Mr Trump's manner of speaking

Mr Trump's language has been much criticized.  It is said to be disjointed, illogical and to ignore all rules of English grammar.  Against that, it has just won the man the Presidency of the United States.  What is going on?

Various people have noted some strengths in the way Trump communicates.  For instance, he uses very simple words and simple sentences.  He repeats himself a lot so that you will be sure to get his point.  But there is more to it than that.  For a start he uses concepts that have a lot of emotional power -- patriotism and safety from danger in particular.

Most important of all, however, he speaks not as a polished intellectual but as a man of the people.  He speaks like a welder or a farmer or a burger flipper.  Yet he has a degree in economics and has long moved in the most exalted circles.  How come he speaks in such a strange way for his background?

I think it is partly learned.  A couple of Australian examples are, I think, enlightening.  Bob Hawke was one of Australia's most popular Prime Ministers. He had been a Rhodes scholar and came from an educated family.  Yet in his speeches he always spoke with a broad Australian accent and used a lot of slang and colloquial expressions.  Like Trump, he sounded like a worker, though he was nowhere nearly as disjointed as Trump.

So it was very amusing when he retired.  When interviewed after his retirement, he would speak in an educated way -- both in accent and in vocabulary.  He had been "putting it on" as Australians say.  He had been pretending to be what he was not.

So where did he learn to do that?  He had long involved himself in the union movement.  And a lot of unionists were genuine working class people.  Over the years, Hawke had learned to model his speech on theirs so that he would seem "One of us".  It worked.  It got him the Prime ministership of Australia for eight years.

Another instructive example was a long-serving Premier of the Australian state of Queensland:  Sir Johannes Bjelke Petersen.  Sir Joh's speech was even closer to Trump's speech:  Very similar indeed.   He also had a messy speech delivery that the elite all dismissed as being beyond  comprehension.  Journalists and others claimed it was just impossible to understand what he was saying.  But Joh was a farmer and he spoke like a farmer, not like an educated man. And ordinary farmers and working people generally understood him just fine.  He kept getting their vote and ended up running Queensland for nearly 20 years -- from 1968 to 1987. So who was the fool?


The Honourable Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, KCMG

Trump comes from the opposite end of the socio-economic scale from Sir Joh so how come he talks in a working class manner?  He grew up in the Queens borough of NYC, which is a very diverse place so he would have heard working class speech there pretty often and it would have become part of normality for him.  He knew how to speak that way if he wanted to.

And he has always had a hands-on attitude to his building projects and has often been on site talking to the workers doing the building.  So it would seem that his conversations with them have reinforced a liking not only for them and their views but also for some of their speech patterns.  Their patterns became his patterns. And those speech patterns sound to large numbers of Americans as "like us".  Powerful stuff. He talks to the people in their own language. His accent is New York Queens and that too conveys an image of the blunt, no-nonsense New Yorker.

So on those two Australian precedents, Trump should easily get his second term in office.

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Trump has the last laugh about Sweden

Riots have broken out in the Swedish suburb that Donald Trump referred to in his speech about immigration problems.

Police were forced to fire warning shots after a group of rioters began setting fire to cars, throwing stones at police and looting shops in the Rinkeby district of Stockholm on Monday night.

A police officer was injured during the clashes, Swedish public service broadcaster SVT reported.

Donald Trump made his confusing remarks about immigration in Sweden at his Florida rally on Saturday.

Trump was initially thought to be talking about terrorism when he warned of 'what's happening last night in Sweden'.

But he later claimed he was talking about an edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight about immigrant crime in the Scandinavian country.

Trump was mocked widely for his Florida speech, in which he said: 'You look at what's happening in Germany, you look at what's happening last night in Sweden.

'Sweden. Who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They're having problems like they never thought possible.'

He later clarified on Twitter that he was denying 'fake news' claims that 'large scale immigration in Sweden is working out just beautifully.'

Police said in a statement that at least seven or eight cars were burned in the district, which has one of the largest immigrant populations in Stockholm, during Monday's disorder.

SOURCE

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Drunk on whine: Liberal boycott of Trump wine fails hilariously

A Virginia chapter of the National Organization for Women attempted to boycott Wegmans Food Markets in the state because they sell Trump Winery products. Instead, the protest backfired and the wine sold out within hours:

    A spokeswoman for Wegmans, a New York-based company, told Fox News on Monday that Trump wines flew off its shelves last week. Out of 10 locations, only its Charlottesville store did not completely sell out.

