On Day Two of the Trump Presidential Pre-Regnum, he traveled to the White House for a meeting with President Obama to begin the governmental transition at the President’s invitation. The meeting lasted about 90 minutes, and occurred without apparent rancor.
At the end, in an informal armchair setting, both men gave some brief remarks about the visit.
Here are two brief accounts from our national paper of record, the ‘failing’ Grey Lady herself (according to candidate Trump) about the encounter.
Mr. Trump, a man who once questioned the birthplace of the president, and Mr. Obama, who scorched Mr. Trump as unfit for the Oval Office, met the news media in that esteemed room, and at least for public consumption, let bygones and bygones.
Mr. Trump, who often labeled Mr. Obama the worst president in history during the campaign, this time called him a “very good man.”
And this story:
For years, Mr. Trump questioned Mr. Obama’s birthplace and legitimacy, branded the nation’s first black president weak and called his tenure a disaster.
On Thursday at the White House, the once-unimaginable happened: The two men met face to face for the first time for a 90-minute discussion in the Oval Office and shook hands, making a public show of putting their bitter differences aside.
Mr. Trump, who appeared nervous and uncharacteristically subdued beside Mr. Obama, called the president “a good man.” He said that the meeting was “a great honor” and that their conversation had lasted far longer than he would have expected.
“I have great respect,” Mr. Trump said, turning to face Mr. Obama. “We discussed a lot of different situations, some wonderful, and some difficulties. I very much look forward to dealing with the president in the future, including counsel.” Given that Mr. Trump has never held elective office or served in government, some administration aides suggest that Mr. Obama could play a larger-than-usual role in acquainting Mr. Trump with the demands of the office.
Watch the brief 2 ½ minute video here.*
One thing I learned from watching is that apparently Trump had never met the President in person. This despite his well-known penchant for meeting, greeting, socializing, and being photographed with a veritable galaxy of important figures, stars, celebrities, and movers and shakers.
More to the point, by my count, he actually addressed Obama as the President, not once, but three different times, in the space of 1 minute and 10 seconds (the entire length of his remarks). This is an expected courtesy for any visitor to the nation’s house. It stands in stark relief to Trump’s insistent, persistent, and nasty referrals, in speeches, at rallies, and insulting along with all his other Tweets, for a period of at least five years since 2011 (going back to Trump’s birther crusade nonsense, which Trump finally disavowed in a blink a month or so ago). Is this a brand new Trump Leaf? We now have a 1 day record of abstinence and sobriety in showing respect towards the office he so covets. Will it last?
Obama criticized Trump, with some sharp elbows, in public at the White House Correspondent’s dinner on April 30, 2011. This was only after Trump stoked up and poured gasoline on the baseless birther conspiracy theorists earlier in the year. Obama didn’t try to have the IRS harass Trump, or rain down EPA inspectors on his golf courses hunting for violations, or have the INS raid Trump hotels and resorts to deport half of the wait staff and cleaning personnel. Those would be Trumpian type moves.
Selected Sources:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trump-and-obama-a-night-to-remember
https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/05/01/president-s-speech-white-house-correspondents-dinner
Watch Obama’s Speech on April 30, 2011 before the White House Correspondants Dinner.
With respect to Trump’s interactions with Obama prior to November 10, there is an illuminating incident from the 2014 Labor Day weekend. Obama was traveling to New York to attend a wedding and a fundraiser, and the White House staff called ahead of time to request an early tee time for a round of golf at Trump’s Westchester course. The request was denied. The reason advanced was ostensibly that the Club was completely booked over the holiday weekend and they just couldn’t possibly accommodate the President of the United States on their links. The issue is not the disrespect towards Obama; he has faced far worse in matters great and small. He just got back on Air Force One, and returned to spend the night at the nation’s grandest residence, the White House.
What rankles is the deliberate, yet casual disrespect Trump showed to our nation’s highest office, no matter what individual happened to occupy it at the time. What do you imagine Trump might do next year if he were treated in the same way when he wanted to play an early round at the Master’s Tournament course in Augusta, GA next April the day before the Big Dogs start play? Twitter would melt down and crash the power grid.
The next object lesson here about Trump is that he waited three years to “get revenge” for what he felt was rough verbal treatment at a well-known political roast event in Washington, where everyone expects to take some roasting, Presidents included.
We have a new political creation. An immortal 3-Year Revenge Boomerang with a 6-foot wingspan and stealthy flight characteristics. A magnificent creature to behold.
