BEN MACINTYRE
may 13 2016, 12:01am, the times
Trump’s cleverest trick is sounding stupid

Republican frontrunner uses the simple language of a ten-year-old to connect with the blue-collar, dispossessed

In 1930, the English linguist CK Ogden invented a pared down, simplified form of language as a tool for teaching English as a second tongue. His “Basic English” included a vocabulary of just 850 words, 18 verbs, and a radically reduced grammar. Anyone with a grasp of Basic English would be able to understand anyone else with the same rudimentary skills.

HG Wells was intrigued and horrified by the idea, and in his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come he depicted a totalitarian government ruling a world in which Basic English becomes the global lingua franca.

Donald Trump has forged his own Basic English, a blunt, reduced, idiomatic form of speech that is comprehensible to any American with the educational skills of the average ten-year-old. Trumpspeak appals his critics, delights his supporters with its directness, and represents one of the keys to his successful bid for the Republican nomination.

A great deal of attention has been paid to what The Donald says; at least equally important is the way he says it. Trump uses short words, in short sentences, with minimal grammatical complexity. He entirely eschews the rhetorical and ornamental flourishes of most campaigning politicians. His sentences are sometimes as short as five syllables and seldom more than 15, with the most important word at the end of the sentence, delivered as a series of (often unconnected) punchlines: a subject, a verb, and usually a direct object. The effect is blocky, chunky, punchy, and instantly intelligible. Get tough with China and Mexico, which are killing us!

His favourite word is “I”. His fourth-favourite word is “Trump”. Eight out of his 13 most-used words are monosyllables.

Trump favours the chummy, throat-clearing locutions common to much informal American speech: “You know what . . .”, “Lemme tell you . . .” He avoids qualifying phrases and sub-clauses, and relies heavily on intensifiers (“very”, “great”, “totally”) and invective (“losers”, “total losers”, “dummy”, “haters”, “idiots”, “morons”, “stupid”).

Sometimes Trump achieves a sort of accidental, rhythmical poetry. “The phones don’t work/ They’re 40 years old/ They have wires that are no good/ Nothing works/ Our country doesn’t work/ Everybody wins except us.”

Followed by a rousing coda: “We’re not going to lose/ We are going to start winning again/ And we’re going to win bigly.”

Of the 2016 presidential contenders, Bernie Sanders deploys the most complex language and Trump the simplest. Indeed, he may be the most verbally uncomplicated presidential candidate since Andrew Jackson, who also rejected spelling: “It’s a damn poor mind indeed which cannot think of at least two ways to spell any word.” Where George W Bush wrestled with the language and frequently lost, Trump chops it into easily digestible lumps; linguistic chicken nuggets.

The Flesch-Kincaid test was invented by the US Navy to assess readability. A text is run through an algorithm measuring syllables, words and sentence construction, and assigned a level equivalent to a school grade. Mr Trump’s language measured in the fourth grade (age nine-ten). Hillary Clinton ranked in the eighth grade (aged 13-14). By comparison, JFK’s Moon-shot speech is high school graduate level and George Washington’s farewell address of 1796 was assessed as graduate degree level.

Educated liberals recoil from Trump’s demotic, reductive way of speaking but for millions of Americans the very bluntness and simplicity of his speeches is the bedrock of his appeal. Trump talks the language of the blue-collar bar, the plainspoken white working-class vernacular of resentment that makes his listeners feel they are being addressed by someone trustworthy. Trump’s fragmented style appears authentic and unrehearsed, when it is neither.

He did not always speak this way. Before politics beckoned, this university graduate and best-selling author spoke in the sophisticated syntax of America’s business elite. However, at a time of political disillusionment, he manages to sound forthright and ardent, even when he is really saying nothing at all. “Something bad is happening.”

The contrast with Mrs Clinton’s manner of speech is telling. Her language tends towards abstraction, “legislation”, “government” and “the international community”. Like most experienced politicians, her word choice is circumspect, careful and sometimes convoluted; her statements are frequently qualified, and grammatically precise. To many Americans, the very sophistication of her language is suspicious and alienating.

Trump and Clinton represent rival traditions of American language. William Faulkner famously attacked Ernest Hemingway’s use of everyday words and compact writing. “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary,” Faulkner sniffed. Hemingway shot back: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

No one needs a dictionary to understand Trump. That is one of his greatest assets, a way to win bigly, and he knows it. “I know words. I have the best words,” he said recently. “But there is no better word than stupid.”

Trump’s unique brand of Basic English may sound stupid to some but it is highly effective, carefully calculated, and the shape of things to come.