Naomi Wolf tells it like it is

NOTE: Coming from my background in public relations/communications and as a journalist/news reporter/news anchor/and talk radio host, I am in agreement with her assessment of Trump’s speech-giving style. I’ll let Dr. Wolf explain why I think she’s right on target. And why I hope his speech writers and advisors read this and make sure he sees this.

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Covering President Donald Trump at CPAC

Notes From a Former Political Consultant

“… Why do I recap the high points of my class on the history of rhetoric, and my findings from my consultants’ life, about what makes a great Presidential speech? 

Because I watched Press Trump speak at CPAC — it was the second time I had heard him in person give a speech — and I have some, perhaps unasked-for, notes.

I am not partisan. 

But as you know, I think our country is in dreadful trouble — I think it has already been captured. In my view, any non-globalist, nationalist candidate running in 2024 should be heard as loudly and clearly as possible, so that citizens can make the best possible choices this Fall.

President Trump is in many ways, a great speaker. The crowds that assembled to watch him in the massive ballroom of the Gaylord Hotel, were ecstatic. But there were, in my opinion, addressable problems, and real missed opportunities, in his speech.

First of all, it is difficult for me, as a reporter trying to cover the speech, to tell you what he said in terms of the “meat” of it, the substance. 

He came onto the stage, after pounding pop and country hits had energized the audience, looking fit and well; he wore his signature navy blue suit with boxy shoulders, white shirt and red tie. His hair was more grey than red-blond; he looked less like a “celebrity,” and more “Presidential”. The crowd was screaming with joy. 

But if I were his consultant, I would have observed that crowd’s ecstasy with mixed satisfaction and alarm. His live audiences’ impact on his own delivery style and his choices onstage, is not necessarily good for his outcomes this Fall. 

President Trump spoke scathingly about the failures of the Biden administration — the poverty and homelessness in our cities, crime and lawlessness, and the open border. He vividly painted, mostly extemporaneously, a picture of the ruin and degradation in just four years of a once-great nation.

However, when he turned to his own plans for his second administration, he was far less specific. He essentially said at one point that his main policy objective for his next administration was to “Make America Great Again”. 

This got a roar of approval from the audience. But it was not answer enough, I argue, for the undecided or swing voter, or for the homeless former Democrat. 

President Trump was very clear on some of his themes and plans, but quite vague or rhetorical when it came to others. 

He was very strong on his past achievements, and his future plans, in terms of foreign policy. He told again the story (and it is a satisfying story) of how he had used the threat of tariffs, to get Mexico to provide military security at our Southern border. He was extremely detailed and specific about how he will close the borders, and deport the illegal aliens who have entered our nation by the millions. But even with the discussion of foreign policy, his language was often anecdotal and personal, with almost no analysis: he presented a series of meetings with “tough” leaders, who reacted well to his own “toughness.” 

Swing or undecided voters are in anguish about our environmental problems. But President Trump merely gestured at the environment — wanting to make America “beautiful” again — with almost no specifics. 

He claimed a strong economy in his past administration, and promised, as I recall, a strong economy in the future, but it is difficult to recall his specific policy proposals to achieve this. 

Unfortunately, in between what were far too few concrete descriptions of his past achievements for our nation — which I had learned only by looking them up directly earlier, had, to my surprise, been considerable — he often committed the kinds of rhetorical lapses that would give thoughtful, experienced advisors watching, high blood pressure. 

He digressed. 

Oh, how he digressed! 

Some of his digressions were hilarious — for instance, he brilliantly told a self-deprecating story about landing in Air Force One, in Iraq, in a state of anxiety, in total darkness. It was fall-on-the-floor funny. It got peals of laughter. 

But there he left it. He had said earlier in the speech that he had started no new wars — which could be highlighted as a huge deliverable, appealing to all voters — but he did not tie this anecdote to that larger point. Indeed he tied that story to no larger point at all about Iraq, or about fear, or about conflict. 

If he had had a tough speech editor, the editor would have red-pencilled the anecdote: “What point are you making here? Conclusion needed.”

President Trump took swipes at the obvious dementia of President Biden — that were, again, meanly funny, and that got big laughs. 

But he could have made that same point more sadly and gently. He could have thus gotten the votes of all those who worry about President Biden’s mental state, and also added all those who are caring for a loved one with dementia — not a small voter category. I registered, listening as a journalist, that those moments would be lifted out by the media, to portray him negatively.

He told hilarious anecdote after hilarious anecdote. The problem is that the live audience loved him. His live audiences always adore him. That is not news. The CPAC crowd cherished the personal stories, the improv, the humor. 

But there are some problems with this speech style, for the rest of us.

One issue is that such speeches guarantee poor press coverage.