The endurance and calculated quality of his snub to the President for a minor infraction is telling and worrisome for America’s voters in the future. Let the purges begin in 2017. Paul Ryan, pack your bags, my friend. How about Little Marco, and Lyin’ Ted. It will be quite a spectacle to see Trump maneuver to unify the Republican Party by dispatching all those who disagree with him in a disrespectful way.
This little contretemps would reflect badly enough on Trump by itself, but as so often the case, he chose to escalate it. After Labor Day 2014, when questioned by some media reporters why he had been so peevish to the sitting President, Trump responded with a classic angry Tweet.
As Ronald Reagan might say, were he here now to observe, “There you go again.”
What a class act is this guy Trump. Just the sort of genuine role model as our President you can point to with confidence, as you endeavor to teach your kids manners and decency, and respect for our country’s leaders. A classic, fearful Bully boy holding grudges forever, lying in wait for a chance at revenge.
Sources:
Back to Trump’s activities on November 10.
Ten minutes after Trump’s account sent a tweet that called his White House visit with President Barack Obama a “good meeting” with “great chemistry,” he tweeted again, blasting protests that have flared up around the country in response to his presidential victory.
He blamed the media and “professional protesters” for the demonstrations, and seemed to criticize people for exercising their First Amendment rights. “Very unfair!”
The Trump Tweet machine had been relatively quiet and low-key for the last couple of days. It went active again post-session with an upbeat appraisal of his first meeting. And then Trump was on the loose again. He complained, without any evidence naturally, except in his own heavily fertile imagination, that the Media and professional (paid) protestors were being very hugely unfair to Trump by demonstrating, of all things.
Apparently overnight some staffer convinced Trump this behavior maybe wasn’t all that Presidential, so by morning he decided it was O.K. to permit the First Amendment to cover his opponents in this one limited instance, at least for now. He will get around to tightening those ultra-liberal media libel laws soon enough, just as he has promised. So much to do, so little time to get it all in. Actually, maybe we can fit in a new Constitutional Amendment to undo that silly 2-term limit stuff for our President, and install a President-For-Life system, like some of those strong foreign leaders enjoy to guide their people.
Readability Scores: Trump in the Cross-Hairs
We have now seen Trump in two sort-of pseudo Presidential action scenes in just two days following election night. In both cases, we have complete video and transcripts of his remarks. Can we learn anything about the new almost-President Trump to verify or substantiate his recent promise to the American people to unite us and serve as President for everyone, including those misguided and uninformed few souls who somehow didn’t vote for him on Tuesday past?
Turns out we have some rather nifty scientific tools, developed and modernized since the 1940’s to assess the reading level of writing and speeches. This is a fascinating field of study, with thousands and thousands of research papers and practical studies. The results are used by the U.S. military for MOS service assignments, to rate and evaluated school books and college texts, to make newspapers better, and improve business communications, written and oral. Some heavy stuff.
There are several standard such tools in the modern era: They include the Flesch-Kinkaid Grade Level, the Gunning-Fog Score, the Coleman-Liau Index, the SMOG Index, and the Automated Readability Index, among others. .
The actual black box equations and decision algorithms are pretty complicated, but there are several software tools available for general use, including some freely available on the internet which allow someone to enter text and get the relevant test scores, including a summary average when the computer analysis is done (usually in just a few seconds). Amazing work.
These tools have been applied to political documents and speeches before, including during the current 2016 campaign season. Several worthy articles have come from reporters at the Boston Globe.
For example, during the primary season in October 2015:
By every criteria in the algorithm, Trump is speaking at the lowest level. He used fewer characters per word in his announcement speech, fewer syllables per word, and his sentences were shorter than all other candidates.
His vocabulary is filled with words like “huge,” “terrible,” “beautiful.” He speaks in punchy bursts that lack nuance. It’s all easily grasped, whether it’s his campaign theme (“Make America Great Again”), words about his wealth (“I’m really rich”), or his disparagement of the Washington culture (“Politicians are all talk, no action”).
He dismisses his opponents with snippy sound bites that, if polls are to be believed, have been devastatingly effective — such as when he labeled Jeb Bush “low-energy.”
“Trump is talking about things that are emotional, simple, and angry,” said Rick Wilson, a Florida-based Republican consultant. “He’s not talking about the complexity of international affairs. It’s, ‘Let’s take their oil!’ It doesn’t have to be a long, drawn-out exegesis of American foreign policy. It’s Trump. It’s simple.”
