Compass Counterpoint

21 September 2024

Trump: Making Hyperboles and Superlatives Great Again

It took Joe Biden’s departure to spotlight Trump’s own shortcomings in communication.

The unfinished sentences, repetitions and overblown rhetoric are nothing new, but they’re getting worse.

Much worse. So much worse that no one’s seen anything like it in the history of the world.

Never seen anything like it.

Take Trump’s dazzling rhetoric in the debate with Harris.

I got more votes than any sitting president in history.

There’s never been anything like it.

We have the biggest, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.

I created one of the greatest economies in the history of our country.

We had the most secure border in the history of our country, in the history of the world.

Nobody’s seen anything like it.

I’m a much better looking person than Kamala.

And a recent gem:

They’ll say “He was rambling”. I don’t ramble. I’m a really smart guy. You know. Really smart. I don’t ramble.

And on he rambles, unable to focus on a single train of thought for more than a few seconds.

Then a sentence is interrupted by a loud, unrelated aside.

The Don doesn’t quietly flow.

Hungary’s deeply authoritarian prime minister, Victor Orbán, is showered with superlatives.

Putin is “a genius”, and Saudi Arabia’s autocratic crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was visited and praised in 2018 at his beheadquarters.

Trump reserves his ugliest put-downs for his enemies at home — Harris, Pelosi, Biden etc.

The language is breathtakingly simplistic; the labels often shockingly cruel and wildly inappropriate.

His description of convicted migrants as animals is alarmingly similar to the Nazi dehumanisation of Jews as disease-ridden rodents.

Mussolini’s fascist-speak was strikingly similar.

It was the master narcissist, though, who took huge pride in his rallies and described himself as greater than Napoleon or Caesar.

He proclaimed his 1940 invasion of France the most glorious victory of all time.

The Führer might have added that the whole world had never seen anything like it.