Through the Perilous Fight* - finally?

* from the 3rd line of The Star Spangled Banner, the US National Anthem

Four Christmases ago, the US electorate had just promoted someone variously described as an attention-seeking, combative, divisive, grudge-bearing, narcissistic, self-entitled, thin-skinned, unquestioning loyalty-demanding, self-publicist ‘reality’ TV show host, to be Leader of the Free World. A convention-disruptor, he wasn’t from your regular Presidential mould. And neither were his Communication strategy or style.

He has since been described by some contacts and former-friends of mine (I'm only joking about that last part) as "an excellent communicator”. As specialist Communication advisors and consultants, however, at GPB we typically judge the effectiveness of communication by how much it persuades others. By how much it changes or influences people's views and actions. As President, Donald Trump has simply continued to stubbornly target his Communication primarily at his established electoral support base. At his captive audience. Which is, arguably, a deliberately divisive strategy, in itself. Perhaps it has worked for him in some ways. In terms of Persuasion of non-supporters, though, Trump has barely moved the needle in four years. But then he hasn’t really tried to. Has he?

When challenged, those over-excited and ill-informed claims of Trump's Communication “excellence” typically contract to “He communicates a lot. Through Twitter. That’s really clever!” I can’t refute the quantity claims. I’ll even supply some helpful comparative metrics. But "clever"? We'll take a closer look at that suggestion - which turns out to be as ill-informed as the individual at the heart of its subject.

How might Donald Trump’s combative communication strategy (his "Perilous Fight", as it were) influence our own? What helpful learnings can we glean and pass on? Since it’s nearly Christmas, I've called the following selected elements of his Communication play-book by a seasonal, festive title: his “Five Gold Rings”. Bear with me on that, even if Trump is not really your True Love.

1) The President of Twitter

I average 3.4 tweets per month. How about you? Trump has managed a whopping 420 tweets per month over his Twitter lifetime. That’s around 14 tweets per day (or 122 times my puny rate). And I’d hazard a guess his output has been considerably higher than this average, during the last four years. Since seeming to choose Twitter as his principle presidential policy medium. Barack Obama has tweeted less than one third of Trump's total output, despite joining Twitter two years prior to his successor.

Let's anoint Donald Trump President of Twitter. The King even, if he insists.

So, by all means, let's anoint Donald Trump the unchallenged President of Twitter. The King even, if he insists. But, as I hope we’ll see and come to agree, perhaps we shouldn't be too quick to endorse him as an “Excellent Communicator”, too.

He is certainly a showman type: ‘the charismatic, brilliant master of ceremonies… The ringmaster… a modern P.T. Barnum’(1). He hopes, nay demands, that you sit back and enjoy the show. His show. Just don't you dare take your eyes off him, or stop paying him the undiluted attention he craves!

2) ‘Fake’

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last few years, you will probably have noticed this is a term Trump has routinely applied to news and other factors which ‘he didn’t like and didn’t fit with his narrative’(1) He would often counter such perceived "fake news" with his own so-called ‘alternative facts’(2). The aim being to sow doubt in the collective public mind about mainstream reporting of all things related to Trump and his various activities. Should anyone really trust ANYTHING the "Fake Media" reported? Could they? He certainly hoped not and helped to create an atmosphere in which deniers, conspiracy theorists and anti-ists could thrive. He seemed pretty certain he could fool some of the people all of the time. And that this would suit his purposes.

Recently, of course, we’ve also seen Trump repeating the same diversionary spoiling tactics in a very specific area: continuously denouncing supposedly “fake” and fraudulent election results, from long before polling day, in an orchestrated campaign to sow further public doubt. That was after having got his retaliation in early about the insecurity supposedly surrounding postal voting. This pre-planned approach began well ahead of election day and carried on well beyond it. He has recently been issuing unsubstantiated (often repudiated) allegations and counter-claims on the subject. So much so that such tweets routinely now earn an official Twitter accuracy disclaimer.

