Three Alarming ‘Tells’ from Trump's Latest Speech.
What he said was disturbing. The way he said it was worse. What I learned from these 100 long minutes.
Supportive crowd reaction during Donald Trump’s Congressional address on Tuesday night. (Photo Tom Brenner / Washington Post via Getty Images)
This post is about three things I noticed in Donald Trump’s delivery of his State of the Union-like speech to Congress this week.1 They are clues, and negative ones, about how he views his job, and of how far his party will go in subservience to him.
About the speech itself: It was extremely long. The transcript ran to more than 10,000 words, and it took nearly three times as long to deliver as Ronald Reagan’s average for all his SOTUs.2
It also drew the smallest audience of Trump’s five speeches of this sort. According to Nielsen ratings, at the peak some 36.6 million people were watching, more than 70% of whom were over age 55. (Fewer than one third of Americans are in this age bracket.) That’s a bigger audience than for Joe Biden in recent years, but only about half as many as watched Bill Clinton back in 1993, when the US population was 75 million people smaller.3
Most SOTUs are dense with policy details and substance. But they leave an impression mainly through body-language signals—bearing, mood, presentation.4 Here is what I noticed in the combination of spoken and unspoken language of the evening.
1) A dramatically shrinking vocabulary, and what it suggests about a president’s role.
Good speakers at big events typically work hardest on two parts of a speech. How it starts, and how it ends. What are the first tone-setting words that will establish a connection with listeners? What is the last impression you want to leave in their minds?
Presidential rhetoric books are full of examples from SOTUs and similar speeches. The beginnings and endings of many Lincoln speeches are common knowledge even in our shattered-attention age. Imagine a speech that begins “Four score and seven years ago,” ends with “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth,” and has barely 200 words in between.
A century after Lincoln, John F. Kennedy closed his first SOTU with a note of purposeful inspiration.5
Few generations, in all history, had been granted the role of being the great defender of freedom in its hour of maximum danger…. It is the fate of this generation.. to live with a struggle we did not start, in a world we did not make.
Two decades after Kennedy, Ronald Reagan ended by quoting Lincoln and telling Americans about their responsibility in the American pageant:
Let us so conduct ourselves that two centuries from now, another Congress and another President, meeting in this Chamber as we are meeting, will speak of us with pride, saying that we met the test and preserved for them in their day the sacred flame of liberty—this last, best hope of man on Earth.
As for starting a speech, consider this example from George W. Bush. In early 2007, Bush addressed a Congress that had switched to Democratic control, after big Republican losses in the midterms. As prescribed by ritual, new Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the chamber to order, and said that she had the “high privilege and distinct honor” of welcoming a president to the Capitol. Bush’s first words were these:
Thank you very much. And tonight, I have a high privilege and distinct honor of my own—as the first President to begin the State of the Union message with these words: Madam Speaker. (Applause.)
By contrast, what did we hear this week?
Here is what Donald Trump said just one minute into his latest speech. (Emphasis added.)
The American Dream is unstoppable, and our country is on the verge of a comeback the likes of which the world has never witnessed, and perhaps will never witness again. Never been anything like it.
And here is what he said more than an hour and forty minutes later, in the speech’s closing words:
My fellow Americans, get ready for an incredible future, because the golden Age of America has only just begun. It will be like nothing that has ever been seen before. Thank you. God bless you and God bless America.
What do you notice about the beginning and ending of Trump’s latest speech? Apart from the clumsiness of expression?
The first thing I noticed, while listening, is that like most of Trump’s recent speeches the material is a combination of “written” and ad-libbed. You could tell, by the labored tone of Trump’s delivery, that someone wrote out the phrase “the golden Age of America has just begun,” and he had to read it from the prompter. And you could also tell, by his tone and riffing, that he was free-wheeling the added commentary I’ve marked in bold.
We’ve all gotten used to the idea that Trump comments on his own prepared speeches while delivering them—“that’s so true!”—as if seeing the material for the first time, which is often the case.
