By hearsay
There is always someone who makes a statistic. PoliFact.com, which measures the truthfulness and accuracy rate of Washington politicians' statements, found that 77% of Donald Trump's statements are largely unsubstantiated, counterfeit or outright lies. For this reason he awarded him the 2015 Lie of the Year award. In the motivation for the award there are some statements by the GOP candidate for president that are completely without any foundation.
“I was there when the World Trade Center collapsed. I was in Jersey City where thousands and thousands of people were celebrating the collapse of the towers… they were cheering!”. Balla: there is no video showing this scene and the public authorities have denied that this ever happened, comments PoliFact.
"The Mexican government sends us criminals." Balla says PoliFact. The Mexican government does no such thing. The majority of Mexicans who cross the border illegally are job seekers. Furthermore, statistics show that illegal immigration dropped dramatically after the recession and remains low today.
"Whites killed by whites are 16%, whites killed by blacks are 81%". Dance, according to PoliFact. It's exactly the opposite. In 2014, according to official statistics, 82% of whites were killed by whites, while those killed by African-American citizens were 15%.
The hyperbole of truth
When Fox News' Bill O'Reilly urged Trump to bring backing papers for these statements, the acrobatic candidate said, “Come on Bill, I can't verify all the stats. I get millions of them...".
With George Stephanopoulos, the anchor of Good Morning America and managing editor of ABC News, who extended the same invitation to him, he was a little less terse: “A lot of the things I say – and I mean all – may appear controversial at first, but , believe me George, in the end I'm not anymore, because people are starting to think that Trump is actually right ”.
In reality, Trump follows a precise script that he developed as a real estate developer and which he made explicit in his "masterpiece" The art of deal, the text, according to Trump, the most important after the Bible. Regarding this reality augmented by the Trump factor which has earned him 3500 lawsuits, the New York entrepreneur wrote in his book: “I would call it hyperbole of truth. It's an innocent form of exaggeration and it's also a hugely effective form of promotion." In a sworn deposition last year, Trump said he doesn't use a computer or even own a smartphone. So how did he post the 50 tweets?
Trump's version
It is, therefore, the "Trump version" that becomes the fact, because people, in the end, believe it. Simple isn't it? And that's exactly the point here. Trump has a trusting, almost emotional relationship with a large portion of the electorate. Many of his supporters are ordinary people who work hard, send their children to school, pay their taxes and do well. And then affection can only be the only feeling that can obscure the truth in an honest person. All Trump supporters, if asked, repeat the same refrain like an automatic responder: "Trump is the only one who knows what to do". Point.
The commentators of the “New York Times” and the “Economist” have no reason to say and write that Trump not only doesn't know what to do but that he is even more dangerous than ISIS. It happens that many Americans also have the same mood as the British voters so well expressed by Michael Gove when he, warned about the consequences of Brexit, said "We have the balls full of the experts".
Bales of the type reported by PoliFact would or would have scuttled any other candidate. Even a slight lie is anathema in the US presidential election. Gary Hart, already almost certain of the Democratic candidacy, was incredulous and forced to withdraw from the race due to an extramarital fling tenaciously denied; Ted Kennedy's presidential aspirations were buried forever by unclear behavior, Bill Clinton nearly went under impeachment and became a lame president for repudiated fellatio. And oral sex isn't even adultery. Ted Cruz's accusation against Trump of being a serial adulterous womanizer didn't move a single leaf.
Trump, on the other hand, can say and do what he wants and enjoy a growth in popularity that astounds reasonable people. Jeb Bush said Trump is the candidate of chaos. Maybe chaos is Trump's strong point.
All the fault of the ars rhetoric
In any case, it is not possible to explain very well how a candidate whose statements for 77% are fabrications or false information can have such an effective hold on a mature electorate accustomed to the mechanisms of democracy such as the American one.
Paul Krugman in an editorial on the NYTimes blamed the "bothsidesism" of the media meaning, with this untranslatable term, the pathological willingness of the big media to describe politicians and their programs as equally good or equally bad regardless of how ridiculous it is this attitude. And then he adds: "voters who have neither the time nor the disposition to do research on their own and take the news and analyzes from television and the pages of newspapers, receive the impression of this false equivalence from their daily media diet" .
For the “Economist there is more than the responsibility of the media, there is also a talent of Trump. Trump has a talent that no one else before him has been able to express. According to The Economist, one of the most important think-tanks in the world, Mr. Trump's talent is in something called rhetoric, a very ancient word that Trump has been able to fill with extraordinary modernity, following the teachings of Orwell on political speech.
We leave it to the “Economist” himself to explain to our readers what this modernity consists of and why it is so effective. Below we publish the Italian translation of an article entitled “Double-plus effective. Why Donald Trump's rhetoric—with apologies to Orwell—works so well” published in the column “Johnson” (Translation by John Akwood).
