From Demosthenes to Donald: How President Trump’s Rhetorical Innovation Places Him In Good Company Among Great Western Orators
President Trump delivers remarks in Scranton, Pennsylvania – October 9, 2024
Americans already have a good sense that Donald Trump is a maestro of political rhetoric. When he burst onto the national stage in 2016, it was in large part owing to a salesmanesque rhetoric, which made it easy to communicate often complex problems and ideas, from the fledgling border crisis to the stupidity of our ruling class, to mass audiences in sound bites that were as informative as they were entertaining. But that does not capture the entire picture of how Donald Trump has revolutionized political rhetoric, or the way we talk about political things, and how his mastery of oratory has evolved over the years to incorporate new innovations previously unseen in our national lexicon.
His innovations span well beyond simply making complex topics digestible for the masses. In a word, the Donald is a rhetorical craftsman. For example, it is also true that President Trump is an artful storyteller. He genuinely enjoys bewitching engaged listeners of anecdotes from his time as president – and life experience in general – invariably with his trademark humor and punchy touch.
But even that does not fully explain how Donald Trump has so mesmerized and captured the imagination of Americans more than any other person – both politician and celebrity – continuously, over the past ten years. Indeed, his stranglehold over the public mind is such that certain Trump-disgruntled segments of the body politic even have their very own medical condition to diagnose their affliction: “Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS),” a term now integrated into our political vernacular.
In an era of divided attention spans, all sorts of distractions and the constant clamor for stimulation abound, making conversing with anyone for more than a few minutes (let alone verging on ten years) a Herculean endeavor. Thus, the conventional wisdom would seem to be that due to these uniquely modern challenges, it is now impossible for any single individual to enchant an entire population, in the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln, who united the country in their respective eras by the sheer strength of their rhetoric. Or, at least that was the conventional wisdom prior to Donald Trump’s rise, who has flipped that conventional wisdom on its head.
Donald Trump now has become America’s main source of not only political entertainment but has established himself as a political authority – a fount of wisdom, so to speak – in an age that is so deeply fractured, not only on the fault lines of ideology, but of attention spans. So how has he managed to accomplish the seemingly impossible? Even more impressive is that he has captivated modern day audiences where the propensity for boredom – particularly in the relatively mundane subject of politics – is at an all-time high, where social media and iPhones have made us into a smorgasbord of scatterbrains.
Part of the answer to this complicated question lies in Donald Trump’s ability to speak about several, seemingly disparate topics all at once, relating each subtopic to various other subtopics in speech, ultimately returning to the main point – where audiences then finally see the whole picture and understand how each part related to the whole. In his own words, the President has referred to this technique as “the weave” – which, on a recent podcast, he described as “you weave topics together, you need an extraordinary memory, and I go to faraway places and then come back to exactly where I started.”
As the President himself has noted, “the weave” has been commended by English professors – and teachers of rhetoric and the classics, those professionals with a deep-seated understanding of Cicero and Demosthenes (to say nothing of Shakespeare and Joyce), as a genuine innovation in the American political lexicon. Where Lincoln used to go on turgid tangents, often systematically laying out his premises as a lawyer would, for audiences to ascertain in all its pedantic depth, Donald Trump is a creature of the television age, where storytelling – more so than rigorous exhortation – reigns supreme in our politics. Hence, “the weave” proves to be a powerful weapon.
Naysayers, who lack the ability to follow how each subpart of “the weave” relates to the whole, have long written off the President’s skill as “rambling.” But rambling it most emphatically is not! What “the weave” does is allow Donald Trump to hit a bunch of topics at one time, sometimes unrelated to one another (at least on the surface), allowing him to maximize the number of points he makes in a campaign speech, particularly in places where audiences do not see him as frequently.
Combining “the weave” with a story, as often happens in his rally speeches, is the perfect one-two combo: because you can stoke the public’s imagination through the narrative, while also combining it with facts and details from other anecdotes. This has the effect of reinforcing the central story in the minds of listeners, while also supplying attentive ears with the dopamine fix, from a variety of different sources, to keep them from drifting off in the course of a two hour speech.
President Trump has mastered this device so adeptly that it seems like whenever he deploys it in a speech, he does so unconsciously. That is to say, he does not meticulously prepare where and when he will start doing “the weave” (weaving?) beforehand. Rather, he begins deploying it impromptu – usually in off the cuff anecdotes where it’s appropriate to deviate from his prepared remarks. At which point, audiences observe the maestro in action. The second nature element of “the weave” hence elevates it to a kind of rhetorical artform.
“The weave” becomes an art, rather than mere rhetoric, because it is uniquely and recognizably a creation of Donald Trump’s (and no other politician) – much like how Luciano Pavarotti’s stirring arias were uniquely and recognizably his, too. In this respect, Donald Trump hearkens back to an older, more classical understanding of political rhetoric – the understanding that was not uncommon among the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Political rhetoric was not simply designed to inform or educate, but also emotionally captivate audiences in ways that elevated and transcended them from day-to-day banalities. This is something lost on the overwhelming majority of politicians, particularly today, so many of whom are utterly starved in imagination, intellect, and humor – the three essential prerequisites to make a speech memorable. Donald Trump, not being a politician “by trade,” but really, an innovator – a creative genius: in a word, an artist, was hence uniquely equipped to introduce something like “the weave” as an innovation in America’s political lexicon.
In America, our literary tradition goes hand-in-hand with our political tradition. The two are intertwined here in such a way that is without parallel in any other Western nation. When we think of great American literary geniuses – typically what first comes to mind are statesmen like Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosvelt, both prolific writers themselves, as equals if not betters than “pure” literary figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James. It has always been part of our culture where political figures – from Washington to Kennedy to Donald Trump – led innovations in literature, thereupon which the literati would seek inspiration from our politicians, and not the other way around (a reverse of the trend in most other nations).
This is partly because Americans are practical, business-minded people. We are men and women of action. Our greatest and most high-minded philosophical achievements remain our Constitution and Declaration of Independence, both political documents, reflecting our people’s penchant for doers over talkers (or thinkers). Political speech, distinguished from other literary genres, is defined by its mass appeal and practicality. But simply because it has those attributes does not render it any less rarefied than the literary and philosophical treatises of great writers, past and present.
Though it is true that Americans are becoming less conventionally literary overall, which is to say, less and less a book reading people, as technology has usurped our collective attention and created a golden age in turn for aural and visual communications over literary ones. But that is not necessarily a bad thing: ancient Greece, the apotheosis of civilization, after all, was defined by its elevated orations, its dialogues that were meant to be performed on stage, rather than written down in books.
Donald Trump’s rally speeches – and his weave – thus tap into that classical heritage, binding our technological age to that most high-minded of the primitives, illuminating and expanding the trappings of the American mind in a way that causes listeners to think about the world in different ways, to expand their minds, and consider alternative and higher possibilities. It is the principle of “thinking big” that ultimately separates the great innovators from the small-minded detractors (the sad majority). More than ever, thinking big remains essential to expanding mankind’s collective consciousness – and progress society into the future.
In this respect, Donald Trump’s weave is far more powerful than any individual policy or agenda – it is a conduit that can broaden the public imagination, and get us all thinking about new ideas and goals, the wellspring for genius and progress for any civilization.
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