Tony Schwartz, author of Donald Trump’s myth-making book, The Art of the Deal, recently told the New Yorker that it took him a while to settle on the right euphemism for Trump’s willingness to ignore truth.
“I play to people’s fantasies,” wrote Schwartz in his channeling of Trump. “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration – and it’s a very effective form of promotion.”
Call it lying, or simply telling people what they want to hear, that was precisely the quality on display this week when Trump gave back-to-back speeches on immigration in Mexico and Phoenix, Arizona.
While in Mexico, he told reporters that in his meeting with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto, there had been no discussion of who would pay for the wall he has famously talked about building between the US and Mexico. “We didn’t discuss that… We discussed the wall; we didn’t discuss payment of the wall,” he said.
Back in the states though, he sang a strikingly different tune: “We will build a great wall along the southern border. And Mexico will pay for the wall ... They don’t know it yet, but they’re gonna pay for the wall.” This, after Peña Nieto had tweeted that he’d told Trump from the beginning of their conversation his country wouldn’t be paying under any circumstances.
Speaking on NBC’s Today show on Thursday morning, Hillary Clinton’s veep pick Tim Kaine knocked Trump’s performance as “amateur”, saying: “You can’t say different things to different audiences.” It’s an interesting knock coming from Kaine, who’s known for speaking differently to different audiences, sometimes speaking in English, other times in his dad-like Spanish.
A fundamental difference: Kaine changes how he talks but not the substance of what he promises.
Tweaking how you talk depending on the audience – code switching – is actually the sign of a good listener, an empathetic human being and, very often, a skilled politician. But it can be difficult for politicians to walk the line between authenticity and connecting with different populations.
Hillary Clinton has been teased for affecting a drawl while speaking to black audiences, and Michael Steele has been mocked for saying things like “off the hook”. Even Obama, a guy Zadie Smith has praised for his mastery of the cultural pivot, gets criticized for it sometimes. After a speech before a mostly black audience in 2007 in which he took on a preacherly tone of voice, for instance, Fox News personality Tucker Carlson pointed to it as evidence of pandering. “This accent is absurd,” he concluded in a segment on Sean Hannity. “This is a put-on.”
It can also be done well, though. Bill Clinton was known as the first black president in part because he knew how to affect a southern twang. George W Bush was beloved by voters in no small part for being likably folksy – the guy voters wanted to have a beer with – if not respected. As African American writer Eric Deggans put it in a 2013 column for NPR, code switching is an important way to make sure you’re understood across cultures.
It can go wrong when it veers into the territory of pandering, as when Marco Rubio was accused of saying something more pro-immigration on Spanish language TV than he was saying elsewhere. Specifically he was accused by Ted Cruz of supporting President Obama’s program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, to allow some young people to remain in the US by giving temporary legal status to immigrants who came to the states illegally as children. Politifact found the claim half-true on the grounds that Cruz didn’t include the full context of the discussion, but it still didn’t play well for Rubio.
The sometimes blurry line between form and substance switching are on display now, when we look at the differences between how Trump changes his speeches to reach different audiences, and how Kaine does.
Trump can be a highly skilled code-switcher in ways that are valuable to him as a politician. It’s what allowed him to read the Republican base better than anyone in the party establishment and construct a campaign that would resonate. But in altering the substance of what he says depending on audience, he takes the tactic too far.
With Kaine we don’t have to worry about any such thing. On the contrary, it’s respectful to learn another culture’s language in the melting pot America is increasingly becoming. The way Trump alters his message isn’t code switching, per se. It’s not “truthful hyperbole”, and it certainly isn’t respectful to his audience. It’s just more lying.