The utterances of today’s candidates reflect a continued decline in the complexity of political speech. President George Washington’s “Farewell Address” in 1796 was written at graduate-degree levels: Grade 17.9 , while President Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” in 1863 was at an 11th-grade level.
A 2012 review by the Sunlight Foundation of nearly every statement on the House and Senate floors found that the grade level of speeches from members of Congress had declined, from 11.3 in 1996 to 10.6 in 2012. That review used the same algorithm.
The transcripts were put through the Flesch-Kincaid readability tests, which were developed by Rudolf Flesch in the 1940s and then modified in the 1970s for the US Navy.
And a second story rating the candidates dueling convention speeches. Trump scored a 7.7 on the Flesch-Kincaid test rating his speech (Of course, Trump didn’t write his own convention speech, it was crafted by a professional word smith. However, Trump undoubtedly provided the intellectual guts to work from):
Trump conveyed a grim portrait of America in his speech accepting the Republican party’s presidential nomination. In previous off-the-cuff speeches, Trump has spoken at an elementary school level, but this time he was guided by a teleprompter. His sentences were 14 words long on average, and one of his longest words was “Americanism.”
In 2016 for the first time in American political history, how could you not consider the Twitter corpus which Trump has made so relevant and come to rely on to goose his followers? Of course, there are reports.
From the International Business Times in May 2016:
That’s according to data provided exclusively to International Business Times by the social software company Spredfast. The data show engagement (likes, comments, retweets) on Trump’s tweets peak at 11th-, 12th- and 13th-grade reading levels. At the same time, Trump (@realDonaldTrump) isn’t shy about tweeting, and the median reading level of his tweets is at the 6.4-grade level. That level is lower than that of his Democratic opponents: Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) has a median 7.66-grade level, and Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) has a 7.06-grade level.
Here are some other interesting charts.
http://www.movoto.com/blog/novelty-real-estate/reading-level-tweet-smart-well-written-state/
http://time.com/2958650/twitter-reading-level/
The rising influence of Twitter on American politics is not a benign influence, and has certainly degraded the quality of political speech, and reduced political interaction among those who hold differing opinions. This helps unravel the threads of our common community interests, and promotes the extreme polarization that is so troubling to many folks. It is however, fast and cheap to use, very endearing qualities for one Donald J.Trump.But a full discussion of Twitter pros and cons is for another time and place.
With Twitter rampant, we may be fostering a nation of citizens with fast fingers and slow, shallow neurons, who think in 140-character bytes, not enough to handle the freight traffic for serious policy matters.
What Do Trump’s First Two Pre-Presidential Speeches Tell Us About Him?
Here is the Readability software website suggested by the Boston Globe team.
Try it for yourself. You just need a plain text version of a document or speech transcript that you want to study. Cut and paste, press the Screen Button, and Bingo. A full suite of the standard test results, along with a combined average.
We analyzed three recent items using this software: Trump’s election night New York Victory Speech (November 9); his brief White House remarks (November 10), and Obama’s remarks from the same event (November 10). This is everything semi-official Trump has spoken about in his first two days of getting adjusted to his new elevated status. We will ignore his protestor Tweet and subsequent walk back Tweet, if that’s what it was.
One of Trump’s favorite tactics, perhaps now only in the past tense, is to Tweet up and down, back and forth, and left and right on a subject. Then at a future time, he has colorable ‘evidence’ to have supported have both sides of any controversy to lean on if one or the other of his responses should blow up. Folks seem not to mind so much. After all, Trump’s sure made a lot of money. He must be doing something right. Right?
Actually he has been known to take three sides of an issue. For example: David Duke: I don’t know anything about him. I completely disavow his support. I am not ready to say until I get more information. Three is even better than two. It gives Trump 360 degree defensive coverage, and plausible deniability no matter who wants to attack him. Neat, huh?
The side by side comparison results for Trump and Obama?
The Flesch-Kinkaid test id the most widely used of all the readability measures. In order, Trump’s New York Victory Speech was a 4.7 (11/9); Trump’s White House remarks tested out at 5.3(11/10)’ and Obama’s White House remarks garnered a 9.1 score (11/10).
The Combined Average Grade Readability Score across all five standard tests for readability measures. In order, Trump’s New York Victory speech rated a 6.5 (11/9); Trump‘s White House remarks ranked at a 6.9 score (11/10), and Obama’s White House remarks scored a 10.4 (111/10).
What to make of this? Trump is fairly consistent and flat at the mid-6th grade level whether he is speaking at a public rally or is hard at work during a Presidential event in Washington. He comes in about four grades lower overall than Obama’s scores, which are those of a superbly educated and experienced President on-the-job after 7 ½ years in the White House.