But here’s the other thing I noticed. The nature of his riffing has become much more primitive and predictable. It’s like a singer who can no longer hit the high notes and now fakes it or hums. In Trump’s case it appears to be that he can no longer find big words or new expressions. So he says the same ones over and over and over again.
I’m not the first to notice Trump’s fondness for the salesman-style superlative “like nothing ever seen before,” which started and ended this week’s speech. Last year David Graham did an online search for the phrase and found that it was attributed to Trump far more often than to anyone else.
But here’s what has changed.
In Trump’s inaugural address eight years ago, I found just one occurrence of this cliche. He said of his supporters: “You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before.” That was it.
In his convention acceptance speech in Cleveland the summer before, it also appeared just once.
During all of Trump’s first-term SOTUs from 2017 to 2020, “never seen before” (or equivalents) appeared rarely or not at all.
But through the past year-plus, it’s what he says constantly. In his latest speech this week, Trump fell back on this formulation about 20 times. It has become his version of regular people’s um or you know?, the content-free padding from one utterance to the next.6 We all have verbal tics. But to do this twenty times, in a formal speech at the Capitol, before a world TV audience of millions, is like “umming” your way through a Supreme Court argument. And, the real point, it’s different from what Trump used to do. This now appears to be the only intensifier he has within his grasp.
His choice of adjectives also appears to have shrunk. If something is positive, odds are now that he’ll call it incredible, as in his latest speech’s close. If something is bad, it’s just bad, or a “clever”-sounding not nice. (Eg in this week’s speech: Panama Canal workers “died of malaria. They died of snakebites and mosquitoes. Not a nice place to work.”)
Why does any of this matter? I can’t presume to know whether it’s a clue to Trump’s cognitive state. (Although we’ve all seen enough people with shrinking vocabularies to have a guess.) But as for his role as president, I think the collapse of all rhetorical styles into one rally-slogan routine is significant in this way:
Presidents usually speak in different registers because they are aware of the different roles they play. One tone is appropriate to revving their own party loyalists. Another, for reassuring the whole national family in time of grief or stress. Another, when representing US interests with foreigners. Another, when representing the Executive Branch, in dealings with the Legislative and the Judicial. And so on down a long list.
But now, for Trump, all forms of discourse have collapsed into one form. To him an inaugural address is a MAGA rally is a State of the Union is a press conference is an Oval Office rant—whether to reporters, or at a visiting foreign president.
It’s all one slurry. It suggests no awareness of the different roles presidents play and the different registers in which they speak.
If Trump now sounds the same in all roles, I think it is because he thinks they’re all one role. That role is being the center of everything—of adulation, of fear, of power, of profit.
2) ‘Pocahontas.’ Trump crosses a threshold, and no one in his party blinks an eye.
State of the Union presentations have become disorderly. Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina yelled “You lie!” at Obama during one of his addresses, and Samuel Alito did a mildly more courteous version of the same thing. Rep. Al Green of Texas was escorted off the floor this week. The more of these events you’ve seen, the more examples you have in mind.
But, despite their differences, previous disrespectful episodes have had one thing in common: They were directed at a president, rather than done by the president. Personal disrespect, in public, is not what a president does.
Donald Trump crossed that threshold in a shocking way when he addressed Elizabeth Warren, a serving Senator, as “Pocahontas” during his speech. In the moment, Warren laughed and smiled and tried to turn the “joke” back on him. She’s tough and has heard worse.
But this crudeness from Trump crossed a line. Perhaps if he had referred to Stacey Abrams, whom he criticized by name in the speech, as “Aunt Jemima,” or addressed new Senator Ruben Gallego as “Pancho” or “Frito Bandito,” the magnitude of what he did would have been more instantly obvious.
This was a big deal. It’s crude enough to use slurs and insults at party rallies, as Trump has done for years. But to do it from the presidency, while performing one of the solemn Constitutional duties of office, is something we genuinely “have never seen before.”
The moment should be noted. Along with the failure of any elected Republicans to blink an eye.
3) Lying as loyalty test: the 150-year-olds on Social Security.
Every politician lies. Every human being does.