Many people have made much ado about President Trump’s tweets during Hurricane Harvey’s crippling ascent along the Texas gulf coast. Admittedly, it was a curious stream of tweets he sent, but not one especially worthy of his audience’s ire. He began his Twitter treatise Friday night, earnestly enough, by encouraging “everyone in the path of Hurricane Harvey to heed the advice and orders of their local and state officials”. Appropriate and professional, few would find fault with such a directive.
As the weekend progressed, however, and the maelstrom in Houston’s streets magnified, Trump’s tone changed. Now, seemingly awed by Harvey’s minatory might, the president transitioned from stoic chieftain to enthralled spectator overnight. On Sunday, he appeared unable to suspend his schoolboyish fascination as the storm surge strengthened. He spoke of (sic) “HISTORIC rainfall” and “unprecedented floods” with more rain to come. He invoked expert analyses, exclaiming that even they (the experts) “have never seen one like this!” and that those same experts were “calling Harvey a once in a five-hundred-year flood!”.
Trump then pushed the opinion of one of his most frequently but namelessly-cited sources, when he said, “Many people are now saying that his is the worst storm/hurricane they have ever seen”. These “many people”, a prescient and prophetic cabal they no doubt are, have apprised the president of wide-ranging topics, from weather patterns to Iranian assassins. (He tweeted in late August 2016 that “many people are saying” the Iranian government murdered a defected Iranian nuclear scientist who later became an American CIA spy because of “Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails”. The claim never was substantiated).
Come Monday, President Trump continued speaking of the storm with unabashed awe and said, quite justifiably, that there has “probably never been anything like this”. Indonesians who witnessed the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa might respectfully disagree, at least so far as natural disasters are concerned, but that is best left to another conversation. Trump’s exclamation-point-laden tweets, coupled with his awestruck fascination, were unusual messages from the man whose job is to assess soberly and with equanimity a perilous situation and to assuage any victim’s fears.
I don’t think Trump’s descriptions were intended to be callous or gratuitous, as so many have condemned them to have been. It may be a sad defense of the nation’s main man, but I think the president’s words were simply the result of his paucity of vocabulary. His language is restrained, but not in a self-regulated and effacing Dwight Eisenhower sort of way. Ike was a back-room classicist who took the stage as a born and bred bumpkin. His everyman, yeoman approach was a deliberate part of his appeal.
President Trump, on the other hand, isn’t suspected of being furtively enlightened but overtly empty like Ike—at least he isn’t by me. Quite simply, Trump’s issue is his diluted diction, and in realizing this, his disinterest to remedy the lack. It’s unfortunate but it’s fact. He speaks of healthcare and hurricanes in the same way he speaks of fiscal policy and his campaign because he’s using the only words at his disposal. Sadly, it’s not a logophile’s dream, but you needn’t look further into than that. It’s not that he means to describe a hurricane and a campaign in the same way, he just lacks the means to do otherwise.
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