Bob MaistrosImagine you are holding for dear life onto the table of an examination room, sick, sore, worried, and weary to the marrow of your bones, and expecting any moment to experience the calming presence and soothing tones of your longtime, trusted family physician.
When in bursts a garish figure not in a white coat, but top hat and tails, shouting at the top of his lungs …
Ladies and Gentlemen! Boys and Girls! Welcome to the greatest medical practice on earth … no! in the history of the earth! No! In the history of the universe!
Featuring amazing feats of doctoral derring-do, mighty miracles of curative coups, and once-in-a-lifetime wonders of three-ring – I mean, chart – therapeutic triumph!
Here to save you from that low-IQ quack in the next office who prescribed those toxic tonics, noxious nostrums and corruptive catholicons that had you at the doorstep of death and in the depth of despair.
Cast your gaze at this center graph with its high-flying x-axis showing how, in record time, my restorative regimen has you back in the finest of fettles and the highest of haleness.
“But doctor, I still feel awful.”
Tut, tut, my boy. Not once in the annals of time has there been a superior specimen of brisk body betterment. Skip on out with a buoyant bounce, supernatant step, and effervescent energy. And don’t forget to look for additional antidote abatements at BarnumBiologics.com.
In a 1992 presidential debate featuring audience questions, an African-American woman asked the assembled candidates how “the national debt personally affected” each of their lives.
After budget hawk Ross Perot spouted cliches about his grandchildren and incumbent George Bush stumbled (“I’m not sure I get — help me with the question, and I’ll try to answer it”), rhetorical virtuoso Bill Clinton physically stepped forward to engage the questioner and gently requested, “Tell me how it’s affected you again.”
The Man from Hope intuited that the query wasn’t about economic policy, but rather her, and America’s, anxiety. And demonstrated with his forward posture and empathetic tone that he – wait for it – felt her pain, and that of millions of fellow citizens.
Three decades plus later, the nation is even more on edge.
Processing five sets of high-profile murders over one horrifying weekend. Witnessing widespread and even violent resistance to promised efforts to enforce immigration laws and to the use of the military to interdict deadly drug traffickers.
Buffeted by waves of worry set from Democrat demagoguery that wide swathes of the populace are in dire danger of “losing their health care.”
But most of all, unsettled about “affordability,” with seven in 10 respondents to a PBS/NPR/Marist poll claiming monthly expenses soak up or exceed their income, a state of affairs increasingly laid at the feet of the current president.
Prompting The Donald’s nationally televised defense of his record Wednesday night. Unfortunately, the one-time host of a top 10-rated reality TV show neglected to read the room. The substance? Dead-on. But the tone couldn’t have been deafer.
Apprehensive Americans were looking for Dr. Marcus Welby – handholding, heart-to-heart, and hopeful. The showman president gave them P.T. Barnum, the Prince of Humbugs, blaring hard-sell and hyperbole, mixed with equal measures of vitriol and vituperation.
Hard sell: the president burst out of the gate and bolted straight at the affordability issue, immediately fingering the previous administration to tee up a searing indictment of its misdeeds on the border, crime, gender politics, child indoctrination, trade, and foreign policy. (Interestingly, and violating this long-time speechwriter’s “tie-the-bow-at-the-finish” rule, “affordability” only came up again once, in the context of, as Trump termed it, the “Unaffordable Care Act.”)
Then: a rapid-fire torrent of boasts. On immigration, his strongest and most popular area of achievement. Education. Rebuilding the military, with a one-time bonus for servicepeople. Neutralizing Iran. Peace deals and the release of hostages from Gaza. Price reductions, complete with charts. Rising wages. Job creation. Foreign investment. Trade policy and tariffs. Tax cuts. Health care reform proposals. Energy production. Housing costs. And back to immigration.
Quite a litany of accomplishments. But delivered at too dizzying a pace and high a temperature – not to mention with a plug en route for his “TrumpRx.com” discount drug site, leaving one expecting a pitch of Trump watches would be next.
Moreover, the speech was overly spiced with heaping helpings of characteristic hyperbole —
- “inflation … the worst in 48 years, and some would say in the history of our country …”
- “the worst trade deals ever made in our country …”
- “more positive change … than any administration in American history … There’s never been anything like it.”
- “elected in a landslide …”
- “the strongest border in the history of our country”
- “the hottest country anywhere in the world … said by every single leader …”
- “the largest tax cuts in American history … perhaps the most sweeping legislation ever passed in Congress …”
- “(on prescription drugs) what no politician of either party has ever done … there has never been anything like this in the history of our country …”
- “We are respected again, like we have never been respected before.”
Your correspondent gets Salena Zito’s whole “take Trump seriously, but not literally” schtick. But when harmless exaggeration elevates into Biden-level fabrication, it undermines the credibility of the president’s entire line of argumentation.
And worse: overhyping accomplishments shifts the entire focus to The Donald — in reverse-Bubba fashion — as he once again displayed a narcissistic streak a mile wide.
The shame is that the president knows how to do this right, perhaps more than any chief executive in recent history. His paean in his 2016 stump speeches to the “forgotten Americans” was tender, touching, and trust-inducing. As was his pledge in his warm, almost shell-shocked victory speech, that they would be forgotten no more.
Too bad that 47 seems to have forgotten how to appeal to those feeling left behind at such a critical juncture for the nation — and his Barnum & Bailey second presidency.
Bob Maistros, a regular contributor to Issues & Insights, is a messaging and communications strategist, crisis specialist, and former political speechwriter. He can be reached at bob@rpmexecutive.com.
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