That devastating but clearly accurate description of the President is by Charles M. Blow in his column in today’s New York Times, which has the title Trump's Degradation of Language.
Blow is on fire in this piece.
He begins
One of the more pernicious and insidious effects of the Donald Trump regime may well be the damage he does to language itself.
In the next paragraph Blow tells us
Trumpian language is a thing unto itself: some manner of sophistry peppered with superlatives. It is a way of speech that defies the Reed-Kellogg sentence diagram. It is a jumble of incomplete thoughts stitched together with arrogance and ignorance.
and warns us
America is suffering under the tyranny of gibberish spouted by the lord of his faithful 46 percent.
Blow presents us with analysis of Trump’s speech patterns that have been done by others. One done at Carnegie Mellon informed us that in general presidential candidates tend to speak at a level of grades 6-8, but Trump’s words are much lower, with the lowest vocabulary and a grammatical usage better only than that of George W. Bush.
He then tells us that such reduced rhetoric is “a well-documented tool of history’s strongmen.”
There is much more in this powerful column.
Blow warns us that a political lie does not have to be slick, because in our upside-down world n “ easy lies sound more true than hard facts.”
We know, as Trump reminds us, that the President does not read and watches far too much TV.
It is after exploring this aspect of our 45th President that Blow offers the words I used for my title:
Trump has the intellectual depth of a coat of paint.
Blow expands on this by exploring how Trump has performed in recent interviews.
I am going to push fair use by going through how Blow concludes this powerful column.
Read together, the transcripts paint a terrifying portrait of a man who is simultaneously unintelligible in his delivery, self-assured in his ignorance and consciously bathing in his narcissism.
OUCH. And yet if you do read the transcripts, that three part punch of being unintelligible, ignorant and narcissistic is an unavoidable analysis.
In Trump world, facts don’t matter, truth doesn’t matter, language doesn’t matter. Passionate performance is the only ideal. A lie forcefully told and often repeated is better than truth — it is accepted as an act of faith, which is better than a point of fact.
What Blow says here is not only true of the words of the President. We here it reinforced in the daily briefings of Sean Spicer. The idea of forcefully repeating an untruth to plant it cannot help but remind those with historical sense of Joseph Goebbels and the notion of the big lie.
This is one of the most heinous acts of this man: the mugging of the meaning, the disassembling of rhetoric until certainty is stripped away from truth like flesh from a carcass.
It certainly has had that impact on many of those who supported Trump. Further, for those who would dare challenge what Trump is saying we now have the threat of taking away protections of speech and press as established in the First Amendment because this President wants to be able to sue his critics. We have now heard this from his chief of staff as well.
What is the end result of all this? Here are Blow’s final words:
Degradation of the language is one of Trump’s most grievous sins.
Language is how we communicate with one another. It is through language that we negotiate our differences to find common purpose, if we are so willing.
But it is also through language that we can distort. Given the history of Republican pronouncements and rhetoric in recent decades, however, as grievous as Trump’s sin may be, it is a continuation of what we have seen from Republicans. We have Frank Luntz offering tested verbal distortions and now “Democrat Party” is regularly repeated within mainstream media and unfortunately by some supposedly liberal commentators. We can go back to the welfare queens of Ronald Reagan and the lies offered by many Republicans of what the results of their economic proposals (starting with the Laffer Curve) would be. We have had lies blaming Democrats for failures by Republicans — remember, the consulate at Benghazi was less than secure in large part because of the refusal of a Republican House to fund the requests by State for diplomatic security.
And yet, what we get from Trump is so extreme that even citing such precedents cannot fully explain what we are seeing.
Trump is without a conscience. I would argue that he is without a soul. His sole measure of things flows from his narcissism and his insecurity. He wants to be loved. He wants people to think he is the greatest — thus his distortion of what Elijah Cummings actually said to him. So long as he can appear as making money he would argue he is successful — which is why his crowds have to be record-breaking, his success unrivaled.
Yes, he has degraded language.
Yes he has unleashed some negative forces within America that had been somewhat suppressed although other Republicans chose to foment these (Islamophobia, homophobia, racism, sexism, and now anti-Semitism), in order to gain and hold power, and powerful interest (read here the Koch Brothers among others) are willing to use these to gain more power and wealth and to achieve the goals they want.
I strongly urge you read read, and pass on, the entire column by Charles M. Blow.
Have a nice day.
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