Never mind what Donald Trump says. Never mind the Mexican “rapists,” the “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States, the “blood coming out of” Megyn Kelly’s “wherever.”
Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of Trump as a politician — and, in some ways, the most powerful — isn’t what he says, but how he says it.
Over the years, America has produced its fair share of rabble-rousers and demagogues; certain politicians have always said offensive things. But when Trump talks, he doesn’t sound like any other presidential candidate in U.S. history. It’s not just his pungent Queens accent; it’s not just his short, simple, fourth-grade-level sentences. It’s the novel syntax. The free-form grammar. The repetitive cadence. The eccentric phrasing.
“This is a story that seems to be more and more happening,” Trump said of the March 22 bombing in Brussels.
“So, just to sum up, I would do various things very quickly,” he said near the end of his presidential announcement speech.
“I know words,” he said in South Carolina late last year. “I have the best words.”
At times, Trump seems to be speaking a different language than the rest of the political world. Sure, Trumpese may be derived from American English. Yet it doesn’t appear to obey the same set of rules.
Which is not to say, however, that it doesn’t obey any rules whatsoever.
At this point, Trump has become such a fixture on TV that it’s easy to take his speech for granted; his barbaric yawp is the soundtrack of 2016, for better or worse.
But recently, I took a step back and tried to listen with fresh ears — to search for the tics and traits that define Trump’s way of talking and make every word he utters seem so distinctively Donald.
I discovered two things. First, there is definitely a pattern to Trump’s patois. And second, whether deliberate or not — and there’s reason to think it may be more deliberate than it seems — the man’s style of speaking has developed into a remarkably effective delivery mechanism for his message. No matter how much the media may like to mock it, Trumpese is helping Trump more than it’s hurting him.
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The first thing to note is that whenever Trump talks, it’s really Trump talking. He doesn’t employ speechwriters. He rarely relies on teleprompters. He barely even uses notes. As David Von Drehle recently reported in Time magazine, Trump basically “improvises his speeches.”
“It’s more work than reading a script, Trump says, but doing so allows him to give and take with the audience, to lose himself in the moment, orchestrating emotions like a maestro,” Von Drehle explained.
