President Bone-spur’s “Fantastic Speech”

Oh, how the media struggles to find positive content to report on regarding Trump.  Witness James Clapper’s CNN interview praising President Bone-spur’s D-Day speech as “fantastic,” one of the best of his Presidency or Jim Acosta’s quote that “he hit all the rights moments.”  Trouble is, that’s not saying much.  The bar is set pretty low. What does it take to read the words of another?  To inspire?  Certainly not the half-dead drone, under-his-breath delivery of a somnambulist speaker, uninspired and sleepwalking through his required appearance. As for his words, well I find them difficult to praise.  They were scripted for him by a speechwriter that could have easily been bested by any high school history or civic students with a sense of patriotism and world awareness. No, there was nothing special about this speech except that Trump stayed on script and read the words provided. Like all of his previous scripted speeches it was flat and lifeless.

 

So what makes a great speech?  I would contend that, as much as I despise the man and his beliefs, his off-the-cuff ad-libs, his departures from reality, his agitating a rabid crowd into joining him in his antics with deplorable anti-democratic, anti-American chants, these constitute great speeches, wrong as they are.  It is where Trump comes alive, inflated by the crowd into filling his own ego to go beyond civil norms, setting new records for brash falsehoods and egregious attacks on American political leaders and heroes, he has been overwhelmingly successful appealing to the baser instincts of his followers, emotional entreaties to an emotionally responsive body void of logic. This he understands.

 

So let’s not try to give him credit for reading the words of others in a less than half-hearted delivery.  Credit where credit is due.  What makes a great speaker is not the words he pronounces (and admittedly Trump has problems in this area) but the ability to market ideas, and in that regard he must join the likes of snake oil salesmen, and marketing genius P.T. Barnum as a huckster with nothing to sell but falsehoods and the hope of witnessing something exciting, even if it would be found repugnant to our long-dead founding fathers and the rest of the world at large.

 

So no, President Bone-spur’s D-Day speech was nothing to be excited about.  This was not his audience.  These were not his MAGA followers.  The speech was written for him to fulfill the most basic requirements of presenting a proper front for the rest of the world on the solemn occasion of the 75^th  anniversary of D-Day, something he could not do for himself under the best conditions.