Communication and Cultural Lessons of the Trump Renaissance
People who live outside America often ask me, as a communication specialist, to explain the enduring popularity of Donald Trump.
How is it, they want to know, that the twice-impeached, criminally indicted 45th US president can still draw wildly cheering crowds to his rallies right across the country? Events at which he demeans his critics with crude epithets, as he asserts his radical agenda for a return to the Oval Office?
Exasperated non-fans slowly shake their heads and wonder why this man, with all his manifest flaws, remains so popular. Or even relevant.
My short answer is that Trump is highly adept at applying the opposite of Emotional Intelligence: manipulative emotional guile. The adulation and extravagant media coverage he receives in return sustains his visibility and motivates his mission.
Trump’s most impressive achievement has been to cause a vast psychographic group, his “base”, to cathect with him. That is, to invest in him totally: mentally, emotionally and increasingly even financially, despite his putative billionaire status. Political commentators have branded this fervent uncritical devotion a “cult of personality”.
Donald Trump is neither a natural politician, nor instinctively empathic. He is, at heart, a performative pitchman—and there’s no shortage of people buying. When elected President in 2016, he was hailed as a disruptor who’d give the US political system a much-needed shake-up. Now, under his influence, the entire Republican party is itself riven with disruption.
Today, Trump’s fan base is far broader than Hillary Clinton’s 2016 “basket of deplorables”. Former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, is no fan. But many of the accomplished professionals in his social circle are.
“These are educated people,” Scarborough routinely tells his on-air colleagues and TV audience incredulously. “Doctors, lawyers, business people. When I ask them why they support Trump, (they are easily disabused by the facts). So they simply shrug and say ‘I just like the way he stands up for what he believes in and goes after it’.”
Like Joe, many people wonder how such educated, accomplished adults can hold the instigator of the January 6th assault on the US Capitol just 3 years ago in such high regard.
Trump’s enduring popularity reflects the defining schism of the post-truth era: the dominance of polarisation over consensus. On so many fronts today, each side of any issue is in a constant state of conflict with the other. And Trump’s behavioural norms make him a potent polariser.
The former President’s self-centred, often obnoxious and sometimes even illegal conduct attracts both celebration and righteous condemnation. The weight of numbers is strong on both sides and each seeks to be right by making the other wrong.
In this combative context, the key to understanding Trump’s appeal is that it’s driven by a shared resentment of elites and their privileges.
Trump channels the deep dissatisfactions of his base by skilfully leveraging key American divides: the gulf between the influential and the impotent. The wealthy and the once-were well-off. Those in authority whose job is to get things done—and those who are hard done by because they don’t. In effect, the players and the pinballs in the game of life.
Yes, Trump is wealthy. But with all his legal issues he is seen, like much of his base, to be struggling. Under constant attack from elites in the media and the justice system, his people stand with him in sympathy.
Trump’s effectiveness as a communicator is therefore grounded in the deep symbiosis he shares with his fans. He too resents all elites, especially those in New York. He has always taken bitter exception to the fact that they have never given him what he craves most: respect and acceptance.
For their part, these elites disdain Trump because he is not polite, refined, subtle, sophisticated, erudite, cultured, modest, mannered, tactful, humble or restrained. All the things they consider themselves to be.
A flawed but influential communicator
Unlike other politicians, Trump is neither polished nor rehearsed. His style of oratory is typically pugnacious, spontaneous, jagged and disjointed. Literal transcripts of it often read as erratic. Sometimes, almost incoherent.
His vocabulary is limited. His metaphors trail off with upward inflections at the ends of sentences, giving them a wistful air that’s clearly intended to sound like irony. His favoured phrase to convey any sense of profundity is “like nobody’s ever seen before”.
Yet Trump’s devotees overlook his expressive limitations because, to them, he has a long legacy of projecting strength, authority and peerless in-charge success. They know this because they’ve seen it on television for two decades now.