    Jo Natale, Wegmans‘ vice president of media relations, told the network that 100 bottles of Trump Winery Meritage and 20 bottles of the Cru remained at its Charlottesville location as of Friday evening.

Natale also had this to say about the failed protest:  “For various reasons, we are sometimes asked to stop selling a product. Our response is always the same, no matter the product: How a product performs is our single measure for what stays on our shelves and what goes,” Ms. Natale says.

It looks like Trump wine won’t be leaving Wegmans shelves any time soon.

SOURCE

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Donald Trump and the Waterloo of the Protected Class

While critics call America “divided” and paint a hysteria-driven picture of a fraying democracy, the divide occurs less along political grounds than it does on “protected” and “unprotected” grounds.

Let me explain:

The two classes that separate America do not divide along the usual lines of socio-economic background, race or party affiliation. Rather, the two classes separate along the lines of the “Protected Class” and the “Unprotected Class.” The Protected Class represents an ideology. Those who opt-in to their ideology receive protection while those who opt-out find criticism and attack. This is why those who opted-out of the Protected Class voting habits were labeled as “deplorable,” “bigoted” and “racist.” Their change of voting habits removed them from the Protected Class and placed them into the Unprotected Class.

This also explains why Ivanka Trump has been met with scornful words and boycotts. Due to her support of her father’s presidency, the Protected Class terminated her membership as well as all rights and privileges to their club.

Bolstered by their key allies in the media, Hollywood, academia and government, the Protected Class operates to proliferate their ideas to the exclusion of any other opposing idea even if it means completely skewing, or in some cases fabricating, the news cycle.

For example, from the vantage point of the Protected Class media, it appears that the first month of Trump’s presidency has been tense and fraught with scandal, change and massive pushback. The Protected Class press wants you to believe this. They want you to believe that Trump’s presidency has been unable to make any changes, that his political appointments are incompetent and that the whole “Trump thing” was a mistake.

Yet, we must remember that what is happening is to be expected, and it all has to do with who is telling the story.

It has been said victors write the history. However, in this case, the vanquished are telling the story. Reeling from defeat, the Protected Class feels threatened, perhaps because people have begun to see inherent hypocrisy within their ideology. Donald Trump’s entire campaign put a spotlight on the Protected Class cartel (how the Protected Class exonerates their own criminals, how the Protected Class media reports what they want and omits what might hurt their agenda and how the Protected Class government officials fill the swamp and get fat off of citizens' tax dollars).

The elitist LA/DC/Manhattan Protected Class value system believes that every intelligent human being would have voted for Hillary. They cannot fathom that any reasonable person would have voted for Trump.

Several years ago, I worked with a guy from the UK. He described his U.S. travels to me in the in this manner: “I have been to New York, LA and DC, but not the bit in the middle. But that doesn’t really matter.”

The Protected Class elitists believe this as well. In their mind, there are three important places in the United States: New York, DC and LA. The rest is home to a bunch of unenlightened rabble residing in the “bit in the middle.”

I would remind those who believe such nonsense that the “bit in the middle” is America. The Protected Class media wants to paint a picture of America in which George Soros, Madonna and Chuck Schumer represent our interests. In reality, the Protected Class is more out of touch than they even know. Small business owners, teachers, moms, pest control technicians, coal miners and construction workers make up America. These people who work hard for their families and try to make a better life for their children stand as the foundation of this country.

The Protected Class is out of touch, because they keep using their old tricks: They report falsely and hope that the people buy it.

So why does it seem so messy?  It seems messy because the Protected Class is making it messy. They intend to focus upon Trump fail after Trump fail, conveniently omitting anything positive coming from DC. They have put a magnifying glass on everything, focusing on fear and failures while intentionally forgetting to tell the whole story.

The Protected Class media has failed to adequately report the results of President Trump’s first month, announced in Monday’s White House press release.

* Withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership

* Renegotiating with Lockheed Martin and saving the American taxpayer $700 million on a new line of F-35 fighters

* Hosting the CEO of Intel who announced a plan to invest $7 billion dollars in a U.S. factory, which will create 10,000 American jobs

* Signing an executive order establishing a task force, headed by the new Attorney General, to decrease crime and restore public safety in American communities.

Ultimately, we must realize that the victory of Trump has been the Waterloo of the Protected Class, their tactics and their deceptive rhetoric. While the news cycle appears chaotic and terrifying, we must know that this is an attempt by the Protected Class to regain the ground they have lost. May we keep our eyes above the waves and remember that Big Lies often die a slow death.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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