I, as a member of the press, watched nearly half an hour of his time go to hilarious anecdotes, repetitions, mean swipes, and charming jokes, in such a chaotic and circular way that, as I noted above, it is very difficult indeed for me to write an article pinpointing what exactly his speech was about. 

The circularity, digressions and repetitions also prevented the speech from having the “liftoff” that a great speech delivers — that sense of moving with the speaker through time, to arrive at a new destination. 

If I were an advisor of his (and I am not angling for a job; just imagining his staff’s tasks in handling him), I would be gritting my teeth at the half hour of digressions, because they took up so much room that there was no systematic summary by the end of his time, of what he had achieved for the country during his first four years, nor a clear projection of what he would do for us in the next four years. 

As noted, when the press can’t easily lift out the bullet points of a speech, they fill the space under deadline with mean quotes, gossip, scandal, invective; and what President Trump calls “fake news.” 

But why needlessly give them the opportunity to do this?

President Trump is not the only candidate whose best talents can be killed or diverted or suffocated with undue responsiveness to live-audience love. 

President Clinton had similar faults — both were or are so good with live audiences that they seduce and are seduced by the live audience, leaving the press and the viewers at home, who may not be so in love with the candidate, often bored or restless or unmoved. 

I watched the reaction of the press corps around me, and observed my own internal responses. 

A meme that circulated later on social media — a snapshot of a reporter playing a digital card game while covering President Trump’s speech at CPAC – seemed to those who were sharing it like a criticism of the reporter in question. 

But speaking as a neutral observer, and as a reporter, it’s actually a criticism of the candidate. 

A great speech, or even just a substantive speech, will rivet any audience member, even if he or she is politically opposed, or neutral. 

During various flights of Trump-ness that led the live audience into paroxysms of adoration, I felt the same sense of detachment as did the reporter who was playing digital Hearts. 

Why? 

Because President Trump seemed to be speaking only to those who were already besotted, and not making his case to the rest of America. 

The live audience at CPAC is not everyone. President Trump forgot, I felt, that he was speaking not just to his base, but potentially to millions of undecided Americans who were watching at home. 

All candidate can fall into the trap of mirroring only the concerns and language of their bases, and forget that most of the country has to vote for you, if you are to win. 

Many phrases that President Trump used at CPAC were right perhaps just for his base, but wrong for a general audience. For instance, he did little to distinguish legal from illegal immigrants, which vagueness allowed the press inaccurately to call him “anti-immigrant.” 

Candidates for President in the past only became President when they solved this problem, of moving from their appeal to the base, which population alone can never get you elected or even outdo the cheating margins, to an appeal to the moderate middle.

An example of this evolution was when President Clinton moved from the language of “welfare” to “welfare reform.” Or when Candidate Bush II said, about abortion, “good people can disagree.” 

The best and most influential speeches of Presidents Lincoln, Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush II, appealed to the “us” in Americans, and were inclusive, not narrowly partisan. 

There was another moment in which I thought President Trump burned political capital needlessly. He pointed directly at the media seated — he literally pointed his index finger at us far in the back of the ballroom, and at the video and TV cameras too — and said that the “fake media” were “corrupt.”

Not “some” in the media. Not “many” in the media. But “the fake media.”

Why do this? Certainly the legacy media have been and are usually corrupt in covering President Trump. I acknowledge this in my essay “Dear Conservatives, I apologize. “

That moment of attacking the press, which I believe is repeated in other speeches of President Trump’s, was pure red meat for the crowd. They howled with joy. 

But if I were advising President Trump I would warn him against the temptation of catering to that live reaction. 

What if there were a few reporters in that ballroom who were open to writing positive or at least neutral stories about the speech? I was seated in the group that had the accusing finger pointed at us from the stage. It was an unpleasant experience and it felt unjust. 

Not every reporter is corrupt. Also, power balances can shift in the course of a campaign, and an editor who has commissioned nothing but hit pieces in the past, can shift to neutral or positive stories when the polls evolve. But the polls won’t evolve much, and nasty coverage won’t change, if President Trump continues so flamboyantly to make a wholesale enemy out of all of the press as a category.

Lastly there were some miscalculations, in my view, by his advance team. One is that, as I mentioned, the press corps was seated at the far rear of the ballroom. It felt stigmatizing to be seated further away from the candidate than anyone else. 

Other campaigns seat the press up front or at the sides of the stage, or even on the floor at the foot of the stage. This proximity has many advantages. One is that when photographers are seated at the foot of the stage, they are forced to shoot with their camera lenses angled upward. This angle reproduces a longstanding visual convention in art history, and now in politics, that portrays someone as heroic. If photographers are seated far away, rather than at the foot of the stage, they take level photographs and video of the candidate:

Compare the above to President Obama’s imagery, and President Clinton’s, whose staffers forced photographers to shoot upward from beneath the podium: 

This “heroic angle” actually derives from classical imagery of leaders — notice that “heroes” are always on plinths or on horseback? 