The poet, singer, essayist and civil rights activist Maya Angelou once insightfully observed “People may not remember what you said or what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” In this sense, Trump is an undeniably strong, emotive and influential communicator. He animates his audiences and confounds his critics in equal measure. He is the consummate polariser, constantly creating opportunity out of conflict.
In any live interpersonal communication, the actual words we speak make up as little as just 7% of meaning. The other 93% is conveyed by paralinguistics—body language, facial expression, posture and prosody, the sonic metadata of verbal exchange. Prosody includes patterns of pitch, pauses for effect, volume, rhythm, intonation and stress in delivery of the actual words spoken.
Trump’s posture and prosody are rarely less than theatrical. In full orator mode, he fixes his jaw in a belligerent uptilt. His eyebrows ascend to his drooping quiff in his own peculiar form of gravitas. He adopts a sort of sidelong static swagger as he leans on his lectern and into his audience. To his fans, this personal presentation projects strength, conviction and effortless self-assurance.
But as his legal pressures mount, Trump’s rhetoric has become more charged and extreme. The perceived passivity of the incumbent President does nothing to moderate Trump’s tirades.
“Bidenomics” has succeeded on many key metrics: dramatic drops in both the jobless and inflation rates; a buoyant Dow Jones and a peak S&P; stable fuel prices; lower pharmaceutical costs; and major investments in infrastructure across America, promised by Trump as president but never delivered. Yet most Americans aren’t feeling it.
Many of them see the billions of US dollars exported to support wars in Europe and the Middle East and resent this outflow of capital that they feel could be better spent at home. Particularly at a time of record US debt and economic uncertainty. Thwarted in their aspirations and frustrated with a political system too often gridlocked in stalemate, many Americans feel they’re not nearly as well off as they were under Trump.
All this simply points to the fact that President Biden has failed to communicate his record effectively. Or to satisfactorily explain America’s geopolitical and security imperatives.
On a human level, Joe Biden comes across as an utterly decent, dignified, experienced and empathic career politician. But his low-key demeanour makes him an easy target for Trump, the ruthless verbal assassin.
There’s no disguising the 81-year-old current President’s patient, silver-haired, doddery demeanour. His compact carriage. His thin, whispery delivery. Biden is earnest and admirable, but nowhere near as vital or visible as his opponent. He can’t compete in the media with the brio, force of personality and aggressive cut-through of Trump, the showman.
In a February interview on ABC TV’s This Week, the influential US radio and podcast host known as “Charlamagne tha God” (real name Lenard Larry McKelvey) put it this way: “Donald Trump seems more sincere about his lies than Joe Biden seems about his truths.” McKelvey sees Trump as charismatic—and feels that Vice President Kamala Harris, even with her low approval ratings, has more charisma and cut-through than her boss.
But in a feisty State of the Union address, Biden did exactly what was required. Unusually animated and bristling with indignation, he ditched his low-key demeanour and became loud, assertive and interesting. In a pointed performance, he targeted “my predecessor” multiple times, the dysfunctionality and duplicity of the Republican Party in general and even the Justices of the Supreme Court, who were all present at the event.
While Biden’s customary low-key delivery is clear and constructive, Trump’s is invariably provocative and inflected with themes of persecution, injustice and victimhood. His constant complaints and criticisms are rarely burdened by factual evidence. But he doesn’t hesitate to take credit for everything good that happens. Often, to a patently absurd degree.
This is why non-fans see through his divisive, simplistic rhetoric so clearly.
A zeitgeist that suits him
Trump has a relentless ability to find fault in any concept or strategy other than his own. In all his querulous histrionics, he holds his audience with him in the comfortable shallows of any issue or argument. It’s always easier to point to problems than to do the deeper work of addressing their causes, then developing and selling detailed workable solutions.
Trump gets away with all this because he is completely a creature of the Digital Age. The times couldn’t suit him better. A surface-skimmer and more entertainer than visionary, he demands little of his audience.
