September 15, 2015 12:16 PM UTC

Donald Trump Succeeds by Saying...Nothing, Really

• 11 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Poll after poll after poll shows famous rich person Donald Trump with a sizable lead over his GOP counterparts in the race for the Republican Presidential nomination. Trump is attracting larger and larger crowds wherever he goes, with people clamoring to listen to “The Donald” speak about whatever is floating around underneath that hair-thing of his.

There are several reasons why Trump continues to dominate the GOP Presidential landscape  American politics at the moment, but one of his greatest strengths is his ability to sound like he’s saying something valuable, even when he’s not. James Brown had a song about it — “Talking Loud and Saying Nothing” — and nobody does it as well as Trump.

As “The Fix” explains, Trump’s rhetorical magic is…actually kind of hard to explain:

Trump’s speeches are notoriously meandering — as though he’s just sort of making it up as he goes. (Breaking news: He is.) That tendency makes it tough to describe the Trump speech-giving experience to people unless they watched the address live…

…Matt Walsh, a conservative blogger, did the yeoman’s work of transcribing the first few minutes of Trump’s Dallas speech. Check it out.

“Wow. Amazing. Amazing, thank you. So exciting. Do you notice what’s missing tonight? Teleprompters! [APPLAUSE] No teleprompters. We don’t want teleprompters. That would be so much easier: We read a speech for 45 minutes, everybody falls asleep listening to the same old stuff, the same old lies. So much easier. So, you know, I have a little debate coming up on Wednesday. [APPLAUSE] I hear my… let’s call them opponents. Can I call them opponents? We’re allowed to do that, right? You know, New York was very nice to you people last night, you know that, right? [LAUGHTER] Did they hand you that game? [APPLAUSE] They handed it! I said, I am going to have the friendliest audience — sit down — I am going to have the friendliest audience. So I wasn’t sure, was I happy or was I sad? But Jerry Jones is a great guy, and he deserves everything he gets, frankly. [APPLAUSE] And you know, another great guy is Mark Cuban. [APPLAUSE] And I think, you know, he’s been talking about maybe doing this himself. And I think he’d do a great job. We don’t have the exact same feelings about where we’re going, but that’s okay. But Mark was great. You know, he called me, like, literally a few days ago, and he said, “You know, if you want to use the arena” — which by the way is a beautiful arena [APPLAUSE] this a great arena — and Dirk is a fantastic player [APPLAUSE] he’s just a wonderful player — and the Mavericks have been fantastic and it’s just a great team — but he said, “You know, if you want to use the arena.” And I said, “Mark, when?” He said “How ’bout Monday night?” It’s like, that was like in four days. And you had a big holiday in between. And he said, “They really like you in Dallas, they really like you in Texas, maybe you can get a lot of people.” [APPLAUSE] Because we were coming here, and we thought maybe we’d get a thousand people, but we never get a thousand anymore, it’s always, like, the same thing. You know, we went to Alabama. We started off with a 500-person ballroom. And after about two minutes — look at all these guys — paparazzi, look at this [LAUGHTER] we’ve got everybody here. We started off, by the way, with a 500-person ballroom, and after about two minutes the hotel called up begging for mercy. “We can’t do it!” They were inundated, so we went to the convention center, and that was 10,000 and that was wiped out in about an hour. So we went to a stadium, we had 31,000  people, which is by far the largest, they say, like, ever, for an early primary, and that’s probably true.[APPLAUSE]”

Trump has an amazing ability to just “be interesting” when he is speaking, and while his speechifying is indeed meandering, there’s no denying his ability to connect with his audience. We’d argue that Trump would benefit from a little more organization to his comments, but there’s a lesson here about talking to voters instead of talking at them.

Now, just imagine if Trump actually had something to say.