Source: Patriot Post | VIEW ORIGINAL POST ==>
Columnist Ben Domenech noted it three months ago, but it bears repeating: Donald Trump has assembled a team of formidable communicators.
“Look across the range of nominees,” Domenech wrote, “and it’s obvious what nearly all of them have in common: they are communicators, not administrators. The skillsets they bring to their new roles are less about the unsexy business of corralling bureaucrats, they’re about being experienced advocates to a public audience on behalf of Trump’s agenda, or their own.”
That analysis seems even more prescient now, as Trump’s cabinet has been almost fully formed in the interim. If Ronald Reagan was The Great Communicator, then Donald Trump has assembled a team of great communicators.
When we consider all the people Trump has picked to represent him this time, we see a range of ideologies but one common thread: They’re all highly skilled at getting a point across. Some of them — like JD Vance and Marco Rubio — are downright spectacular at it. Think about the communicative tour de force that the veep pulled off last week at the Munich Security Conference.
Now go down through the list of Trump’s team: Hegseth, Bondi, Bessent, Bergum, Noem, Wright, Duffy, Zeldin, Lutnick, Stefanik, Miller, Leavitt, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, Bhattacharya, Waltz, Homan, Patel. With the possible exception of Bondi, who can sometimes seem a bit stiff, they’re all natural communicators.
Yes, Border Czar Tom Homan comes across as gruff, but when has he not wrested the illegal immigration narrative away from hostile reporters or hapless Democrats? Even RFK Jr, despite his spasmodic dysphonia speech impediment, communicates compellingly. And you might be thinking, Elon Musk? Musk is a clumsy communicator, a communicator with what my colleague Sterling Henry has rightly called “a puerile sense of humor.” But think about it: When was the last time Musk said something uninteresting?
Now, for comparison, consider some of Joe Biden’s high-profile communicative duds: VP Kamala Harris, perennially whiny Attorney General Merrick Garland, dull-as-a-doornail Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, talentless Xavier Becerra at HHS, always-nervous DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and elfish Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin. When was the last time any of them said anything smoothly or interestingly?
The difference is glaring. Substance is essential, of course — one needs to be in command of the issues — but being able to stare down a hostile reporter, look confidently into a camera, and communicate the administration’s ideas clearly and concisely is critical. And Trump gets it.
Trump gets it because he is it. Trump is The Great Communicator of our modern age. This is not to take anything away from The Original, Ronald Reagan, who first showed us how to use substance, humor, dignity, and stage presence to talk right past the mainstream media and directly to the American people. But Trump, man.
To illustrate Trump’s communicative genius, let’s look at a moment when his political career absolutely hung in the balance. The date was August 6, 2015, and then-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who was co-moderating the first debate for 10 Republican presidential candidates, was armed to the teeth with a politically perilous question for Trump. You remember it.
“You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals,’” Kelly began. To which Trump interrupted, mid-sentence: “Only Rosie O’Donnell.”
Only Rosie O’Donnell.
Could you have done that? I couldn’t have done that. No one I can think of could’ve done that. Robin Williams, maybe, but he’d already been dead a year. Here’s how Scott Adams — yes, that Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy, the guy who picked Trump to beat Hillary Clinton when The New York Times’s Nate Silver put his chances at 2% — described the moment in the book Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter:
Kelly finished the question and Trump responded with something about the problem of political correctness. But by then it didn’t matter. The Rosie O’Donnell reference sucked all the energy out of the room. It was a masterstroke of persuasion, timed perfectly, and executed in front of the world. When I saw it happen [and this is the best part] I stood and walked toward the television … I got goose bumps on my arm. This wasn’t normal. This was persuasion like I have never seen performed in public. And in that moment, I saw the future unfold. Or so I thought I did. It would take another year to be sure.
Adams, a deep thinker in the arts of communication and persuasion, went on to analytically assess what had taken place and list the tools that Trump had used — the “emotion-triggering visual image,” the “pacing and leading,” the “high-ground maneuver,” and so forth. All embodied in a jiu-jitsuy three-word response to a question that hadn’t yet been asked. That was Trump’s “Rosie O’Donnell Moment” — a moment when, on the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Donald Trump dropped a communicative bomb on the establishment hordes, both left and right, who for a brief moment could practically see The End of Trump.
Adams has described Trump’s communicative gifts as “weapons-grade” persuasion skills, and who can argue? Given his mastery of the art, it’s no surprise that he looks for superior communication skills in the people he’s chosen to represent his administration.
“Clearly, Trump is a far better communicator now than he was then,” writes our Mark Alexander. “Moreover, that is also reflected in the selection of his key administration leaders. They are not only disruptors but effective communicators.”
“Ronald Reagan may have been the ‘Great Communicator,’” writes Jeremy Carl, “but his impact and reach in a highly centralized media environment (in which almost all the outlets were controlled by his opponents) are dwarfed by Trump’s team of great communicators who are reaching a new level of what is possible in effective conservative political messaging.”
Carl concludes by noting a feat that Reagan performed some 45 years ago but that his Republican forbear has reworked for our modern age: “The history of the Trump era is obviously still to be written. But it seems indisputable that one major aspect will be that Trump showed the GOP how it can fight back against a hostile media elite — and win.”