He is not insightful, innovative or intellectual. But he is skilled at emotive sophistry—the deceptive art of fashioning plausible but specious arguments that display persuasive ingenuity in reasoning.
So he makes strong but simplistic statements that, on the surface-logic of self-interest, are unquestioningly accepted by his enthusiastic audience. In this way Trump succeeds primarily by creating an effect, rather than articulating any thoughtful considered meaning.
The rise of effect over meaning is a peculiarly post-truth phenomenon. It’s one of six contemporary sociocultural drivers, or behavioural traits and trends, identified and explained in my new book about communication in the Digital Age. A brief overview of the book’s broad working premise—and why it suits Trump’s exploitation of this zeitgeist so well—follows…
Since 2007, modern full-size touch-screen smartphones have put us online 24/7/365, wherever we are. Most of us touch our smartphones up to 2000 times a day, spending a cumulative total of 3 to 4 hours with them in hand. This obsession with screens has rewired our brains, embedding them with dominant neural pathways that have conditioned us to two things.
The first is an addictive need for a compelling sense of momentum—provided visually in the first instance by all that we scroll, swipe and flick through the screens of our smartphones; the second is an insatiable hunger for the diversion and instant gratification that viewing this flow of largely trivial but distractingly irresistible material induces in us.
The quality of the attention we are then able to bring to people, problems, work and all the slower demands of daily life is increasingly compromised.
As a result, we have all developed at least some resistance to engaging in tasks that require the investment of time, effort and concentration to yield more satisfying but delayed results. This doesn’t mean that we shun such tasks. But it does mean that we often come to them with a reluctance to apply ourselves. This in turn leads to a selective avoidance of complexity.
Processes that require clear, disciplined thinking, reasoning and mental exertion now feel far less appealing. So we are disinclined to interrogate our choices and more inclined to uncritically accept or adopt the thinking of others. Overlay this with the fact that, thanks largely to social media, self-absorption has overtaken self-awareness in the Digital Age and it’s easy to see why we tend to succumb to simplistic solutions so readily.
Years of our kinetic tapping, swiping, scrolling and flicking as we pass content through the screens of smartphones means that much of what we look at is always in motion. Our uncritical brains have been trained to seek and respond to a stimulating sense of anticipation, of something happening. So any process to which we address ourselves needs a sort of constant shark-like forward momentum to maintain our interest.
Trump provides that. He’s relentless, almost a social media channel within himself. He communicates in absolutes, idealising or catastrophising everything he talks about. For both his fans and his outraged critics, he constantly commands a potent share-of-mind. The media amplifies everything he says and does, so he’s always on a screen somewhere. On YouTube, “Urgent Trump News” is now almost its own complete category.
But there’s a grim side effect to our habit of allowing screens to dilute our awareness like this. Inevitably, it results in attention deficits that deplete our ability to compose ourselves and settle. This devastates personal productivity, because it leads to a disinclination to focus.
Consequently, regardless of one’s level of education or achievement, the diligent application of evaluative thinking and reasoning skills is more challenging today. Never have we been more susceptible to distraction, or less discerning in that to which we choose to direct our attention.
The other aspect of the Digital Age that suits Trump’s simplistic approach is that we live in a time of greater personal control than ever before. So much of what we do happens instantly, or at least rapidly. Want to know anything about anything? Jump on a search engine. Need a new phone? Kitchen utensil? Book? Jump online and Amazon will get it to you tomorrow. Don’t feel like taking that call? Let it go through to message.
Years of such autonomous control of so many aspects of our daily lives means that we have a growing intolerance of the things we can’t control. Combine all this with the mental lassitude outlined above and you can start to see why so many people are so vulnerable to the disgruntlement, simplistic assessments and “fix it all for me” solutions offered by Trump.
