Words fail Trump but for supporters his message is loud and clear
Language experts have pored over speeches that have translators tearing their hair out and some find his macho bluster surprisingly effective
Presidents are often remembered for their words as well as their actions but at the close of one of the most tumultuous years in White House history, Donald Trump has linguists scratching their heads.
He is routinely mocked as incoherent, yet gets his message across to supporters clear as day.
Philip Roth has declared that Trump “speaks jerkish”, while Columbia University professor of linguistics John McWhorter calls his speech “oddly adolescent”.
Others see it as one of the reasons he got elected.
“I think a lot of his base is counting on the notion that he can be the tough guy and tell it as it is,” Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a Calvin College historian who has done a comparative study of Trump and Hillary Clinton’s speaking styles, told the Guardian. “It very much reinforces this notion of macho leadership.”
Where Clinton was meticulous, offered concrete examples, and qualified her claims, Trump sought to knock all caution and nuance away, rejecting “political correctness”, name-calling his opponents and ad-libbing on stage before large crowds.
“People were drawn to his unorthodox style and his strong masculine leadership,” said Du Mez, who is currently writing a book on evangelicals, masculinity and the rise of Donald Trump. “There’s been a hunger for that aggressive style of leadership, and a belief that a more calm and calculating foreign policy hasn’t gotten us very far.”
Since taking office Trump has adhered to the male chauvinist rhetoric that helped him get elected, speaking boldly and brashly, often to the point of recklessness.
The hope is that people will fear him, and do what he wants them to do. But particularly when it comes to foreign policy, many worry Trump’s careless use of language could lead to complications (or worse) down the road.
Such concerns were on display earlier this year when, after a major British terror attack left 22 dead, Trump referred to the terrorists as “losers”.
His word choice launched a raft of think pieces. Trump himself explained: “I won’t call them monsters because they would like that term. They would think that’s a great name.”
As USA Today noted at the time, “losers” is Trump’s go-to epithet. The move was strongly reminiscent of Trump’s puerile names for his opponents on the campaign trail: “Lyin’ Ted”, “Crooked Hillary” and “Little Marco Rubio”.
And though many felt the schoolyard taunt was inappropriate given the gravity of the situation, others argued such blunt talk was a savvy way to reach people with a forceful message across languages and cultures.
But why does Trump think Isis murderers would prefer the term “monster” to “loser”? The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart had a perceptive explanation: it’s the term Trump himself would prefer.
“Think about the language he used to describe his sexual assault: ‘When you’re a star they let you do it.’” Beinart wrote. “For Trump, the ultimate test of a person’s worth isn’t right. It’s might.”
That insight is on display everywhere with Trump, and it’s evident in how he uses language.
It is sometimes said that Trump is rich in the way people wish they were rich, but he is also macho in a way people wish they were macho.
The way he speaks is one of the best indications of such masculine bravado: if Barack Obama spoke in poetry, Trump speaks in grunts.
He is all confidence and bluster, something apparent both in how he delivers information and how he takes it in.
Trump won’t read books or even White House memos, which he reportedly insists be limited to a page and read to him out loud. He has no patience for “girly man” things like teleprompters, preferring off-the-cuff remarks.
Often it seems Trump’s communicative efficacy depends on whether his words are being read or heard.
He is typically most effective as an oral communicator, memorably stirring up passionate rallies on the campaign trail and dominating presidential debates despite a paucity of knowledge and ideas.
“The medium of speech is much richer than the medium of text, and these extra dimensions can be used to make a message clearer and easier to understand, more persuasive or more memorable,” University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Yoffe Liberman told the Guardian. “But these extra dimensions can also be distracting, annoying, or otherwise self-defeating.”
Trump’s apparent incoherence, in Liberman’s estimation, has two main causes: false starts and parentheticals. Such ticks are considered bad qualities in writing, but, as the linguist points out, they may actually enhance speech by giving an impression of enthusiasm and genuineness.
Some of Trump’s verbal tics, according to UC Berkeley linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff, are not a bug of his communication style, but a feature.
As Lakoff told Vox, trailing off mid-thought may be a function of his New York City upbringing, where “it is polite if you finish their sentences for them”, but it also has benefits in political communication. “He knows his audience can finish his sentences for him,” Lakoff said.