We also point out a publication, which has just been released, where you can have, in Italian, an essay on Trump's rhetorical technique. This book (free in ebook format) collects, in Italian translation, Trump's 100 most popular tweets to be read in just half an hour. A sister book for Hillary Clinton is also out. By comparing the two styles, one can get an idea of the profound difference between the communication and rhetorical styles of the two people who are contending for the leadership of the most important country in the world.
To invent
It's easy to make fun of the way Donald Trump uses the English language. His tweets tend to follow the same structure: two short statements followed by an emotionally appealing word or phrase and finally a big question mark (on June 12 after the Orlando shooting he tweeted “We must be smart!”) .
He invents nicknames for his opponents: "little Marco" (Rubio), "Ted (Cruz) the liar", the "dishonesty Hillary" (Clinton). His vocabulary is down to earth: he says “series A” to describe how he would do things or “fuck” to describe a bad defeat (like Hillary's with Obama). During the primaries, faced with unanimous disapproval, he promised to quit (and indeed at one point he did). Peter Barker, the New York Times' senior reporter from the White House, called him a "serial abuser."
How could this man have become the candidate of Abraham Lincoln's party? Even if we can't get over it, we have to ask ourselves reluctantly if something "good" must have been done if it is where it is. It's Trump's language that works. After all, language is a politician's tool for building consensus (along with handshakes and pats on the back). The way of speaking or writing swept away capable and long-experienced politicians.
Simplify
First, Trump speaks simple. Journalists often fault the simplistic language of politicians and sometimes go as far to correct it as one does an eighth-grade essay. Trump is said to use the language and vocabulary of a ten-year-old boy. But the readability test, based on Flesch's formula, simply measures the length of the words and says nothing about the content.
At the very least, this test measures the things that are wrong with a political discourse that, in fact, aren't. Short sentences containing commonly used words are a good thing. “Never use a long word instead of a short one,” writes Orwell in his essay Politics and the English Language.
Simplicity is not stupidity: to make language simple is to capture its essence and make it attractive. Countless psychological studies have shown that what is understood has a better chance of being considered true. “I want to build a great and beautiful wall and Mexico will foot the bill to build it” may be nonsense but it is easy to understand, and the human brain, in its limitedness, appreciates the simple things.
To repeat
Another Trump tactic is repetition. That too may seem childish. But it's not. Trump repeats exactly the same things over and over again in a direct and hammering way.
But in a more sophisticated way, repetition is a very respectable speaking technique. Mark Antony in Caesar's funeral oration sarcastically repeats at every sentence that Brutus "is a man of honour" after Brutus has assassinated Caesar (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, act III, scene II). Winston Churchill called the British together with the refrain "We will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the landing places, we will fight in the fields and in the streets...". And the most beloved buzzword of the 20th century is the great refrain "I have a dream". Trump is certainly not Martin Luther King, but he knows just as well how to make people remember what he said.
Improvise
Trump's most effective way to captivate his audience is perhaps the simplest: he doesn't give a prepared speech, but he speaks freely based on the audience he finds. Only in rare cases, that is, when he realizes that his mouth can get him into some trouble - as in his first speech after the Orlando shooting - does he resort to the teleprompter.
It doesn't even seem to have any ladders. Reporters who wearily follow traditional candidates on election campaigns know that, even if they speak without notes, ordinary politicians always heat up the same soup from place to place. Even Trump, as we said, uses endless tropes and repeats a lot. But it's different, because Trump really speaks off the cuff and contextualizes the issues. He avoids the usual ejaculation of clichés and in this way dazes the journalists in tow.
A sentence from Trump can make the news. It happened, for example, when speaking of a case of fraud, his sudden digression gave rise to a dispute reported by the entire press of the country: Trump mentioned to a judge (who incidentally found him wrong in a lawsuit) in an alleged conflict of interest because of Mexican origin. False, in reality the judge in question was born in the United States of Mexican parents.
Dangerously effective
This ability to improvise is a plus. Even a well-founded thesis appears weak if conveyed as an automatic message. It also happens that a groundless thesis can appear convincing if it appears spontaneous, especially to voters disgusted by professional politicians. This shows how Orwell's famous rules for honest and clear use of language are actually a double-edged sword.
Speaking honestly in public means for Orwell to express himself concretely and succinctly without clichés. But a demagogue can also use this same technique. Orwell believes in the magical therapeutic effect of speaking out to expose lies and avoid foul language. But some voters can't tell a lie and others appreciate profanity.
If there are too many lies and vulgarities in communication, then the link with facts loosens, the verbally brutal attitude towards opponents and a style artfully designed to hypnotize listeners are the ingredients of a dangerously effective cocktail. Doubly effective.
