#218) THE NARRATIVE KNOCKDOWN #7: The Story Continues, this week with Donald Trump, On and Off Script

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Trump has two speaking modes: bland versus fiery. One is scripted (his day job), the other shoots from the hip, is borderline crazy, and inspires his base. The Narrative Metrics reveal all.

Hercules shouts about health issues, the Hulk holds court over economic policies, a couple of magazine editors speak rationally, a great columnist keeps her cool, a macho Health Secretary turns out to be a narrative weenie, and all the while, the two forms of President Trump are revealed by the Narrative Index of his speeches.

Trump: Unscripted barking versus scripted restraint

This is the next installment in our on-going quantitiatve analysis of the narrative strength of various communicators. If you’re not clear on our two narrative metrics you can go back to our first post in this series for an explanation.

So for this week, our focus is the two versions of Donald Trump when it comes to public speaking. This fundamental divide became evident during his first term as U.S. President (I wrote a series of blogposts back then as I was first developing the narrative metrics). There are two versions of him for public speaking as you can see in the graph.

You can see the divide in the two groups of speeches we analyzed just by looking at the labels for the speeches in the spreadsheet below. The UNSCRIPTED speeches were events like Coachella, CPAC, the Al Smith Dinner — all venues where everyone wants the entertainer version of Trump. The SCRIPTED speeches were all from the teleprompter — things like his State of the Union addresses, Inaugural Address, commencement speeches.

The unscripted, shooting from the hip version of Trump is loud, bellicose, braying, bragging, bullying and often a boor. That version averages over 30 for the Narrative Index — the highest average we’ve ever seen for a politician.

The other version is more “diplomatic” (though that term is a stretch for him). It is more restrained, averages below 10 (a “D” for a letter grade) and is probably controlled mostly by the writing of Stephen Miller and his other speech writers who craft the text that he reads off the teleprompter.

A Boor versus a Bore

This is what the Narrative Index shows, quantitatively. When he goes scripted, he gets boring. When he throws out the script, he becomes a boor who lights the place up. And by the way, his January 6 speech scored a 26. Right on-brand.

All of which shows QUANTITATIVELY what I’ve been saying for a decade: Trump Knows Narrative.

Far better than any Democrat. Which is why, like it or not, the news of his demise continues to be premature. He understands our media-driven mess of a society, far better than any scholar, pundit, or critic, with the possible one exception of Steve Bannon (which was what David Brooks found so unsettling about him).