WHEN DONALD TRUMP and Kamala Harris debate for the first time on September 10th, two very different speaking styles will be on display. Mr Trump talks and talks. His speech at the Republican National Convention, in July, was reportedly scripted to last 40 minutes. It was supposed to reinvent him as the unifier of a polarised country mere days after he had survived an assassination attempt. Instead he extemporised heavily, going on the attack so energetically that the few “unifier” bits were quickly forgotten. And he delivered the longest nomination-acceptance speech at a convention in modern history, at 92 minutes. Ms Harris, by contrast, spoke for just 38 minutes at the Democratic convention last month.

The two differ in another way: Mr Trump crammed an average of 128 words into each minute of his time on the podium (including pauses and breaks for applause). Ms Harris managed just 97, meaning that Mr Trump got in 3.4 times as many words as she did. That is consistent with their performances in unscripted situations. Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, has calculated that Mr Trump spoke at a rate of 189 words per minute at a recent rally (in which the candidate extolled his own practice of “the weave”: shifting seemingly at random between disparate topics but, at least in his own view, brilliantly bringing them together). Excluding pauses, Mr Trump spoke at an even brisker 234.5 words per minute.

Ms Harris is the more considered speaker. In her one-on-one debate in 2020 with Mike Pence, the then vice-president, she uttered about 17% fewer words than Mr Pence, despite speaking for almost exactly the same amount of time. She carefully controlled his interruptions with “Mr Vice-President, I’m speaking”. When she had the floor, she often seemed to be back in her old job as a prosecutor, methodically making her case against the Trump administration.

The variety of their vocabulary differs, too. By Mr Liberman’s calculations, Mr Trump uses unusually few distinct (ie, different) words when speaking—fewer, in fact, than almost any other public figure he has analysed. In the debates in 2020 it took Mr Trump around 6,000 words to use 1,000 distinct words. Mr Biden, Ms Harris and Mr Pence reached that mark somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 words. This tallies with Mr Liberman’s analysis, for example, of the Republican and Democratic primary debates in 2015, where Mr Trump again used the fewest distinct words per total spoken (Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, used the most).

Mr Trump’s failure to flash hundred-dollar words should not be automatically equated with linguistic cluelessness. His rally speeches lose nearly all of their coherence when transcribed. But as live performances they have often held his audience spellbound. He repeats himself—often over and over—as befits someone who has made a career as a promoter. That, plus using words that everyone knows and uses frequently, helps his messages stick. Remember “we are going to build a wall and Mexico is going to pay for it”? A big vocabulary may be good for Scrabble, but Mr Trump’s rhetorical style is good at getting his point across. It helped make him president once, and could do so again.■

Темы и теги

США Политика