Revealing Trump
Half of America will find this difficult to swallow, but Donald Trump is a regular guy—as regular as a billionaire U.S. president can be. He is a working-class kind of guy who resonates with blue-collar types, even those who haven’t met him. Shortly after Trump won the 2016 presidential election, CNN interviewed such a person—a working-class guy; much like the hordes who turn out by the millions to vote for him—to get his take on Trump’s “upset” victory. No doubt making CNN staffers squirm not realizing at first what they had done, the man said that Trump reminded him of his own father, a family man with an ironclad work ethic. The dad worked at blue-collar jobs most of his life, the man told CNN, only for his way of life to get scrapped because of politicians and technocrats out for themselves at the expense of the underclass.
“I don’t know if Trump will change anything,” the grown-up son said, fighting his emotions, “and I don’t really care if he does. He is the only one who spoke to my dad’s broken heart. My dad is now gone, but when I voted for Trump, it was like voting for my dad.” 1
Donald Trump is no ordinary Joe, far from it, but he is a man of the people—and he won’t debate or fight back against anyone who describes him as a “populist”—a label that doesn’t often get attached to too many billionaires. He is not a man of pretension and is not reticent to let down his guard in public, with or without a microphone in front of him.
One of many stories reflecting Trump’s ordinary-man character describes a time during his 2016 presidential campaign Trump was finished giving a speech at a small venue somewhere out in America. Following his talk and after leaving the stage, as described by Gene Ho in his book Trumpography, Trump walked the halls of the building to retreat to the “green room,” offering a sanctuary away from the crowd. “It was a comfortable little room, one with retractable walls to adjust to a suitable size. The room was mostly bare, nothing too fancy, but the tables were draped in cloth, and refreshments were available,” writes Ho, who at the time was a photographer tethered to Trump during the campaign. 2
Just as the door to the room was closed behind him, Trump breathed a noticeable sigh of relief. He picked up a bottle of water, removed the top, and poured some of the water on his hands, which he rubbed together to clean them off. He leaned forward a bit, and using his still-wet hands, wiped away the sweat on his face. He then grabbed the loose end of a tablecloth and dried his face with it. This was not the act of a man on guard, afraid to refresh himself in a manner that any ordinary person probably would have done in like circumstances. Miss Manners would not have approved, but thumbs up from Bob the Truck Driver.
“I stood in awe,” Ho wrote. “The man who I had seen as a seemingly indestructible force for months appeared so raw and human in that moment. . . . In this unedited act, I was reminded immediately who stood before me: a man. He is just a man. He sweats, he bleeds, and he’s flawed.” 3
Trump brings to mind Howard Cosell, the renowned Brooklyn-raised sports announcer and commentator whose calling card during his 40 years behind the mic was “telling it like it is.” Cosell was an ego-driven media icon for whom there was no in-between, his fame largely built on his fourteen seasons as part of ABC-TV’s vaunted Monday Night Football coverage. When sports fans were polled on their favorite sports announcers, Cosell was voted Favorite and Least Favorite—at the same time. Applied to the world of 21st century politics, that’s Trump—embraced and detested simultaneously.
Trump tells—and tweets—it like it is, much in Cosell mode. He’s all about straight talk, simple language (few words used with more than two syllables), and shooting straight without a filter—saying what he means, and meaning what he says. Anybody can understand what he’s saying—as annoying as the message might be for liberal elitists insulted by such brash language—even though his supporters listen to him and think, That’s exactly what I was thinking. Trump knows his audience, and it begins with not speaking down to them but in concert with them. That’s how he’s made a strong connection with tens of millions of people. He doesn’t speak above his audiences, instead choosing to meet them at ground level. Whatever his arrogance level might be on a given day, it doesn’t hurt his ability to communicate with the masses and be easily understood.
Why is that so hard to understand?
Run-on sentences are the bane of Trump’s speaking style:
“I manage to blast through the ridiculous liberal bias of the media and speak right to the hearts of the people—or at least I try,” Trump has said. “Even New York magazine, hardly a conservative outlet, has given me credit for shaking up the status quo.” 4
Before Trump became president, he was perhaps best known for his starring role in the hit TV reality series The Apprentice, which aired for fifteen seasons between 2004 and 2017. Like anything else with Trump, the show had its enthusiastic followers as well as its detractors, but it did elevate Trump to iconic status in America—and in other parts of the world—mostly because of his brashness as well as his conciseness. When it was time for a contestant to leave the show, Trump simply said “You’re fired!” and that person was gone.
That’s telling it like it is.
“Those of you who have watched The Apprentice will notice that the candidates who can present the facts with the least amount of verbal decoration will have an advantage,” Trump wrote in his 2010 book Think Like a Champion. “We don’t have the time for loquacious colleagues, and the longwinded diatribes we often have to suffer through will greatly diminish their chances of winning.
“Simple as it sounds, there is great wisdom in the short, fast, and direct route. Knowing where you’re going in your conversation and demonstrating to others you know where you’re going by being concise, is a big step toward leadership and respect. . . . People appreciate brevity in today’s world.” 5
Often brief, blunt, and confrontational, Trump is also intolerant of contrarians—many disguised as journalists—who emerge from the woodwork or the shadows to challenge any position or statement of his that doesn’t fit the politically correct narrative. Trump came to the White House as an outsider, a businessman without a political pedigree. On one hand he fulfilled the wishes of voters who had long awaited such a paradigm shift in Washington, D.C.; on the other hand, his election peeved capitol insiders—many of them manning media outposts—intolerant of anything but politics as usual.
(To be continued)
Notes:
1. Dinesh D’Souza, Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the
Making of the Democratic Party (New York: All Points Books, 2018), 258.
2. Gene Ho, Trumpography: How Biblical Principles Paved the Way to the
American Presidency. (iUniverse, 2018), 146.
3. Ho, Trumpography, 146.
4. Donald J. Trump, Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America
(New York: Threshold Editions, 2015), 29.
5. Donald J. Trump. Think Like a Champion: An Informal Education in
Business and Life (New York: RP Minis, 2010), 63.