Shaped by his origins
To fully fathom the Trump communicative phenomenon though, it’s essential to consider it in the wider context of his troubled backstory. The scion of a family headed by a tough, hard-hearted patriarch, Donald Trump grew up imbued with his father’s brutal notion that to be a success in life you had to be “a killer”.
What’s missing from his emotional software therefore is a sensitive side: the benign observation, compassion and empathic consideration of others. Young Donald was never nurtured emotionally in this way. So his innate philosophy and mind-set have always been highly transactional and self-centred. Money, personal benefit, advantage and optics—how the things he does appear to others—have always been his standard measurements of success.
Abundant insights into the specific dysfunctions of these characteristics are revealed in Too much and never enough, a 2020 book by Mary Trump PhD, Donald’s niece and a noted psychologist.
Trump pulled off his first big pitch as a young man, when he inveigled his real estate developer father into lending him hundreds of millions of dollars. Trump senior had built this fortune through his entrepreneurial exploits in the New York residential boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.
Trump junior aimed much higher: Manhattan, the epicentre of a city where, as Frank Sinatra assured the world in song, if you can make it there you’ll make it anywhere.
In the 1980’s, riding a heady wave of local celebrity, Trump engaged a ghostwriter and produced a bestselling book, The Art of the deal. Its essential narrative was that you always have to believe in yourself, go with your instincts and identify then leverage advantage, to outsmart the other guy with an aggressive whatever-it-takes approach.
“The Donald” was soon established as a brash, high profile mover and shaker with his surname on New York skyscrapers. But he was not widely known outside his home city.
In the 1990’s though, Trump over-reached. His ambitious diversifications into aviation, casinos, golf courses and other more risk-prone enterprises resulted in multiple bankruptcies. Through 1990 and 1991, Trump’s core businesses lost over $250 million. This meant that, for eight of the next ten years, he paid no income tax. He soon sank into a social relevance-deprivation syndrome in his home city.
But in 2004, Trump’s profile was spectacularly resuscitated, reinvented and nationalised. Producer Mark Burnett made Trump host of his new reality TV show The Apprentice. This series presented Donald Trump as the definitive entrepreneur and mentor, notionally expunging his commercial missteps of the 1990’s.
The Apprentice was an exceptionally popular series right across America. It ran for 14 years, twelve with Trump as host. Every episode ended with his signature in-charge catchcry: “You’re fired!”
Trump’s TV show projected him to mainstream audiences right across America as a master dealmaker who had turned himself into a billionaire. This was far from the truth.
But Trump instinctively understood the optics of the showman and relished the spotlight. He was a supremely self-assured, authoritative and tough taskmaster to teams of would-be entrepreneurs—all of them keen to be the one chosen to work for him.
In the public perception, Trump’s TV career made him a rolled-gold American business icon. Never the prototype smooth, polished presenter, Trump always told it like it was in his distinctive, lightly gravelled voice. His audience lapped up his show’s themes of innovative approaches, competitiveness, resourcefulness and relentless dedication to the task in the single-minded pursuit of success.
An inspirational, aspirational hero
Trump’s growing army of fans revered him because he had it all and showed it off weekly: money, fame, success, glamorous lifestyle, photogenic family, opulent homes, helicopters, private jets, national profile and peerless name-awareness in the business world.
In the documentary The long road to the White House 1980-2017 (which you can view on YouTube) Trump demonstrates a very clear understanding of his audience. “The people who like me are the taxi drivers, the workers,” he says. “Not the wealthy and the elite, because I compete with them—they don’t like me because I win!”
The Apprentice rescued Trump from his financial disasters of the 1990s. Then with live appearances, product endorsements, licencing and other downstream Trump-branded deals, he was everywhere in the national consciousness. Over his twelve year tenure on TV, these activities added $270 million to the $200 million his TV role afforded him.
