ?" Whether you despise him or adore him or are an independent, you cannot deny the fact that when Trump speaks, people stop what they are doing and LISTEN. He knows how to directly connect with all sorts of different people in America. Likewise some phenomenal number of Americans - many of them doubtless Trump-haters follow "The Donald's" tweets religiously. I figured that the answer is his way of speaking; just as Winston Churchill was famous for his unforgettable speeches to the British public in WW-" Churchill's courageous speeches rallied the British people during some of the very darkest and most desperate hours of England's war against the Nazis in the early 1940's: - the evacuation of the BEF from Dunkirk, the "Battle of Britain", the fall of France, etc. I am not trying to equate Trump as a political orator with Winston Churchill, the two men lived in entirely different historical circumstances: wartime Britain has very little in common with the US in 2020; Churchill and Trump had very different personalities, Trump delivers his speeches off -the - cuff, while Churchill read his speeches from typed scripts that he had painstakingly prepared, often over hours on end. Their is, however, one characteristic the Trump and Churchill's speeches have in common. Both men tended to use simple words (one to two syllables) and syntax/sentence structure. So this is the first feature of Trump's success as an orator , I'll explain...
(1) TRUMP'S SIMPLE LANGUAGE - SHORT WORDS
Linguists have done countless analyses of Trump's speaking style and they all agree that he predominantly uses simple words and sentences. Churchill discovered that his audiences preferred short, homely words that were of common usage. The shorter words of a language are usually the more ancient. So in the case of English the shorter word are essentially Anglo-Saxon and date back to the very early medieval era. This means that given the passage of time, their meanings have become more ingrained in the national character and they appeal to English people and people of direct English descent (like White Americans/Australians) with greater force to simple understanding than words that have been more recently introduced from the Latin and the Greek. Trump would not say "liberated" , for example, he would say "freed." While Obama uses the fancy, college-level words, Trump manages to get by with the kind of vocabulary an eight year old English speaking child possesses; short, simple Anglo-Saxon zingers e.g words like:...has...so...much...been...owed...by...so... many...to...so...few.
(2) "TRUMPTALK" IS A STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
If you listen to one of Obama's speeches you will find that he uses very erudite, sophisticated language, and was praised by the political establishment for being a refined, articulate and sophisticated speaker. Linguists call this "monitored" or analytic speech. Monitored speech is like writing a letter or an essay. Writing is deliberate and demand the use of rational mental processes, that is , before you write a sentence you think or deliberate about what you are going to say before you put pen to paper. (And) what you write can be edited, amended and corrected if you have made an error. Obama's formal speeches were usually pre-written and read from a script or auto-cue screen; if they were "ad libbed" they are framed very carefully and reflectively in much the same way that a piece of writing is. The irony is that because "monitored" speech is so "stiff, formal, precisely calculated and in the case of a politician like Obama, so "clever" and sophisticated and full of fancy big words/sentences most ordinary people find it difficult to keep paying attention, they then get bored and they then tune out and stop actively listening. When Obama gives a public speech today, he might draw a crowd of 200-300 sadsters like the (F)oulWoman but that's all. People don't want to listen to his boring, pretentious bullshit, and who can blame them ! If ever I have trouble sleeping I don't drop a temazepam tablet, I just listen to one of Obama's speeches on You Tube and in 10 minutes I'm our like a light !
Trump is the opposite, his speech is unmonitored and generally delivered "off the cuff" like at MAGA/KAG rallies and in his Tweets. Linguists say that Trumptalk is a "Stream of consciousness". What they mean is that the thoughts in Trump's head are largely verbalised directed, spontaneously and impulsively without any prior deliberation or reflection; and this is why when he is speaking he has a well-known tendency to zig-zag rapidly from one topic to another, changing the direction of his narrative like the silver ball in a pinball machine. His critics say that this "stream of consciousness" speaking style makes his speech garbled and incoherent gibberish. They then add that he is evidently suffering from a cognitive disorder like dementia, but this is all just spiteful bullshit. It is bullshit because this how we ALL speak. Trump speaks just like everyone else, our friends and family members etc. If you were to record, then transcribe a casual hour-long chat you had with a friend, when you read the written text of the conversation, you would find it was ("stream of consciousness") Trumptalk. This is why so many people go to hear Trump speak; he connects with them because he is speaking just like all ordinary people do, also he instinctively uses the small Anglo-Saxon "zingers" I mentioned in simple sentences that strike the hearts of his audiences directly.
One final point on "stream of consciousness" Trumptalk. The word "stream" in the expression "stream of consciousness" implies a continuous "flow" of language, like the flowing water in a stream. At a MAGA/KAG rally Trumps speech has an easy melodic flow (prosody) that his audience can slip into, the speech is easy to listen to and puts them in the groove, so they are enjoying the sound of Trump's oratory in the same way they might enjoy a tuneful pop song by "The Beatles". Trumptalk at a MAGA/KAG rally is a cool, extended
mellow riff. Can you dig it Dims ?
(3) TRUMPTALK - CONFIDENT, POSITIVE HYPERBOLE
The emotional tone of Trump's speeches like the SOTU address and his MAGA/KAG rallies is consistently positive and this is another reason he is such a successful political orator. He achieves this by using hyperbole like: "tremendous", "great", "spectacular" "winner", "best", "amazing", "wonderful", "record-breaking", "unbelievable" and such like. He uses frequent repetition of these words to rally his base The vibe is always upbeat, positive, can do and will do. (And) what wrong with that ? What's wrong with telling Americans that they can, and will, make their country great again ?
(To be continued)
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Originally Posted by Nordberg
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