This didn't seem to bother or deter the "undefeated" heavy-weight President, though. When bellowing out his “stolen election” rhetoric and his fantastical, unsubstantiated claims to the widest audience he could reach, the more mainstream media simply started cutting Trump off, in midstream, live on air. Which must have been annoying!

I’ve heard one US father reference his para-triathlete son’s “fake pain”(3), on hitting the infamous endurance "wall”. Showing just how easily such loaded words can gain insidious and unexpected wider usage, with users anticipating full audience understanding. How was he qualified to assess his son's pain as "fake", I wondered? And what, after all, is the nature of pain? One journalist recently repeated a well-worn concept. That ‘The centrality of language to politics is ancient and recurrent’(4). We now see examples of that centrality also leaking out into wider, popular usage.

As the renowned, anti-authoritarian, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick presciently observed, in 1978:

'The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words'

(in 'How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later'). Donald Trump has demonstrated the truth of this claim. Just as others have previously recognised this truth.

3) Black and White

Leaving all racist and white supremacist connotations of this phrase aside, nuance seems rare in Trump's world. You’re either Good or (Very) Bad. Either with him (you’d better be!) or against him. Either Making America Great Again or part of The Swamp. A (BIG) winner or a (sore) loser. The last of these now prompts thoughts of Pots and Kettles.

Trump often seemed to chose language specifically to challenge what appeared established perceptions of what was intrinsically considered black and white / good and bad. He routinely tries to upturn the perceived natural order. Even celebrated, decorated, public-serving former combat veterans, for instance, were to be considered suspect. In 2015, Trump (a man with no war record of his own, and suspicions hovering around the nature of his Vietnam draft record) said of Senator John McCain: “He’s not a war hero… I like people who weren’t captured”(5). 

This strange redefinition came as a revelation for many. Though, disappointingly, it was not publicly repudiated by enough reputable figures. Trump also branded America's war dead, in general, as ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’(5). But his popular support seemed surprisingly unaffected by such sentiments and paradigm bull-dozing. An unapologetic, call-it-how-I-see-it communication characteristic which was, arguably, one of the bases on which he had swept to power, after all.

One US-based foreign observer analysed some of Trump's other notable behaviours, perceptively observing:

“His most deep-rooted fear is the ‘Loser’ tag”(6).

Which suggestion might start to help explain Trump’s increasingly desperate denials of Presidential electoral defeat. As late as the 5th day of Advent, he was still claiming that “We’ve never lost an election. We’re winning this election”(7). His dislocated use of the present tense here seems to reveal there was an imaginary election process still ongoing in Trump's own mind. In contrast to the one that had already concluded, almost a month earlier, in the real world, upheld by the U.S. constitution and its courts of law.

4) Superlatives

On 6th January 2016, before his inauguration had even taken place, Trump famously tweeted his belief that he was 'a very stable genius'. He was subsequently ridiculed by some, for his trouble. In adjacent tweets, however, he also used other typically extreme and highly illuminating vocabulary: ‘total hoax’, ‘Fake News’, ‘Crooked Clinton’, ‘VERY successful businessman’, and ‘top TV star’. His stream-of-consciousness tweeting has often suggested Trump is unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s cautionary adage from 'Hamlet': he "doth protest too much, methinks"(8).

We soon got used to the repeated bathos of Trump's language choices. Even the provenance of his superlative medical report became the subject of comic, mocking enquiry: ‘laboratory test results were astonishingly excellent… I can state unequivocally he will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency’.

Was Donald Trump really 'the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency'?

Really? An obese 70 year-old would be the healthiest US President ever? Now that would, surely, come as something of a surprise to at least some of his predecessors, as well as to many neutral observers.

It was a health report ostensibly released by Trump’s personal physician. Deployed to underline the President's supposed fitness for office. But it begged the question of Dr. Bornstein: ‘could he possibly have had a little help with the drafting?’(1) Trump’s linguistic fingerprints here (and elsewhere) are revealing. He forgets the Narnia author C.S. Lewis’s advice on exaggeration, as offered generously to another American child, decades earlier: ‘… you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite’(9). There are surely echoes here of The Boy Who Cried "Wolf".

