All the Best Word Salad
“I went to an Ivy League school. I’m very highly educated. I know words. I have the best words.”
Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, Dec. 30, 2015
President Trump once told the American people that he knew the “best words”, and he hinted he knew how to use them.
He doesn’t, and he hasn’t.
Give him a microphone and step back and watch him try to ad-lib.
You’ll hear lots of never-ending, misshaped sentences filled with meaningless platitudes.
A wordsmith on the fly he’s not.
If Trump doesn’t like somebody (or if somebody indicates they don’t like him), he’s sure to call them a “disgrace” – or say something they’ve done was “disgraceful”.
“Watching Barack Obama take credit for Donald Trump successes is disgraceful,” he tweeted recently.
He’s used “disgrace” or “disgraceful” 92 times on his Twitter feed.
By now, when he uses them, they’ve lost their meaning.
But not nearly as much as when he utters the word “disaster”.
Since 2011, Trump has thrown the word “disaster” around 216 times.
He’s claimed Obamacare is a “disaster” 16 times on Twitter alone.
According to the most recent polling, far more Americans have a favorable opinion of Obamacare (50 percent) than have an unfavorable opinion of it (40 percent).
It’s been that way since 2017.
For Trump, though, that’s a “disaster”?
The verbal escape hatches that he uses require little thought when he finds himself being asked a question he doesn’t want to answer.
He’ll claim somebody is an “embarrassment,” or that something they do is “disgusting”.
These aren’t the words of a poet.
They’re the reflections of a man who doesn’t engage in deep thought.
There are times when he’ll revert to car dealer speak by prefixing the words “honored,” “great” or “special” with the words, “very, very”.
He generally restricts the appending of the words “very, very” to describe people who are in his camp.
For instance, he might say somebody is “very, very special” when he nominates them to a high post within his administration.
He just can’t help himself.
Nor, can he resist telling a reporter he knows what they’re thinking, and what they’re thinking is exactly what he’s thinking.
“I know it, and you know it, too,” he’s apt to say – even when what he just said makes little sense.
When he does appear at a news conference, and a reporter tries to ask him a follow-up question when he’s failed to answer their first question, he’s sure to interrupt them by loudly saying, “Excuse me. Excuse me.” And then he proceeds to not answer that first question.
It’s so predictable.
There are a few words he’s seemed to have abandoned since he’s taken office.
I haven’t heard him use the phrase “Big League,” or is that “Bigly” lately.
He also seems to have retired the word “Huge,” when he pronounced “Yuge”.
When he’s droned on and on about a subject, he’ll usually end it with one of his more frequently used go-to phrases, “That I can tell you.”
You have to wonder who told him he couldn’t tell us that?
He’s unfiltered. He says what he wants to say, even if nobody wants to hear it.
Beware whenever he claims, “A lot of people tell me,” or, “A lot of people are saying,” because it’s a safe bet that whatever people are supposedly saying is something he’s heard on Fox News.
He’s just wildly exaggerating the popularity of it.
Also, take note of the times he says, “And lots of other things,” or “In many ways.”
Chances are there really aren’t a lot of other things, and there really is only one way.
He’d just gotten into the middle of one of his excruciatingly long sentences, and he needed something like, “In many ways,” to end it.
“I think he likes me,” is one of those phrases he frequently uses to let know he’s adored by leaders around the world.
But there’s one phrase he uses far more than any other.
“That I can tell you,” is the winner.
Edward A. Owens is a multi-Emmy Award winner, former reporter, and anchor for Entertainment Tonight and 20-year TV news veteran. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net.