How a man of few words reached the pinnacle of power
Howard Jacobson
Saturday 8 April 2017 06.00 EDT
... Trump’s hobbled vocabulary is now the incontestable stuff of comedy. Not just how few his words but how narrow their range, from boastful to irked and back again. For satirists and impressionists a president who addresses the American people in abbreviated tweetspeak is a gift. Employ the adjectives “horrible”, “weak” and “great”, the noun “cheat” and the adverb “bigly” – and you have him down to a T. “Will there,” Hugh Laurie wondered in a now famous tweet of his own, “be a separate news conference for the verbs?” ...
... Trump is uniquely stunted. A child listening to two of his speeches could reproduce a third without the use of a dictionary. He reproduces them himself with the same facility, employing speechwriters reluctantly, seemingly convinced no one can speak better for him than he can himself – “I know words,” he declared at one campaign rally, “I have the best words” – and he is never happier than when back in electioneering mode, rolling out the same best words he rolled out last time ...
... Admirers have spoken unironically of his oratory, his ability to relate to people of a particular class and alienated temper. It cannot, though, be called oratory to shout “Lock her up!”, Trump’s anti-Clinton rally cry, no matter that thousands shout “Lock her up!” in return. It is, rather, a symbiosis of inarticulacy – the rage, though there is no doubting its reality, fuelled by the repetitive simplicity of the words, like a drum beating in a jungle ...
... “I love the poorly educated,” Trump declared last year at a rally in Nevada. That could have meant that he loved them despite their disadvantage. But it was impossible to avoid the opposite conclusion, that he loved them because of it, that it was the condition of being poorly educated itself he loved. Of the many forms of divisiveness that have characterised Trump’s administration so far, this is the most dangerous – setting ignorance against knowledge and falsity against truth, making a virtue of inarticulacy, demonising the educated, making the people distrust enlightenment itself, though enlightenment is as much their birthright as anyone else’s ...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/08/howard-jacobson-donald-trump-bigly-tweetspeak
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