By waving his hands or shrugging his shoulders, Trump suggests themes to his audiences while ultimately allowing them to think what they want, filling in the blanks of his speech with the details of their own circumstances and feelings, be they fears of joblessness or anger at feeling displaced in their own country.
“It would be a mistake to underestimate his considerable effectiveness as a public speaker,” Liberman wrote on his site Language Log in 2015, “even if he doesn’t speak in conventionally coherent textual paragraphs”.
When you actually read a transcript of Trump’s remarks, it can be incredibly difficult to follow: on a page Trump doesn’t make much sense.
The well-documented bewilderment of the translators poring over Trump’s speeches only lends further credence to the argument. As noted, his syntax is broken, his logic hard to follow – and is “bigly” even a word?
But those watching in person, or even just hearing him, often find intonation and gesture picks up where grammar leaves off.
No wonder we’re having what the New Republic skeptically referred to as a “golden age of body language ‘experts’”. In everything from his “white knuckle” handshake with the French president to his spurning of Angela Merkel, Trump’s style of communication – unapologetic machismo – is reduced to its purest form.
“People think of him as having a big personality; he’s all over the place,” Georgetown University’s Jennifer Sclafani, who studies political identity through language, observed back in 2015. “His fingers are also all over the place. He makes himself physically wider. Those gestures add to the perception of his character.”
He also, Lakoff has written previously, uses the time-tested tricks of a salesman to tap into people’s unconscious through mechanisms like repetition, framing and verbal intensifiers.
For instance, he notes, Trump’s false statements are often made to sound more trustworthy with the addition of emphatic adverbs or the insertion of qualifiers like, “Believe me,” which suggests he has personal experience or an inside perspective he’s bringing to bear.
Trump appears to be aware of what he’s doing to at least some extent. “The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies,” Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal. This is what he goes on to describe as “truthful hyperbole”, and “a very effective form of promotion”. The truthful part too is a stretch.
He’s also – according to Anthony Atamanuik, who plays Donald Trump in a series on Comedy Central – incredibly self-obsessed. He recalled Trump’s joint press conference with Bibi Netanyahu in which Trump is “gripping the podium and turning with his shoulders” in anticipation of Netanyahu ceasing to speak. “You can just see him going, ugh, when will you be done? Like, when will you be done so I can talk more?” he told NPR’s Terry Gross.
An analysis by Liberman on Language Log would seem to back this observation up. Contrasting speeches from Jeb Bush and Trump during the presidential election he found that where Bush used policy-relevant language and his most frequently used word was “the”, Trump’s most used word was “I”, and his fourth-most used one was “Trump”.
Trump often repeats his own statements for emphasis, as he did in responding to the sexual assault allegations against Roy Moore: “Roy Moore denies it, that’s all I can say, and by the way, he totally denies it,” he said of the then Alabama Senate candidate.
“I thought it was so interesting to add the, like, ‘by the way’,” Gross said to Atamanuik, “because that usually implies, here’s something you didn’t know. Here’s something else.”
Trump didn’t have anything else to offer, he just wasn’t done speaking.
Most people when they have nothing left to say stop talking or at least buy time with words like “umm” or “uh” – what linguists call “disfluencies”. But as Liberman has noted, in one of the most subtle observations about Trump, “umm” and “uh” are almost entirely missing from Trump’s vocabulary.
In a side-by-side comparison with remarks from Steve Bannon, Liberman found “umms” and “uh” constituted 30 of 367 words spoken by Bannon – more than 8% of his total word count. For Trump, by contrast, in two different selections, 1,604 words in all, the final total of “umms” and “uhs” was zero.
“I’ve speculated that he may have trained himself – or been trained – at some point in his life to avoid using um and uh,” he wrote of the findings. “But it’s also possible that these filled-pauses statistics are the consequence of a relatively unfiltered connection between his thoughts and his words.”
Trump’s attention span is famously short and he will change direction in the course of a conversation constantly, sometimes contradicting himself even within the same sentence.
And his language, as Greg Pullum, a linguist at University of Edinburgh who co-writes Language Log with Liberman, put it to the Guardian, “is simply not anchored to any approximation to the truth”.
While such illogical flitting around may make him seem stupid, it has the political benefits of making him harder to pin down or hold accountable. As Du Mez told the Guardian, “Trump seems to have worked out a whole different standard of truth.”
But truth does not appear to be the purpose of his communication – grabbing attention is. “When you’re a star,” as he says, “they let you do it.”
