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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFantastic article: The Plot Against America: Donald Trump’s Rhetoric
DECEMBER 15, 2015
You cant effectively say that Donald Trump is vulgar, sensational, and buffoonish when its exactly vulgar sensationalism and buffoonery that his audience is buying.
Donald Trump, when he really gets going, hardly speaks in sentences anymore. He doesnt need to. His audience is with him in fragments. He shuffles pages covered with poll numbers written in thick black ink; he ovals his mouth, the lower appendage of a solid orange-gold block, and lunges forward like the giant sandworm in Dune, which devours all before it. At times ecstatic, relying on emotional connections alone, he leaps from subject to subject. Fear, danger, stupidity. Stupidity! Weakness! The fate of the nation is at stake. The personal safety of the people before him is at stake. Something terrible is going on. We cant live like this. Its gonna get worse and worse. Youre going to have more World Trade Centers. Its gonna get worse and worse. We can be politically correct, and we can be stupid, and its gonna get worse and worse.
The energy comes in surgesin bunched mini-waves, so rhythmically charged that they never bore the listener, even the listener who loathes every word that comes out of his mouth, every frown and eye-rolling grimace, every gesture of his right hand, which disposes of the worlds idiocy in jerking sweeps to the side. In one patch in a recent speech (the speech in which he read his proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the United States), Trump ran from Hillary Clinton (Shes got no strength. Shes got no stamina) to the United States being ripped off on trade, and then to veterans not being taken care of, and then to generals wasting time talking on television, and then to Bush (mimics a man sleeping), then to Hillarys complaint that Trumps tone was not nice (We have people whose heads are being chopped off
), then to the need for smart people (I know a lot of tough people
but theyre not smart), then to the money we owe (We owe nineteen trillion
trillion, trillion, trillion dollars. Who the hell ever heard of the word ten years ago? There was no such word), then back to the trade imbalance with China, Japan, and Mexico (Were going to build a wall. It will be a real wall. . . . Its gonna happen).
His speeches have no beginning or end, no shape, no culmination and release, and none is necessary. For the audience, his fervent incoherence makes him that much more present, for it is Trump alone who matters, the vividness of him standing there, in that moment, embodying what the audience fears and desires. At the Republican Convention in 1964, Barry Goldwater famously said, Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. At the time, the left heard a reveille issued deep into the woods of the American right. The word Fascism was spoken (by Norman Mailer and others) to describe Goldwaters speech. But now Goldwaters statement, with its balanced clauses, its formality, seems merely rhetorical, a flourish more than a threat.
Trump is devoted to anti-rhetoric. Boasts and fears and menacing attacks are followed by instant solutions (about fighting ISIS: You dont want to know what Im going to do)punctuated by war whoops and cries of adoration from the crowd. But put aside Trumps ideas just for a second. When you do that, you might hear, especially in his recent speeches, uncanny echoes of Alan King and Don Rickles, the New York-born Jewish comics of the sixties and seventies who Trump must have listened to, as a young man, on late-night TV and in Vegas/Atlantic City entertainment rooms. The slow beginning, the sudden up-tempo shift, the shouted indignation, the repetition of a few simple phrases (Its not going to happen. Not going to happen), the wounded expostulation, the exasperated bewilderment: its classic Alan King.
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http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/plot-america-donald-trumps-rhetoric
amb123
(1,581 posts)"Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice." Today's GOP proves that Extremism in the defense of Liberty, DESTROYS Liberty.
yodermon
(6,143 posts)no_hypocrisy
(46,190 posts)cali
(114,904 posts)for the New Yorker. He brings that to this piece.