5) Baffling Statements

Of his first 100 days in office, Trump stated on 28 April 2017:

“I thought it would be easier”(10). He surely didn't really say that out loud, did he? 

Near the opposite end of his tenure, on 25 November 2020, the President tweeted it was his ‘Great Honor’… to fully pardon convicted felon and perjurer Michael Flynn. The same clemency would, however, not be extended equally elsewhere. For example, Trump seemed simultaneously to set his sights on delivering the highest number of Presidential death sentence confirmations in over 120 years. This has been described as 'a full-throttle resumption of federal executions after a 17-year pause... a higher yearly total than under any presidency since the 1800s' (11). In between these book-ending eyebrow-raisers, he also frequently betrayed a broad and deep ignorance. A lack of even fairly basic general knowledge. If we side-step his controversial Climate Change denier status without comment, two of the many other available examples of his ability to baffle (and to unintentionally entertain) should suffice to illustrate, here:

a) On a 2018 centenary visit to the French World War I battlefields and war cemeteries, Trump asked aides “Who were the good guys in this war?” Stating that he couldn't understand why the USA had intervened on the Allied side (5). An interesting way of honouring America's war dead.

b) Then, early in the Covid Crisis, Trump suggested using “tremendous” ultraviolet light and bleach injections as potential virus cures (12). Were these creative ideas coming from a ‘very stable (medical) genius’, perhaps? If so, he's one who has seen 42 high level members of his team contract Covid, so far. Laughter and ridicule rang out around the world, like plangent Christmas bells.

There's no Partridge and no Pear Tree amongst these Five Gold Rings, I'm afraid. But what practical lessons can we learn from President Trump’s bizarre Communication play-book? Here are a few pointers, in summary:

1) The immediacy of social media facilitates speed and quantity (but not always quality) of thinking out loud, so use it sparingly

2) Vocabulary can be infectious; choose it wisely and cautiously

3) The world is nuanced; black and white can't cover all possibilities

4) A superfluity of superlatives can spoil the broth

5) And, finally,

if you’ve nothing sensible and well-informed to say, maybe consider saying nothing.

At least some of the time!

Let us accept these Trumpian Communication presents in the Christmas spirit. Each one seems to be a gift that just keeps on giving! But who can tell when his generosity will finally end?

An abbreviated version of this article was published in the 75th (Christmas) edition of GPB's quarterly 'Speak Up' Communication journal. Contact me if you'd like to join its growing distribution list.

Source References - "The Dirty Dozen":

1) Sopel, J., 2019. A Year at the Circus: Inside Trump's White House. BBC Books p 24, 131 & 186

2) Counsellor to the President, Kellyanne Conway, in a Meet the Press interview, 22 Jan, 2017

3) Nick Nikitch, father of para-triathlete Chris, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, 25 Nov. 2020

4) Freedland, J: The Guardian Opinion piece, 5 Dec. 2020

5) Goldberg, J., Trump: Americans Who Died In War Are ‘Losers’ And ‘Suckers’ - https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/Trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/ 

6) Sen, A., 15 Nov 2020. Five Reasons Why Trump Is Clinging To The Presidency - https://www.indiatoday.in/news-analysis/story/five-reasons-why-Trump-clinging-us-presidency-1741086-2020-11-15

7) BBC News, 6 Dec 2020. Trump Holds Georgia Senate Rally, Repeats Fraud Claims - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-55206016

8) wikipedia.org/wiki/The_lady_doth_protest_too_much,_methinks

9) Lewis, C.S. (Ed. Dorsett, L. and Lamp Mead, M.), 1985. Letters To Children. New York: Macmillan. (p. 64)

10) Adler, Stephen J., 2020. Trump Says He Thought Being President Would Be Easier Than His Old Life - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-Trump-100days-idUSKBN17U0CA

11) https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-16/us-federal-executions-overtake-states-donald-trump-death-penalty/12991330

12) BBC News, Coronavirus: Outcry After Trump Suggests Injecting Disinfectant as Treatment, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52407177/