Trump - Part 5

In the last of the Trump articles for the the time being (there's lots more material!) we look at Trump's persuasive use of language

12. Repetition to Make a Point?

Trump is a master at using language to help him make a point, paint a picture or sell his brand.

Trump will say something no matter how extreme but at the end says something along the lines of “believe me, believe me, that’s a big number, that’s a really big number”. It’s a very clever trick, and Trump learnt it from one of the best.??

As a child, his Pastor was a man called Norman Vincent Peale, a man so good at persuasion he was often accused of being a hypnotist. He used a variety of techniques in his writing and his preaching to ensure his message found fertile ground.??

And Trump has taken this on-board.?

I am the Greatest!

An example is his hyperbole - “I am the greatest jobs producer that God ever created,” “they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true!” to make sure everyone has an inflated sense of his qualities.?

And he’ll keep repeating those phrases, to the point where you might think he’s thinking of what to say next, but no, he’s making sure that it’s sinking in. Psychologists consider the optimal number of times something should be repeated is between three and five, and that’s exactly what we see in Trump.

Declarative Sentence

The other repetitive method is ending a sentence with a short declarative sentence, then repeating it, for instance “I want security for this country, okay? I want security.”?

Take his assessment of what the previous administration has left him when he took presidential office ““To be honest, I inherited a mess,” he said. “It’s a mess. At home and abroad, a mess.” “I inherited a mess.”?

Or of the New York Times “That’s wrong. They were wrong. It’s The New York Times, they’re always wrong. They were wrong.” Get the message??

His tweets (back when he was allowed to send them) would often end in a single emotional word such as ‘Sad’ leaving the reader with a clear way in which he wanted the tweet to be interpreted, rather than leaving it to chance as to how they felt about it.

Trump the Populist

There is also more to Trump’s short, repetitive and clunky phrases, such as “I will build a great wall—and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me—and I’ll build them very inexpensively”. That phrase won Trump derision from the press during his first presidential campaign but helped boost his popularity with his core audience.

According to Richard Wilson, a professor of anthropology and law at UConn School of Law, this is really very clever method of oratory that has a lot in common with other populist politicians (and dictators) “They use unusual speech patterns and ungrammatical phrases and long pauses - and it kind of pulls you in,”?

He continues “[Populists] want to speak like regular folks and so they often use phrases that are ungrammatical so as to seem popular,” he explains. “But they also do it because it forces us to listen more closely.”

Trump the Salesman

Trump also uses salesman’s techniques - "Many people are saying…" or "Believe me" — whilst saying something that is baseless or untrue.?

From his days on QVC (honestly, he sold ‘Trump Steaks’ "The World's Greatest Steaks" through the channel) he would repeat, again and again, that the steaks were the same as you could only get at the best gourmet restaurants around the world.?

Edward Schiappa, professor of rhetoric and media at MIT, says Trump sells simple answers to problems: “People who don’t have time or the inclination to do much research or thought about certain topics think they can be solved simply—’build a wall,’ ‘bomb the hell out of them,’ ‘buy American’ - these are simple ideas that seem to address problems that bother a lot of people.”

Thus he can get away without having to consider the logistics of the solution. That same style can throw the unwary off their beat within negotiations, when such a simple solution is proposed. If that happens then we all need to remember to stop and take a step back to see the defects in the proposed scheme.

Trump vs. Obama

Professor Susan Hunston of the University of Birmingham has compared in detail the inaugural speeches from Obama and Trump. These two passages show the difference in how they address the same point:

Obama: And for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken - you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

Trump: [We will] unite the civilised world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the earth.

Comparing them, Hunston says “Trump’s statement is shorter and simpler. It consists of two clauses linked by ‘which’. Obama’s statement has eight verbs and includes coordinated, projected and embedded clauses.”?

She also highlights the difference between Obama’s use of ‘defeat’ against Trump’s far more incendiary intent to ‘eradicate completely from the face of the earth’.

Linguistic Tropes

All in all you can see that whilst a lot of people continue to deride Trump as a semi-literate buffoon, he’s a very clever operator.?

We can all copy some of his linguistic tropes by using declarative language, simple emotional words, repetition, plain language and keep selling an idea (over and over again) until it gains traction.?

This way, we can all have a little bit of Trump in our negotiation tool kit.