Trump’s personal brand was founded, built and burnished on this TV star status. It cemented his image as an uncompromising, no-nonsense, get-it-done master achiever. The ardent adoration still displayed today by Trump’s followers was cast and case-hardened here.
When Trump himself was fired by NBC for comments he made about Mexicans in 2015, after he announced he was running for president, his fans were devastated. Trump on the other hand saw no reason why he couldn’t continue to host The Apprentice from the Oval office. This reflects his key operating principle: optics, impact and wow-factor in impressing his audience are everything to him.
On the 2015 campaign trail, Trump articulated economic issues in patriotic ways, often with a hefty dose of hyperbole. “We don’t beat anyone anymore,” he said, in one example. “Japan sends us millions of cars, but no-one ever saw a Chevrolet on the streets of Tokyo. The US has become a dumping ground!”
He resolved to “drain the swamp”: to slim down and limit the power of the Washington bureaucracy. This hefty prospective dose of “You’re fired!” across government ranks resonated powerfully with his fan base.
Trump’s rhetoric also exhibited instances of unabashed casual sexism and racism. But to his uncritical audience, these were not dealbreakers. Rather, they were idiosyncrasies that made him flawed and therefore relatable.
In all this lay the genesis of his personal brand, Trumpism. Consider the allure from the perspective of his typical TV viewer today: if, in your ambitious but impressionable late teens, twenties or even early thirties, you watched Trump’s weekly showcase of hard-nosed high achievement on TV, for twelve years, it still constitutes a major influence in your life. Even at the age you are now, in the mid-2020’s.
A compelling personal aura
In her 2023 book Enough, Cassidy Hutchinson—former assistant to Trump’s fourth and final White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (and star witness for the January 6th House select committee in June 2022)—related her first vivid experience of the Trump phenomenon. At the time, she was an intern on Capitol Hill. This was years before she viewed the tumultuous events of January 6th 2021 from inside the White House.
Hutchinson’s father had always been a huge Trump fan. He never missed a single episode of The Apprentice on TV. So obsessed was he with Trump and his TV show that he was rebuked by his young daughter for neglecting the family. So, years later when she was working in Washington, Cassidy attended a Trump rally to discover the mystique for herself.
This rally, in April 2017, celebrated Trump’s first 100 days as President. In her book Hutchinson describes how, standing in the crowd, she was “transfixed” when Trump came onto the stage. She was swept up in the fervour as “his magnetism electrified the crowd”.
In a November 2023 TV interview on MSNBC, Hutchinson described this same event and the impression it made on her at the time. She told how she looked at the people in the crowd around her and saw many women so overcome with emotion that they were openly weeping.
Such passion might be expected to be triggered by pop idols, or movie stars—admired from afar for years then suddenly right there, live in front of you. But it reflects the ardour and devotion of Trump fans, who had watched their hero calling the shots on their favourite TV show for so long.
Their response to the visceral thrill of being in his presence was intense, passionate. At last they were seeing him for real, in a far greater role.
Over four years as president, Trump gave his TV fans a wild, exultant ride. They watched him getting it done for America through his dealmaking with global leaders. Including the autocratic strongmen who became his personal heroes.
For his vast TV audience who have been with him from the beginning, Donald Trump today remains their strong, straight-shooting, in-charge hero. He dares, he wins. He is a psychological panacea for his fans because he says the unsayable. In doing so, he articulates the way people really feel. And he still attracts TV cameras like no-one else.
To his legions of uncritical die-hard fans, Trump’s road to the White House was a logical progression, an amplification of his Apprentice persona and professional journey. And now, in 2024, comes the sequel. So of course they keep watching and cheering.
Flexible facts and redefining reality
But in 2020 Trump failed to win a second term as president. Bob Woodward, the iconic Nixon-era Watergate journalist, interviewed Trump extensively in office. He believes Trump failed in his bid for a second term due to his indecisive passivity in dealing with the COVID pandemic. The high US death toll, on his watch, was disastrous.