(This “heroic angle” has been exploited by fascists, communists and leaders of free societies, alike.)

Aesthetics aside, there were other omissions that prevented positive or even substantive coverage of Pres. Trump’s CPAC speech. 

Our advance teams, back into 1990s, would give press kits to all media present, with a speech summary clearly presented, and the bullet points and key quotes already lifted out. This gave reporters no excuse not to report what was in the speech. At CPAC there was no such summary or bullet-pointed press kit distributed to us — to my knowledge at least — so a reporter heading back to his or her hotel would be forced to rely on wading through a transcript, re-watching the speech and taking notes (incredibly slow and laborious when one is on deadline), or else be driven to simply recycle: again —- gossip, innuendo, slander, and some quote from a random purported Nazi at CPAC, if one could be found. 

My view of press coverage is that the subject always has a responsibility at least to make it easy for the press to understand what was said. If the press has that summary in hand and then smears or mis-reports the speech, that is fully on them. But if one leaves gaps such in press outreach, one bears some responsibility for poor or nonexistent or “fake news” coverage of a candidate or a speech.

And indeed the reports of the CPAC speech were full of “fake news.” 

Rolling Stones’ headline was: “Self-Proclaimed Dissident Trump Rails at Newsom; Calls Migrants’ Languages a “Horrible Thing.” 

This is Rolling Stones’ summary of the speech:

“The hour-and-a-half rambling speech covered Trump’s typical gamut, where he touted his cognitive abilities while demeaning President Biden’s; defended Jan. 6 insurrectionists; ripped on the media; and preached a doomsday scenario if he is not reelected. He compared migrants to Hannibal Lecter, claiming “they are terrorists” who are “killing our people,” and a “contagion” — echoing his previous Hitler-like “poison the blood” rhetoric.”

Would you vote for someone who did all of this? Most Americans would not.

So, the CPAC speech itself is misrepresented grossly by this Rolling Stone summary. But also, it isn’t. 

Unfortunately, Press. Trump was indeed so loose and anecdotal so often in his detours and riffs, that these words could indeed be lifted out of the verbal spaghetti on the plate, and presented thus damagingly out of context. 

Here is the Washington Post’s transcript of the speech: you can see its discursiveness and treacherous lack of structure for yourself.

Why not say “many” or “some” illegal immigrants are “terrorists?” Why not say “many” or “some” in the media are “corrupt”? I was there, listening as President Trump did his jazz-extemporaneous riff on the many languages of the illegal immigrants. 

I knew when he said “It’s a horrible thing” that he was talking about the entire scenario that preceded that statement: the invasions, the crimes, the lawlessness. But my reporter brain recognized the “Bingo” moment: I knew that other reporters would lift out the phrase “It’s a horrible thing” and relate it just to the preceding sentences about foreign languages being spoken. And I knew with what aversion swing or undecided voters would hear that. 

Why make these careless lapses in specificity, which are so easy for a hostile press to exploit? 

Why, by not giving the press a tight printed speech with bullet points and summary, and by not training the candidate to stay on message, pave the way for President Trump’s critics to dismiss him as “rambling”? 

Why, why, if you support this candidate’s policies, make it so easy for his critics to smear him entirely? 

I am in the sad position of having seen President Trump twice, and having been impressed, wholly against my will, by much of what he had to say. 

Most of the rest of the country has not had that experience; their knowledge of him is filtered through this hostile media. 

He can win if he and his team prioritize message discipline, structure and good advance work. His adoring base will send me angry emails now no doubt — “We love him just the way he is, because he is real”. “He does not talk like politicians — that is why we love him.” 

I am sure that that is true, but the rest of the country is not so all-embracing. 

And any good candidate, with his or her speechwriter, can attain a healthy balance: offering structure, and adding flights of seeming (but carefully vetted) improvisation, that do not get the candidate in trouble again and again with the press and with undecided voters. There is a way to improvise so that vagueness and rhetorical lapses do not drown out the overall very important policy message. 

I guess what I am saying is that President Trump’s speeches and speaking style do not do justice to his record of achievements, and actually sometimes undermine many people’s ability to understand and evaluate his record. 

President Trump — indeed any nationalist candidate running for US President in 2024 — should take a careful look back at the great speeches of the past, including the great American Presidential speeches.

These candidates should, in my humble view, rein in their human inclinations to respond primarily to the swooning responses of their live audiences and their devoted bases.

They should remember that the great and successful US Presidential candidates, and indeed the great US Presidents, spoke with focus and discipline and strength and a sense of mission. And they did all of this by addressing the “better angels” of our nation as a whole; and by issuing historic and a future-oriented calls to duty and unity — to all of the American people.

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https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/covering-president-donald-trump-at