Why is Donald Trump so bad at the bully pulpit?

Why is Trump so bad with words? Blame reality television, Twitter and political talk shows.

Trump “cannot give a speech without his hosts distancing themselves from his rhetoric.”
.. Consider Trump’s three biggest rhetorical own-goals over the past week.
  1. His “fire and fury” statement on North Korea forced Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to try to talk the United States off a ledge.
  2. Trump’s belated response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ejection of U.S. diplomats was even worse:
  3.  Trump attempted to address the violence triggered by white nationalists in Charlottesville with a namby-pamby statement that blamed “many sides” for the violence.
    • It is odd that a president who claimed to despise political correctness with respect to Islamic terrorists suddenly chose to be circumspect in describing homegrown neo-Nazi terrorists.
    • Trump was more willing to call his country’s intelligence community Nazis than he was to call actual Nazis Nazis.

.. Running for office repeatedly tends to hone one’s rhetorical instincts. At a minimum, most professional politicians learn the do’s and don’ts of political rhetoric.

.. Trump’s political education has different roots. He has learned the art of political rhetoric from three sources:

  1. reality television,
  2. Twitter and
  3. “the shows.”

His miscues this past week can be traced to the pathologies inherent in each of these arenas.

..  I have seen just enough of the “Real Housewives” franchise to know that this genre thrives on next-level drama. No one wants to watch conflicts being resolved; they want to watch conflicts spiral out of control. So it is with Trump and North Korea. He never sees the value in de-escalating anything, and North Korea is no exception. Calm resolution is not in the grammar of reality television.

.. I am pretty familiar with Twitter, and the thing about that medium is that it is drenched in sarcasm. It is a necessary rhetorical tic to thrive in that place. The problem is that while sarcasm might work on political Twitter, it rarely works in politics off Twitter.

.. Finally, there are the political talk shows. If there is one thing Trump has learned from that genre, it is the “both sides” hot take. Pundits are so adept at blaming a political conflict on both sides that the #bothsides hashtag is omnipresent on political Twitter.

.. These people are bigots. They are hate-filled. This is not just a protest where things, unfortunately, got violent. Violence sits at the heart of their warped belief system.

.. substantive problems with Trump’s reaction to each of these three crises

  • .. He seems overly eager to escalate tensions with North Korea and
  • steadfastly does not want to call out Vladimir Putin or white nationalists by name.
.. his limited grasp of the bully pulpit. He ad-libbed all these rhetorical miscues. In doing so, he relied on tropes he had learned from reality television, social media and political talk shows.
Those tropes might work for a reality-show hack desperate to engage in self-promotion. They do not work for the president of the United States.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the Optics of Relatable Style

But in a West Wing vocally obsessed by image and appearance, the mien is the message. Or something like that. Recall President Trump’s lauding of his generals as straight out of “central casting”; his reported early scolding of Mr. Spicer for his rumpled appearance; the rumor that he had declared that the women on his staff should “dress like women”; the fact that one of the first things he said to Brigitte Macron during his Bastille Day visit was: “You’re in such good shape. She’s in such good physical shape. Beautiful.”

This is true especially in a visual age, and for an administration schooled in the crucible of reality television, where what you wear and how you look play a leading role. Especially when Ms. Sanders is only the third woman to ever hold the post of press secretary and, as she often mentions in her briefings, the first mother. Especially when she is charged with representing an administration in which the attitude toward gender has been, let us say, a somewhat contentious and much discussed issue.

.. Dana Perino, President George W. Bush’s last press secretary and now a Fox host, once told Elle magazine: “When I got the job as the press secretary, one of my first thoughts was, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to wear?’ People really focus on that.” Externally and, apparently, internally.

.. That may not seem like a big thing, but abandoning the jacket, even in 2017, is a striking choice on a professional podium, one that aligns Ms. Sanders more with the sartorial camp of Ivanka Trump and Kellyanne Conway than with her predecessors: Dee Dee Myers, a press secretary during the Clinton administration who was known for her miniskirts and bright jackets, and Ms. Perino, who tended toward Chanel-esque suiting

.. The net effect is femininity that hasn’t been stiletto-weaponized or armored up as much as turned into an access point: No matter her words, they are framed by a style steeped in cheerful Hallmark history. That is bound to inform how they are received. If much of the administration still channels Wall Street (the Oliver Stone version), Ms. Sanders offers visual reference points of Main Street (the Fox version).

