Donald Trump isn’t a simpleton, he just talks like one. If you were to market Donald Trump’s vocabulary as a toy, it would resemble a small box of Lincoln Logs. Trump resists multisyllabic words and complex, writerly sentence constructions when speaking extemporaneously in a debate, at a news conference or in an interview. He prefers to link short, blocky words into other short, blocky words to create short, blocky sentences that he then stacks into short, blocky paragraphs.
The end result of Trump’s word choice is less the stripped-down prose style of Ernest Hemingway than it is a spontaneous reinvention of Ogden’s Basic English, the pared-down lexicon of 850 words selected by early 20th century linguist/philosopher C.K. Ogden as the bedrock of a new world language. In the August 6th Republican candidates debate, Trump answered the moderators’ questions with linguistic austerity. Run through the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test, his text of responses score at the 4th-grade reading level…
Trump’s low grade at the debates wasn’t a fluke. His comments from an August 11 news conference in Michigan earned only a 3rd-grade score.
The billionaire proceeded to lay out a dark vision of America: “Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life.”
“Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities,” he continued. “Many have witnessed this violence personally. Some have even been its victims…”
America and its allies overseas, according to Trump, weren’t faring much better. France, he noted “is the victim of brutal Islamic terrorism. Men, women and children viciously mowed down. Lives ruined. Families ripped apart. A nation in mourning,” he said. “The damage and devastation that can be inflicted by Islamic radicals has been proven over and over – at the World Trade Center, at an office party in San Bernardino, at the Boston Marathon, at a military recruiting center in Chattanooga, and many more.
Then point out that you are the only candidate who can meet the challenges of that environment:
“Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo,” Trump said Thursday. “As long as we are led by politicians who will not put America First, then we can be assured that other nations will not treat America with respect. This will all change when I take office.”
And what ails America he suggested could be remedied by changing the party in power.
“The problems we face now – poverty and violence at home, war and destruction abroad – will last only as long as we continue relying on the same politicians who created them in the first place,” Trump said. “A change in leadership is required to produce a change in outcomes.”
Up until now, most politicians tried to measure the political terrain with polls, and find the position which was most appealing to the most voters. The epitome of that was Mitt Romney, who would change his positions effortlessly with any minor shift in the political winds he thought he had detected. Inherent to that strategy was an assumption that the opinions of the populace were static and unchanging.
What Trump has done is totally different. The reasons it has worked are part good luck, part good timing, and all brilliance. Trump has the good fortune (or the brilliance to have chosen) to be running at a point where times are just beginning to grow violent and dangerous. He has the good fortune of being a capable man who has the appearance and mien of someone who appears custom tailored to that environment, while his opponent is an old and frumpy female liberal who nobody trusts.
Trump has chosen to exacerbate that advantage, by highlighting the risks and dangers we face, focusing us upon them, and then pointing out the advantages of his positions over the opposition’s.
Conservatism exists for a reason – the policies work in our K-selected world. People believe in it because it is a superior strategy for confronting the world we live in, which is dangerous and threatening. When a pansy like Romney comes in, tries to win by avoiding conflict, tries to be positive about the nation, and tries to make everyone feel good and happy, he will either have to abandon conservatism and embrace a more liberal position more adapted to that world, or he will lose.
Conservatism, and the K-strategy, are not about enjoying the moment – they are about doing the difficult things now that will make the future better. You don’t do difficult things unless the alternative is more difficult. Trump understands this in ways even the candidates who mouthed the highest ideals of conservatism do not.
In pursuing this strategy, unlike every previous candidate, he has drawn the populace to his position, rather than moved his position toward that of the populace. Polling-driven-position-selection caused both the conservative politicians and the nation they were appealing to, to turn more liberal. Donald J. Trump has drawn the populace toward conservatism, and made the nation more conservative as a whole. Just as the rise of the cuckservatives, such as McCain and Romney sent the nation leftward and set the stage for Bernie Sanders, Trump is moving the nation rightward in a way that will one day make candidate-Sanders a non-starter.
This begins when Trump actually creates more conservatives:
Donald Trump may be winning converts from an unlikely source — Democrats — a new unpublished poll shows.
What’s more, according to the poll, Trump is tied with Hillary — and in fact, the Republican candidate is within striking distance in several historically Democratic states.
Sources I interviewed said the poll was conducted by the Harper Polling Firm for the U.S. Senate campaign of GOP State Rep. Dan Carter.
The as-yet published poll shows Trump tied with Clinton — each with 43 percent — in heavily Democratic Connecticut.
This also showed in polls after the convention:
For viewers, a whopping 57 percent said they had a “very positive” reaction to the speech, while only 24 percent said the speech had a “negative effect.”
Even more incredible for Trump was that 73 percent of viewers said the policies proposed in the speech would move the country in the “right direction,” with only 24 percent saying otherwise.
The speech left 56 percent of viewers saying they are “more likely” to vote for Trump.
It even affects other conservative issues like gun control:
An Associated Press (AP) poll released July 23 shows that 59 percent of Americans disapprove of President Obama’s handling of gun laws, and an even greater majority, 62 percent, believe owning a gun makes people safer by “preventing them from becoming victims of crime.”
The poll also shows that 53 percent of Americans support national reciprocity for concealed carry permits. National reciprocity renders a concealed carry permit issued in one state valid in every state. An overwhelming majority of respondents also said a “high priority” for law enforcement should be “cracking down on people who own guns illegally” and “cracking down on people who sell guns illegally.
Trump is the first candidate to focus his efforts on molding the population’s views to support what he feels is right, rather than taking a poll to try and adapt his own views to the public’s, so he can pander more effectively. What is even more amazing is that as he is enjoying a success no other candidate can begin to replicate, he is turning the entire populace more conservative.
Given how massively he has swelled the ranks of those who will vote Republican already, it is mind boggling to imagine what the sum total of his effects will be at the end of eight years.
[…] How Trump’s Formula To Win Is Fueling A Conservative Revolution […]
I have no doubt he will improve conditions. I doubt he can prevent the collapse. They’re probably planning to dump it on his head, no?