The US president’s almost primal language is a source of widespread amusement and horror. But some have begun exploring its aesthetic power
“I know words … I have the best words,” Donald Trump once declared with his usual, braggadocious aplomb. For once, he may be right. Dreaded by transcribers and translators worldwide, Trump wields his lively, if limited, vocabulary like a rubber hammer; this is a man who uses “schlong” as a verb and whose babbling is too frequently leapt upon by pundits and despairing lexicographers: bigly, covfefe, the aforementioned braggadocious.
But like his fellow wordsmith Shakespeare, Trump has produced a remarkable burst of something like poetry. There is Hart Seely’s Bard of the Deal, a 2015 book of poetry compiled from interviews, speeches, and tweets; at least two different collections called Make Poetry Great Again (one in Norwegian); and the forthcoming Bigly: Donald Trump in Verse by Cheers writer Rob Long. He has also inspired others to verse: A Hundred Limericks for a Hundred Days of Trump, Trumpetry, and the self-published Shit My President Says Poetry.
The latest collection of Trumpian verse is The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump, by McSweeney’s writer Rob Sears. Consider:
I am the best(1)
I predicted Apple’s stock would fall(2)
I will build a great, great wall(3)
I build buildings that are 94 stories tall(4)
My hands – are they small?(5)
Sears is far from the first to notice potential in Trump’s voice: after all, elevating a man who struggles bigly to articulate himself to poetry is inherently funny. “He does speak in very compact, distilled phrases that tell you a lot about who he is, in a small number of words. So it’s not that far away from poetry,” says Sears. “Lots of declarative sentences, a staccato rhythm. There is no complexity to anything he says. People have said he writes like a third grader with a limited vocabulary. I’ve read so many of his words and there really are no exceptions.”
Working with the Trump Twitter Archive, the Trump Archive and American Presidency Project to collect long-deleted tweets and forgotten quotes from the pre-internet era, Sears describes “a weird process, more like being a data scientist than writer”. More than 30 years of Trump’s misogyny, xenophobia and taste for vengeance are on display – all fastidiously footnoted. And as Sears says: “I am certain there are tons of good quotes that have never been written down.”
The president may still wish that many of these quotes were never written down, such as his now startling call for coordinated global action on climate change in 2009 (in Sear’s poem “We’ll be fine with the environment”); or the grotesque pass he dribbled at a female Celebrity Apprentice candidate, in the third line of following poem:
Hot little girl in highschool6
I’m a very compassionate person (With a very high IQ)7
Just think, in a couple of years, I’ll be dating you8
It must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees9
Come here, I’ll show you how life works10. Please11
For all the fun with his buffoonery, Trump’s language still holds power, because of a style of speech that might be described as demagogic water-cooler banter: constant references to us versus them, and “winners” and “losers”, the latter being possibly the most frequent word in Sears’s collection, which includes several blistering haiku dismissing John McCain (“Doesn’t know how to win”), Rosie O’Donnell (“Sad sack”) and Ted Cruz (“Dyin’ Ted”).
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“I thought maybe he was, on some weird level, a kind of strategic genius,” says Sears of Trump’s ability to convince average Americans. “But now I know there’s nothing clever or pre-planned about what he says. It is just lucky for him that he communicates this way, and that he has such simple ideas.”
But there was one speech that convinced Sears that there was more to the president than met the eye. “I came across a speech on the White House website, addressed to the people of Flint, Michigan, about the water scandal. It was quite reassuring and had a lot of figurative turns of phrase. It really surprised me, and I thought, ‘He’s not so simple, there is another side to Trump,’” he says. “And then I got to the bottom and realised I’d got my dates wrong. It was Obama.”
1. Tweet, 8 August 2013
2. Tweet, 28 January 2014
3. Presidential bid announcement at Trump Tower, 16 June 2015
4. Campaign rally in Plymouth, New Hampshire, CSPAN, 7 February 2016
5. Hannity, Fox News, 29 February 2016
6. Discussing losing his virginity, on The Howard Stern Show, 1997
7. Tweet, 21 April 2013
8. Quoted as saying this to two 14-year-old girls in the Chicago Tribune, December 1992
9. To Brande Roderick on The Celebrity Apprentice, 2013 season
10. The New Yorker, 19 May 1997
11. Speech after winning Florida, Illinois and North Carolina primaries, 15 March 2016
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