During a July 11 interview with CNN, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said this about Donald Trump: “He is a faker. He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment.”
Having seen him in person, her description jumped out at me because she got it exactly right. I went to see him perform June 29 at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor. The outspokenness that everyone seems to love about Trump is actually nonsensical. If he showed up with a pre-vetted message, he didn’t follow it and ad-libbed 99 percent of his speech. Altogether, it was a blathering, serpentine, repetitive mess of linguistic Jenga, a crooked tower on the brink of collapse held together by pockets of air. His words were honestly impossible to follow.
What he has done successfully is master the jokey, aw-shucks, one-of-the-people character he plays. It’s a low-key performance that seems off-the-cuff and powerfully authentic, and it feeds right into the crowd’s desire for an apolitical outsider. And they absolutely love it.
Trump takes the stage like a war hero — or TV star. He typically begins his rallies with: “Do we have any protesters here?” and the crowd boos. Then he says: “Too bad,” and the crowd cheers. It is a bit like dinner theater, with pre-assigned roles for “good guys” and “bad guys” and lots of rowdy audience participation.
This either/or binary world he has created works well for him. Everything is oversimplified and parsed down to heroes and villains in humorous, easily digestible one-liners. It makes his messages short and uncomplicated. It is also an absurdly insincere facsimile of reality and disregards all nuance and complexity of the real world.
His manner is so unrehearsed, so flippant and nonchalant, it is as though he is speaking in stream of consciousness. Many writers have successfully used this narrative device to give the written equivalent of a character’s thought processes, but it only works if those thought processes are elegant and astute and woven together to create a complete and polished portrait.
Trump’s loose interior monologue is scattered, disconnected and disingenuous. He orates in a kind of Twitter verse, 1-point, monosyllabic, punchy lines in 140 characters or fewer. All those pull-outs you see in media reports are not media-generated sound bites. That is actually how he talks. His speeches comprise tweets strung together into one, semi-coherent, political promo ad. I think that’s why he’s so hard to follow in person: There’s no movie, just a bunch of trailers for different movies playing back-to-back.
Is his success a result of modern attention spans? Look at social media, at Twitter and Facebook memes, at circulating media stories: lots of bold headlines and catchy lead paragraphs, not a lot of actual information. We retweet and repost articles with short, pithy tags, but never actually get around to reading the articles. Sometimes those articles have nothing to do with the headline: Sometimes those headlines are deliberately misleading. Nobody knows because tl;dr (too long; didn’t read). And now we’ve got a crafty businessman who’s figured out that this is how lazy America interprets information, and he’s banking the presidency on it.
Trump is betting on a population who do not think critically. Prove him wrong. The majority of his supporters are lower income, blue-collar men and women struggling with real problems that Trump, as a trust-funder, has never experienced or encountered in his life. Many of the people I spoke with at the Bangor rally talked about working two jobs, losing work after paper mills closed or struggling to find work. Trump throws out key words like “NAFTA” and “trade negotiations” for instant applause, but all he has are a couple bullet points, no detailed plans for change nor any political experience to support those plans.
Ignorant people can be given knowledge and the tools to interpret and analyze that knowledge. People who are willfully wrong and actively perpetrate misinformation, people like Trump, are subversive and should not be elected to lead this country. His ideas are not only vacuous, they’re dangerous. We need to start thinking critically and we need to start encouraging our friends, neighbors and family members to think critically as well.
Brooke Nasser of Lewiston is a freelance writer and filmmaker living in Lewiston.