The Leader of the Class and the Boy in the Corner. Guess who?
Trump’s authentic speech is the same in vocabulary and complexity, despite the switch to a serious professional setting, based on this sample. His performance is less than the accomplished standard displayed by the current President, by a fair margin.
Is Trump’s current skill level adequate to handle serious international affairs parlays. No. Can Trump learn? Don’t bet against him. Can America spare the time to absorb Trump’s learning curve before a crisis erupts? Who knows?.
What America really needs is more 1863 Gettysburg addresses, and fewer knockoff 2016 Gettysburg Light speeches, served with a side of pique about sexual allegations and vindictive lawsuits, true or false. Let’s go back 150 years to elevate our American political rhetoric to make our nation proud and truly bind up our partisan wounds, without specious disruptions. Americans can handle the complexity, even if Trump has doubts about their capacity.
If only we could MAGA, in that way at least.
At this point, I suppose it is what is it, for all of us together.
What’s Up, Readability Doc?
Trump tweets just like he talks. He aims down at his audience, aiming for and hitting 6th grade knowledge and understanding, He disrespects the actual intelligence and educational status of his most dedicated followers by several grades on average, time after time. That’s between him and his loyal adherents.
Trump has set a new level of down-draft in modern American discourse, leading and forcing a race which may end up in pre-school status. Are you smarter than a Kindergarten student could be all the reality TV rage in 2018.
The average American reads at a 9th grade level, and the vast bulk of citizens are comfortable with at least 8th grade speech. They don’t like being talked down to as if they aren’t able to grasp subtlety and nuance for serious public policy matters, especially when it is done by an elitist with a for the little people smirk, who is pretending to be just like normal folks.
This is a significant problem for the rest of us, and our country. To take one example, Christians regard their Bibles as critical moral and inspirational books, teaching life lessons to abide by. Bible scripture comforts and heals, inspires and warns, and provides moral lessons and behavioral injunctions for those who believe.
Our Bibles are not written for 4th or 5th graders. They generally test at a 7-10th grade level, depending on the particular version. The beloved King James Version (KJV) is written at a 12th grade level, and generations of folks in America often with limited formal schooling nonetheless read and understand their KJV fluently, without hesitation or error. Tens of millions of Americans understand the language in their Bibles perfectly well, just as it is written. No need to dumb-down serious and complex topics like honor, love, faith, understanding, moral precepts, and so on.
It has been said that “No man should talk worse than he writes, no man should write better than he should talk….” What evidence there is, strongly suggests that Trump pretty well fits that mold. He tweets and talks generally at about a mid-6th grade level, all the time, that we have records of. This frequently performance level is not consonant with his educational history, which should put him at about the Grade 16 level, with a bachelor’s degree from college.
Trump could be a veritable closet Shakespeare in his private apartments, but probably not.
6th grade level speech is great for the locker room, a pizza bash, watching a ball game with friends, standing in line at the grocery, or waiting in a doctor’s office. We can and should expect more for a formal occasion, or where heavy-duty matters like affairs of state or national security are being weighed and discussed, and decisions made that affect our nation primary safety and security. No playing around.
If Trump always talks like an overgrown 12-year old, how do we know he doesn’t have the same kind of mental thought processes of an aging 12-year old?
Trump is known to be exceptionally fidgety and restless, and doesn’t tolerate having to spend more than 30-45 minutes on any one thing,. He loses focus and becomes irritable when he is pushed beyond his short comfort zone. Watch the second Presidential debate for the pacing, glowering and general prowling around displayed in bold terms. Note that we are not talking about physical stamina or vitality; Trump is clearly full of energy.
We are talking about mental acuity, depth of concentration and hard sustained periods of thinking. That’s what the President must be able to do, fluidly, competently, and repeatedly, at a moment’s notice, even when he or she doesn’t really feel like it.
It is quite possible Trump has an undiagnosed variant of ADD dating back to his childhood years. Diagnostic criteria and treatment for this family of conditions were not well developed in the 1950’s and early 1960’s when he would have been at risk. We are describing a mental information processing disorder. We are not talking about a low native IQ at all. Trump has clearly been personally very successful, and compensated well enough to project the Trump image we all see.
A President must be able to deal with complex matters in diplomacy, foreign affairs, nuclear arms issues, and military decision making at a rigorous and advanced mental level with little preparation time in a crisis. We all depend on his skill for these tasks. He must not have a short fuse, or engender accidental mistakes or misunderstanding with a flare of temper, or an injudicious word cast among world leaders who have billions of dollars at their disposal, and Armed Forces to back them up.
