For many people, the moment that they began to take Donald Trump’s presidential bid seriously was the day that he descended the escalator at Trump Tower and delivered his rousing speech announcing his candidacy. While I was immediately impressed by both his words and his stagecraft, it was a different moment, just a few weeks later, that made me believe that Donald Trump was for real.
As every serious candidate for their party’s presidential nomination has for years, Donald Trump attended the Iowa State Fair. Unlike the vast majority of the others, though, he didn’t go there pretending to be someone he wasn’t.
Trump didn’t arrive in blue jeans nor did he don the sleeveless jacket-vest that Midwesterners often wear. Trump showed up in the same suit – and the same overly long red tie – that he wears whether he’s on the campaign trail, on a television program or chairing a meeting in the boardroom.
If ever there was a candidate who might have been well served by pretending to be what he’s not, it was Donald Trump in Iowa. After all, a brash, New York City-born billionaire and the folks at the Iowa state fair he was there to woo could not possibly be more different.
Trump, however, didn’t pander; Trump was Trump — the very same Trump he had been for his entire adult life and this stood in stark contrast to his opponents in the three presidential elections since.
Unlike Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris (et al.), Trump never once changed his accent, lied about his biography or claimed to carry around hot sauce to prove his bona fides to one or another minority group.
Most significantly, Trump never changed the language he used in his speeches. This is very different than white Democrats who "dumb down” their vocabulary whenever they speak to the people they believe to be inferior to them. This is from a recent Yale study but we’ve all seen it a million times:
White liberals tend to downplay their own verbal competence in exchanges with racial minorities, compared to how other white Americans act in such exchanges.
Donald Trump uses the same language no matter who he’s speaking to because Donald Trump doesn’t look down on minorities the way that Democrats do. He speaks to every group as one American talking to another American and that’s all there is to it.
In fact, one can go back fifty years and whether it was Trump talking to a David Letterman audience, an Oprah Winfrey audience, a Phil Donahue audience or any of the literally thousands of others, Donald Trump said the same things about the same issues using the same language and even wearing the same clothes.
Meanwhile, after witnessing Trump’s straightforward and clear-eyed policy suggestions, every one of these disparate talk show hosts asked Trump to run for president — a notion roundly approved of every time by the studio audience. Now, suddenly, the very same guy is “Adolf Hitler”? So, what changed? It’s not Donald Trump.
Evan is the author of three bestselling books on how the “Modern Liberal” thinks and why they side only and always with evil over good, wrong over right and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Please check them out at Amazon.com/Evan Sayet