What is it about Donald Trump’s use of language that is such a shock?
He seems incapable of making so much as a casual remark about the weather without sending the whole of the East Coast Literati into torrential avalanches of Hitler metaphor. One can dismiss the latter reactions as being politically motivated, but there’s more to it than simple political animosity. There really is something qualitatively different, unique — and uniquely disturbing — about Trump’s political discourse. Whether we hear it from left or right, it jolts us. It isn’t merely what he is saying. For all the faux-outrage of the media talking heads, Trump’s comments, when not truncated into more virulent form by the snips and compressions of sound byte technology and the needs of electoral slander, are nearly always milder and more qualified than they appear when reported second-hand; it’s his way of speaking itself that imposes itself on us in a bizarre and disquieting sort of way. This is not the usual, ostensibly content-oriented, discourse to which we are used. But the exact nature of the difference seems elusive.
I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was so different about it, till I realized what it reminded me of. Casual speech!
Seriously. Go to a cafe and listen to people. You’re certain to hear someone say things like, “Cripes, did you see that beheading video on YouTube… disgusting… I know what they should do, they should freaking nuke ISIS… where’d they get that name anyway, is that a girl’s name?… hey, what’s Jeb Bush doing now?… what a wimp, that guy!… is that wife of his a midget or something?… ah, I don’t mean that, he wasn’t so bad… now his brother!… a total loser… forget illegals, we should ship the Bushes out of the country… And Hillary is an even bigger loser…”
This has all the hallmarks of a Trump address: exaggeration, incoherence, self-contradiction, crass humor, frequent insult, egocentricity, overstatement. And yet no one gets upset with the speaker or even raises an eyebrow, because we all know that it’s just casual speech. The speaker is not giving us his considered opinion at all, merely shooting the breeze. If by some chance the person were given Presidential power, we know full well that person would not nuke ISIS or deport the Bushes. What’s happening is just the usual jokey, flip, stream-of-consciousness improv of day-to-day chat.
But Trump does that all the time. He has no sense of rhetorical occasion whatever. When he gives a speech to ten thousand people he talks to them the way he would talk to someone in a bar, tossing out jokes, passing thoughts, one-liners, and really not giving a damn whether anyone agrees with him or not.
And people respond to it because it’s something they immediately and instinctively recognize as something they themselves do all the time. They forgive his overstatements and absurdities because they do the exact same thing, and they know full well that when they toss off as a casual aside just to be amusing, it has nothing whatever to do with their deeply held serious opinions — which (like Trump) they rarely express, may not have fully worked out, or may not even know.
This is not necessarily a weakness. Not holding a fully worked out position allows one to keep an open mind when seeking the correct answer; it can be a humility that spurs one to understand more deeply rather than to pretend understanding. Composed, calculated, final, comprehensive and meticulously reasoned recitals are not how we think, but where we arrive after we think. Casual speech reflects the halting ambiguous stream-of-consciousness thought process itself, and to see it in those least spontaneous of figures, the politician, jars. Paradoxically, Trump, in this sense, may be the Thinking Man’s Politician par excellence. He never delivers a speech; he just speaks.
At the same time, the casual and even contradictory remarks Trump makes on such occasions aren’t considered to be lying, simply because his listeners do the same thing in casual speech themselves all the time in full knowledge they aren’t being serious or irresponsible. “Oh, they should just take all the Republicans and Democrats out and hang them, they’re all crooks.” Is this a lie? A policy statement? The barbaric yawp of looming ur-Fascism? It’s none of these things. It’s just talk.
Now the polar opposite of the way Trump comports himself, and the officially celebrated way, is Obama, who unreels bland generalities by the kilometer with all the polish and feel of intelligence of the Harvard Law School graduate that he is. The strange thing is, however, that in eight years of listening to Obama speak I cannot think of one single line that sticks in my head. When I think of John Kennedy, a dozen gleaming sentences pop instantly to mind. But when I try to think of something that summarizes Obama I think not of his remarks, but of his logo. Why? Because the logo is memorable and original. Whereas when Obama talks of “healing,” or “putting aside hatred” or “working together for peace,” he’s saying nothing with which anyone could disagree, for he is as close as a person can come to saying nothing, period.
Intellectually, we dimly realize that Obama’s John Ashbery-like palaver should disturb us even more than Trump’s asides and sputters, but, as with Ashbery, the smooth unreeling onanism of Obama laps us into a sleep like surf. Trump’s discourse, by contrast, is neither the usual high-sounding windy meaninglessness that shields politicians from any possible criticism, nor can it quite be pinned down as an accurate reflection of the candidate’s views. It’s chat, not a policy position statement. (The truly bizarre thing, is that so few people seem to be aware that Trump has published three entire books on his policy positions, not to say a host of further policy position papers on his web site. Not once have I seen the press refer to or so much as quote one single line from them. They contain his considered views — and no one wants to hear them.)
How did Trump develop this Charlie Parker improv approach to public speaking? I think it comes from being grotesquely rich for so long. He’s gotten it into his head that he can say what he pleases, and the deep core of what disturbs us about it is the suppressed anger behind the recognition that we can’t. We have built ourselves a prison where if we say the wrong thing, utter a socially unacceptable epithet, we lose our jobs, friends and colleagues shun us, the press holds us up for collective abuse and ridicule, our income plummets, our everyday life ends. The shock of Trump is the shock of listening to someone not praise the right to free speech but actually exercise it; and the double shock of recognition as we realize we no longer have that right.
No wonder he’s hated.