Pay attention when Trump talks

One evening nearly a century ago, a young woman found herself seated next to the president of the United States at a White House dinner party. As the story goes, the woman turned to the famously taciturn Calvin Coolidge and brightly mentioned that she had made a bet with a friend that she could get at least three words out of him during a conversation.

The president’s response? “You lose.” The story may be apocryphal, although Grace Goodhue Coolidge, the first lady, reportedly enjoyed sharing it. True or not, our 30th president was known as “Silent Cal” for a reason.

Coolidge’s most recent Republican successor will never be known as “Silent Don,” even though the paucity of his vocabulary may have been sufficient — if not appropriate — for the laconic New Englander. Beneath Donald Trump’s incessant bombast, on display during interviews and throughout stream-of-consciousness campaign maunderings rivaling Fidel Castro’s in length, are a handful of adjectives so full of hot air they immediately float away like giant balloons over Albuquerque.

Trump apparently is ill-equipped to do subtlety, nuance, precision, suppleness. He rejects exactitude (not to mention honesty). Like a surgeon employing a kitchen knife because he can’t locate a scalpel, Trump will grab whatever is at hand. And that’s usually a superlative — the worst in history! The best! The greatest ever! The most horrible!

For his followers, we suppose, this is part of the thrill of a Trump campaign event: no doubt, in a world of cliches and canned stump speeches — it’s the greatest political show on earth!

For journalists who cover the former president as he seeks to regain the White House — and for American voters trying to discern where a second Trump term would take us — the challenge is when to take his huckster’s grandiloquent imprecision seriously.

When Trump labels his fellow human beings “vermin” who need to be rooted out, does he actually mean he considers them the equivalent of cockroaches or flies, creatures who end up splattered on a kitchen counter? Is that the word he retrieves from a diminished tool kit, or is it the verbal swatter handed to him by an anti-immigrant nationalist fanatic like Stephen Miller or a devious propagandist like Steve Bannon? (Both men, by the way, could be back for a White House sequel if Trump is victorious this fall.) Or is it, instead, Trump’s peculiar style of performative politics, where it’s the emotion that registers, not the actual language?

If, every day, the Republican candidate for president in 2024 says something outrageous, something it’s impossible to imagine any of his predecessors ever saying, should Americans keep listening? Should the media keep covering? And if we do, does our vigil of headlines constitute accountability or free advertising? Does the mundane ever, perhaps, become the meaningless, even when the words carry an unpleasant whiff of fascist bombast?

At the same time, are we ever at risk of listening too closely, of reading too much into Trump’s use of, say, a common idiom such as “bloodbath” that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if uttered by a politician considered more rhetorically responsible? We’d say yes. While it’s important to assess Trump in the context of his pattern of authoritarian behavior and language, knee-jerk condemnation from the left only helps him. The recent uproar over Trump’s bloodbath remark — which was assailed by President Joe Biden in a digital campaign ad as violent rhetoric — unfolded with little regard to context: Trump was talking about the economic consequences to the auto industry if he doesn’t get elected. Trump and Republicans, of course, jumped at the chance to dismiss the wolf-crying Democrats and to discredit the media for its coverage. Such episodes only make it easier for Trump supporters to tune out concerns about his rhetoric in the future, even when they’re justified.

Granted, most Americans don’t pay as much attention to candidate bloviation as journalists do, and yet, when it comes to Trump — “a rhetorical genius,” in the words of Jennifer Mercieca, a scholar of political rhetoric at Texas A&M University — we cannot not help but listen to the underlying message of his “weaponized rhetoric.”

Mercieca, who points out that she watched every Trump rally leading up to his 2016 victory, defines “demagogue” as “a leader who capitalizes on popular prejudices, makes false claims and promises and uses arguments based on emotion rather than reason.” She contends that Trump knows exactly what he’s doing, either intuitively or by design. Rhetorical tactics he regularly employs follow a demagogue’s playbook. They include ad hominem attacks, treating people as objects, alluding to the wisdom of crowds and — our favorite — “paralipsis.” (“I’m not saying, just saying.”)

Trump, Mercieca writes in her book “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,” is “probably the most successful demagogue in American history.” Whether intuitive or carefully choreographed, Trump’s rhetoric has been more effective than Huey “the Kingfish” Long, more effective than Joseph McCarthy or George Wallace.

For that reason, we can’t tune him out. And for that reason, we can’t play into his hands as many in the media did during his first campaign, rewarding his accessibility with endless airtime. We must listen — with our heads and with our gut. His blather connotes his inclinations.

We must pay attention, because this time, unlike in 2016, Trump has a team of professionals ready and willing, if American voters restore him to the White House, to translate his authoritarian inclinations into actual policy. Whether it’s weaponizing the federal bureaucracy — including, of course, the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department — or using state National Guards to round up thousands of suspected “illegals” and transport them to vast internment camps along the border, or abandoning Ukraine to Vladimir Putin’s rapacity, or sneering at the dangers of climate change, or pardoning hundreds of Jan. 6 insurrectionists or …

In other words, we may not know precisely what Trump means when he snarls about “poisoning the blood of our country,” but we know pretty much where we’re headed if he ends up back in the White House.

Mercieca suggests that we are in this fix — a political party in thrall to a dangerous demagogue — because we have neglected our obligation as citizens of a democracy. “The people have a responsibility,” she writes, “to hold their leaders responsible for their words and actions and to prevent them from becoming demagogues.”

It would seem that we need a crash course in critical thinking. Although, Mercieca told us that actual courses in critical thinking aren’t necessarily the answer. “What we have to keep in mind,” she said, “are the stakes for democracy.”

Maybe we need a Silent Cal. Preceded in the White House by the administration of Warren G. Harding, an administration known as one of the most corrupt in U.S. history, Coolidge was a modest man of rectitude. Despite his reputation for Yankee taciturnity, he was also known for his dry sense of humor. He once said, “You can’t know too much, but you can say too much.” Also, “No man ever listened himself out of a job.”

Alice Roosevelt Longworth once commented that Coolidge looked like he’d been weaned on a pickle. That’s the expression he’d be wearing, we suspect, were he to know the logorrheic Trump.

The prospect of a latter-day Silent

Cal sounds tempting, here in the midst of the political din created by a demagogue, and yet silence isn’t golden, either. A healthy democracy is an ongoing conversation between the people and their leaders — a spirited, occasionally raucous conversation, to be sure, but one based on honesty, mutual understanding and trust. With every word he utters, Donald Trump sullies that vital conversation.

Rhetoric could become actual policy were he to return to White House