In the way he mixes occasional truths with hyperbolic superlatives, Trump is a clever salesman. Unlike Joe Biden, Trump readily admits America is in decline. Most Americans sense this and agree with him. His solution is a vague "Make America Great Once Again" slogan, complete with the usual tax cuts for the rich and promises to end the "invasion" at America's southern border, the worst in all recorded history (those superlatives again).
Educated to be a careful engineer as well as a discerning historian, I am both aghast at many of Trump's wild claims and entertained by them. I find them absurd but also frequently amusing. They're not examples of careful and judicious thinking, and they're not meant to be. Trump knows how to entertain a crowd. What he doesn't know how to do is to unite and lead a country.
Here's an extended excerpt from Trump's acceptance speech from last night. I'll highlight a few words/claims that illustrate the Trumpian style, with a few comments of my own in [brackets]:
Under the current administration, we are indeed a nation in decline.
We have an inflation crisis that is making life unaffordable, ravaging the incomes of working and low-income families, and crushing, just simply crushing our people like never before. [Great Depression of 1929?] They've never seen anything like it.
We also have an illegal immigration crisis, and it's taking place right now, as we sit here in this beautiful arena. It's a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease, and destruction to communities all across our land. Nobody's ever seen anything like it. [Mongol invasions? Napoleon and Russia? Nazi invasions?]
Then there is an international crisis, the likes of which the world has seldom been part of. Nobody can believe what's happening. War is now raging in Europe and the Middle East, a growing specter of conflict hangs over Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, and all of Asia, and our planet is teetering on the edge of World War III, and this will be a war like no other war because of weaponry. The weapons are no longer army tanks going back and forth, shooting at each other. These weapons are obliteration. [I wish Trump had directly mentioned nuclear weapons here.]
It's time for a change. This administration can't come close to solving the problems. We're dealing with very tough, very fierce people. They're fierce people. And we don't have fierce people. We have people that are a lot less than fierce, except when it comes to cheating on elections and a couple of other things, then they're fierce. [I can't help it: this is a funny line.] Then they're fierce.
So tonight, I make this pledge to the great people of America.
I will end the devastating inflation crisis immediately [By waving a magic wand?], bring down interest rates and lower the cost of energy . We will drill, baby, drill. Can you believe what they're doing? [That's exactly what the Biden administration is already doing.]
But by doing that, we will lead a large-scale decline in prices. Prices will start to come down.
Energy… Raised it, they took our energy policies and destroyed them. Then they immediately went back to them, but by that time, so much was lost. But we will do it at levels that nobody's ever seen before, and we'll end lots of different things. We'll start paying off debt and start lowering taxes even further. We gave you the largest tax cut. We'll do it more.
Now, people don't realize, I brought taxes way down, way, way down. [For whom?] And yet we took in more revenues the following year than we did when the tax rate was much higher. Most people said, how did you do that? Because it was incentive. Everybody was coming to the country, they were bringing back billions and billions of dollars into our country. The companies made it impossible to bring it back. The tax rate was too high and the legal complications were far too great. I changed both of them, and hundreds of billions of dollars by Apple and so many other companies would work back into our nation, and we had an economy the likes of which nobody, no nation had ever seen. China, we were beating them at levels that were incredible. And they know it. They know it. We'll do it again, but we'll do it even better.
I will end the illegal immigration crisis by closing our border and finishing the wall, most of which I've already built. [Trump built it himself?]
On the wall, we were dealing with a very difficult Congress and I said, "Oh, that's OK. We won't go to Congress." I call it an "invasion." We gave our military almost $800 billion. I said, "I'm going to take a little of that money, because this is an 'invasion.'" And we built — Most of the wall is already built, and we built it through using the funds, because what's more, what's better than that? We have to stop the invasion into our country that's killing hundreds of thousands [Does he mean by drug overdoses?] of people a year. We're not going to let that happen.
I will end every single international crisis that the current administration has created, including the horrible war with Russia and Ukraine, which would have never happened if I was president. And the war caused by the attack on Israel, which would never have happened if I was president. Iran was broke. Iran had no money. Now Iran has $250 billion …
You get the idea. My brother used to say, jokingly, "It's hard to be humble when you're so great." It's a joke that applies well to Trump.
Here's another saying, this one taught to me by my dad: "The empty barrel makes the most noise." It's a lesson I often recall whenever I hear Trump speak.
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