It’s still a surprise to encounter a president who mostly shuns the potent rhetorical power of the office in favor of throwing little grenades of text out to small screens.
Since the early 1950s presidents have always made effective use of television. As my colleague David Blake points out in his new book, Liking Ike (Oxford, 2016), even the rhetorically awkward Dwight Eisenhower warmed to the demands of ‘putting on a good show’ for Americans anxious to be reassured. With its obvious interest in pictures, television is anything but a natural home for political discussion. But the presidency obviously has the advantage of singularity. This is what the “bully pulpit means in the 21st Century. Video in various forms sustains our need to understand that one person is mostly in charge. We use this reductionist idea to make the presidency a vessel into which we place a lot of hope for our well-being and security.
So it’s all the more surprising to encounter a president who still shuns the magisterial power of the Presidency in favor of throwing out little grenades of text to small screens late at night. To be sure, our Donald Trump remains true to his reality television roots. He has mastered a kind of bumper sticker rhetoric, even though these missives betray him as a shallow and surprisingly mean-spirited leader. In more normal times presidents usually try to offer to the nation the best versions of themselves.
The screen of a smartphone is too small for this task, especially since presidents have an IMax of possibilities they can use to press their views to the American public: availabilities for journalists, junkets, and visits to Americans to offer support and reassurance. By tradition the best and most transcendent causes are at his disposal. The job requires the celebration of all things quintessentially American.
We usually come to terms with the President largely as a dominating presence in video set pieces: press conferences, the State of the Union Address and carefully choreographed interviews, especially when they are carried by one of the big three cable news channels. It’s a puzzle no one has clued him in on how to master these venues. He survived the State of the Union Speech. Many thought it was one of his best moments. Surely he must have some additional American values to celebrate, features of the national character that he could endorse. They would at least make a play at reframing himself as a leader with a heart. Events like a walk-through at a veteran’s hospital or simply throwing out a baseball as the National’s start of their season could humanize him. Moments like these could only leave his doubters silent. Even Richard Nixon could be charming when reminiscing about his four brothers, or the hard-scrabble life of his Quaker family in small-town Whittier California.
What kind of president reverts to a divisive campaign speech in the first three months of office?
To understand how much an outlier Trump is one need only look at his strange “campaign” appearance in Harrisburg Pennsylvania on April 27. The Leader of the Free World looked small and defiant in that speech, which was mostly an attack on all sorts of Americans: the press, the Senate Majority Leader, migrants and minorities. He found time to criticize the architecture and new location of the “fake news” The New York Times. There were also predictable scuffles outside. And a few hecklers gave him a chance to use his beloved mafia line, throw them “outta here!” As the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson noted, “It was a speech with all the logic, elevation and public purpose of a stink bomb.” Another Republican presidential adviser David Gergen, told CNN it was the most divisive presidential speech he had ever heard.
What kind of president reverts to a divisive campaign speech in the first three months of office? Why is his eye always on the rear view mirror rather than the tortuous road ahead? And why is he still issuing jeremiads against his foes rather than sharing national aspirations? Time will tell. But at least for now, and from a rhetorical perspective, Trump has managed to make the Presidency small and diminished, and too many of us nervous.
It remains to be seen how long Americans will accept a drama queen as President: how long it will be before their forbearance for the man who can’t fill the part is tapped out.
This site is all about maximizing the chances for success in connecting with others. But if we flip that goal over, we get an equally interesting effect by testing the limits of behavior a mile wide of the norm.
I’ve been thinking about this watching television news people on cable networks, trying not to register shock that the President of the United States has just trashed another convention of the presidency. News people are expert for keeping calm in the presence of disorder and rudeness. Serious and accomplished reporters can be very good for taking any act and trying to place it into a context that normalizes it for the beat they are covering. This is partly a function of their self-definitions as professional observers.
Those of us with shorter fuses may not have this kind of professional elan. But that’s what forbearance gives us: the use of euphemism and “just the facts” to keep an offensive act from devolving into a comedy of manners.
We would never think to associate public acts so careless and random as authentic examples of “presidential rhetoric.”
It’s not too much to say that this President has seriously undermined the conventional role functions of the Presidency. We would never think to associate public acts so careless and random as authentic examples of “presidential rhetoric.” But we’ve had over fifty days of them, and then on one recent Saturday: an astonishing and libelous tweet accusing President Obama of tapping phones at Trump Tower, followed minutes later by a second missive expressing giddy delight that a reality star was cancelling his show. These rants came a few days after Trump gave us the wide-eyed and definitive insight that “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”
Nobody? That must have struck analysts and experts in three previous administrations as news. No one else had apparently been able to grasp the complexities of American health care.
These combined responses and many more like them seem like evidence for what’s known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a condition where an individual with limited competencies lacks even the capacity to understand how limited they are. No wonder one of the dominant tropes emerging in the coverage of this president is of a man-child.
Donald Trump’s over 500 angry, misspelled and boorish Tweets alone would have disqualified him for leadership in most large organizations. Can we assume that one day these rhetorical ejaculations will greet visitors at his Presidential library?
To be sure, we grant every White House occupant some non-presidential moments: Nixon angrily shoving his press secretary toward journalists, Johnson showing photographers a surgery scar on his fat belly, Ford diving head-first down the stairs of his airplane, Clinton lying about his relations with Monica Lewinsky, George W. Bush commenting at a press conference on the British Prime Minister’s brand of toothpaste.
But nothing has scratched the mostly pristine finish of the institutional Presidency like Trump. He has entire seizures of misdirected utterance and grotesque overstatement. His willful ignorance, bluster and conspiracy-mongering, are not just unpresidential, but anti-presidential. His penchant for turning almost every claim into an accusation and most statements into shaky affirmations of his fragile ego has made his short tenure an unintended psychodrama: an embarrassment to be endured. His first address to Congress showed that he can follow linear thinking if it is fully scripted. Yet he seems uninterested in the kinds of details and substantive exchanges that the press and public long for. So it remains to be seen how long Americans will accept a drama queen as President. Like a school play, the mishaps and miscues are sometimes funny. But how long will we accept this bad actor before our forbearance is tapped out?
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Gary C. Woodward has written about the Presidencies of Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