Trump’s relative lack of verbal dexterity and expression is a potential risk. Yelling, finger pointing, scowling, and shaking one’s fist will not carry the day with folks like Putin, or Assad, or North Korea’s Great Leader. Maybe Trump is so good he can think like an experienced post graduate, even while his verbal expressions wander and struggle for clarity, but most of his available public speeches and private personal writings don’t show it. He has never had any significant work or policy experience in public affairs, or government service to demonstrate otherwise.
He may have the most powerful light under a bushel basket in North America. After all, he is the President-Elect.
We can hope.
Buckle up , my fellow Americans. It’s going to be a hell of a ride for the next 1,461 official days of the 45th President, starting on January 20, 2017.
God Willing.
*Here are the transcripts for both sets of remarks at the White House.
**From the Wikipedia entry n Readability and Test Methods:
Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand a written text. In natural language, the readability of text depends on its content (the complexity of its vocabulary and syntax) and its presentation (such as typographic aspects like font size, line height, and line length). Researchers have used various factors to measure readability.
Higher readability eases reading effort and speed for any reader, but it is especially important for those who do not have high reading comprehension. In readers with average or poor reading comprehension, raising the readability level of a text from mediocre to good can make the difference between success and failure of its communication goals.
In the 1880s, English professor L. A. Sherman found that the English sentence was getting shorter. In Elizabethan times, the average sentence was 50 words long. In his own time, it was 23 words long.
Sherman’s work established that:
- Literature is a subject for statistical analysis.
- Shorter sentences and concrete terms help people to make sense of what is written.
- Speech is easier to understand than text.
- Over time, text becomes easier if it is more like speech.
Sherman wrote: “Literary English, in short, will follow the forms of standard spoken English from which it comes. No man should talk worse than he writes, no man should write better than he should talk…. The oral sentence is clearest because it is the product of millions of daily efforts to be clear and strong. It represents the work of the race for thousands of years in perfecting an effective instrument of communication.”
In 1943, Rudolf Flesch published his PhD dissertation, Marks of a Readable Style, which included a readability formula to predict the difficulty of adult reading material. Investigators in many fields began using it to improve communications. One of the variables it used was personal references, such as names and personal pronouns. Another variable was affixes.
Publishers discovered that the Flesch formulas could increase readership up to 60 percent. Flesch’s work also made an enormous impact on journalism. The Flesch Reading Ease formula became one of the most widely used, and the one most tested and reliable.
In the 1940s, Robert Gunning helped bring readability research into the workplace. In 1944, he founded the first readability consulting firm dedicated to reducing the “fog” in newspapers and business writing. In 1952, he published The Technique of Clear Writing with his own Fog Index, a formula that correlates 0.91 with comprehension as measured by reading tests.
Harry McLaughlin determined that word length and sentence length should be multiplied rather than added as in other formulas. In 1969, he published his SMOG (Simple Measure of Gobbledygook) formula:
Several studies in the 1940s showed that even small increases in readability greatly increases readership in large-circulation newspapers.
In 1947, Donald Murphy of Wallace’s Farmer used a split-run edition to study the effects of making text easier to read. They found that reducing from the 9th to the 6th-grade level increased readership 43% for an article on ‘nylon’. There was a gain of 42,000 readers in a circulation of 275,000. He found a 60% increase in readership for an article on ‘corn’. He also found a better response from people under 35.[53]
In 1948, Bernard Feld did a study of every item and ad in the Birmingham News of 20 November 1947. He divided the items into those above the 8th-grade level and those at the 8th grade or below. He chose the 8th-grade breakpoint because that was the average reading level of adult readers. An 8th-grade text “…will reach about 50 percent of all American grown-ups,” he wrote. Among the wire-service stories, the lower group got two-thirds more readers, and among local stories, 75 percent more readers. Feld also believed in drilling writers in Flesch’s clear-writing principles.
Both Rudolf Flesch and Robert Gunning worked extensively with newspapers and the wire services in improving readability. Mainly through their efforts in a few years, the readability of US newspapers went from the 16th to the 11th-grade level, where it remains today.
The two publications with the largest circulations, TV Guide (13 million) and Readers Digest (12 million), are written at the 9th-grade level. The most popular novels are written at the 7th-grade level. This supports the fact that the average adult reads at the 9th-grade level. It also shows that, for recreation, people read texts that are two grades below their actual reading level.