For the Trump faithful who had applauded his progress on TV for so long, being fired from the presidency by voters was an aberration. A mistake. Should never have happened. Trump has an exquisite understanding of his audience, so he played to their indignation. And as a “killer”, any notion of losing at anything is repugnant to him.
“This is embarrassing Mark,” Trump told his Chief of Staff Meadows at the time, in the aftermath of his election loss to Joe Biden (as reported by Cassidy Hutchinson in Enough). “I don’t want people to know we lost. Figure it out!”
Hence the “stolen election”, a ploy mapped out much earlier by Trump strategists Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, in the event of an election loss. Both were recorded plotting this strategy long before its implementation.
Today, Trump’s wounded rhetoric constructs an alternative reality: he is the victim of “radical Leftist thugs”, the “Biden crime family” and the corrupt institutions of the government bureaucracy. All are intent on depriving American voters of the chance to return him to the Oval office.
The fact that no single piece of evidence, legal or otherwise, has ever emerged to support Trump’s stolen election claims is irrelevant to his blinkered fan base. To them, Trump’s unwavering depiction of events is unquestionably correct. So, just as his fans would expect, he still maintains his rage at his thwarted right to continue governing.
These devoted fans remain blind to Trump’s shortcomings—just as they were to his failure to deliver the Mexican border wall that Mexico would pay for. And his failure as “a businessman who knows how to balance budgets” to do so for America. Instead, Trump added $7.8 trillion to the national debt (almost a quarter of today’s total US debt of $33 trillion).
Trump gets away with all this because, with his peculiar psychosis, facts and actuality have always been fluid in service of his self-centred world view and dealmaking. His devotees understand and accommodate him on this, because they have never seen him suffer adverse consequences arising from his opinions, actions or choices. Until now.
Trump’s peerless ability to reshape the facts and distort reality is finally, inevitably, reaching the implacable proving grounds of the US justice system. Notwithstanding Trump’s protestations, his four indictments and 91 charges are all consequences of his own illegal choices and actions.
In court, Trump has no control over events. Here everything is fixed, fact-based and provable. Inescapable outcomes are determined according to precise legal statutes and irrefutable evidence presented to impartial judges and juries.
Trump’s fans have been so invested in him so emotionally and for so long that, as part of their cathexis, they genuinely feel his pain at all this. They too have experienced their own injustices—in different and lesser contexts of course. But for many of them the parallel, writ large via the media, is poignant and compelling.
Trump’s talent for redefining the facts may validate his narrative with his sycophants and his fan base. But it cannot alter the integrity of the legal process. Ample proof of this lies in the penalties from his first two civil court cases, which stand at more than half a billion dollars.
So Trump exercises his obvious option: to obfuscate and polarise even more, by attacking a “weaponised” justice system. He makes every court appearance a campaign event. This galvanises anew the sympathy and support of his uncritical audience. They gasp in admiration at the audacity of his attacks on the judges he faces.
Here, with an adroit twist to his logic, Trump has performed a slick perceptual three-card trick of transference: he has reshaped his narrative to assert that the pursuit of him by ominous government forces through the courts is tantamount to a pursuit of his followers. He stokes the fires of fear to fuel this spurious claim.
“They’re coming after me because they’re coming after you,” he tells his fans. “I was indicted for you! I am your justice! I am your retribution!”
To any unbiased observer these assertions are so outrageously melodramatic as to be totally implausible. But for Trump’s blinkered true believers, they make his legal travails deeply personal.
In all this, Trump succeeds in undermining faith in the judicial process, just as he has successfully undermined faith in the US electoral system.
It’ll be interesting to see if the 2024 election result also affords him the opportunity of undermining the US Constitution and the American democratic process.
Julian Smith is an Australian communication consultant and author of communEQation An Emotional Intelligence playbook for the Digital Age.
See www.communEQation.com
Photo by Myke Simon on Unsplash