Parents should be repulsed by Trump’s playing of the father card

“The president weighed in just as any father would, based on the limited information that he had,” said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, effectively confirming The Post’s report that President Trump personally drafted Donald Trump Jr.’s misleading statement about his meeting with a Russian lawyer proffering dirt on Hillary Clinton.

.. “As any father would.” Fathers are supposed to teach their children the difference between right and wrong. My father taught me not to lie. Donald Trump Jr.’s father taught him to shade the truth — in this case, so much that it was in total eclipse. “The statement that Don Jr. issued is true. There’s no inaccuracy in the statement,” Sanders said. No technical inaccuracy, perhaps, but little actual truth.

“Primarily’’ was the tell, the classic Trumpian hedge behind which Sanders so unconvincingly hid.

.. Fathers are supposed to put their children’s well-being above their own; that selflessness is the essence of being a parent. Trump Jr.’s attorney, Alan Futerfas, told The Post that he and his client had been “fully prepared and absolutely prepared to make a fulsome statement” about the meeting. Then the president intervened, dictating edits in the statement to his aide Hope Hicks, and gambling foolishly that the real facts wouldn’t emerge.

.. When, inevitably, they did, it made Trump Jr. look bad — “If it’s what you say, I love it,” he told the Russian attorney of her Clinton offer — but also provided evidence of some willingness on the part of the Trump campaign to collude with the Russians. Whose interest was the president so frantically scrambling to protecting here, his son’s or his own?

The Latest Voice at the Lectern: An Effusive New Yorker

Where Ms. Sanders tends to the dry and sardonic, Mr. Scaramucci is over the top.

.. The uneasy alliance between Mr. Scaramucci and Ms. Sanders will help determine the fate of Mr. Trump’s efforts to reboot his message and survive amid the escalating scandals engulfing his presidency.

The pair represent the competing power centers still vying inside Mr. Trump’s West Wing:

  • Ms. Sanders, the Southern-drawling, workmanlike political operative installed by Mr. Priebus; and
  • Mr. Scaramucci, the gregarious New York hedge fund manager who has grown close with the Trump family and is new to politics.

.. Telegenic and smooth-talking, he was an eager face of the Trump campaign on television and in the halls of Trump Tower, bringing a brash style and disarming humor to his tussles with reporters.

.. A mother of three young children whom she often mentions in tense moments in the White House briefing room, she inherited her father’s folksy style, his Christian conservatism and his biting sarcasm.

“If you want to see chaos,” she told a reporter on Friday, when asked about the West Wing turmoil, “you should come to my house early in the morning, when my three kids are running around. That’s chaos; this is nothing.”

.. there’s a New York-versus-Washington dichotomy here, New York is winning

..  it was left to Mr. Scaramucci, not the president, to announce that Ms. Sanders would be his new press secretary. The slight did not go unnoticed by veteran communicators, who said it could undercut her at the outset.

.. “It would have been appropriate for him to announce Sarah,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary for President George W. Bush. “It empowers her, it sends the message that the president appointed her, he’s standing next to her, and that signal was not there.”

.. While Mr. Trump all but invented the “fake news” moniker himself, some of his advisers, including Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, have told him that he cannot afford to have a spokeswoman who has such a poisonous relationship with reporters. That was one of the reasons that Mr. Scaramucci was brought on.

.. “He’s very slick and smooth,” said Jennifer Palmieri, another of Mr. Obama’s communications directors. “This removes any ruse that this is a White House that will operate under the transparent standard we expect for a democracy. Instead, it will operate like a country with ministers of propaganda, not press secretaries.”

.. “If the president thinks he’s surrounded by good people fighting for him, defending him and doing a really good job at it, then the president won’t feel the need to push boundaries himself and make the mistakes that he’s made on Twitter,” Mr. Fleischer said.

.. Mr. Scaramucci wished Mr. Spicer well in a distinctly New York style.

“I love the guy,” he said. “And I hope he goes on to make a tremendous amount of money.”