Larry D. Lauer

Somewhere in the avalanche of pundit commentaries following the inaugural address I remember ‘hearing the words “Trump is more interested in America’s competitive interests than in our founding values.”  From my perspective as a communicator, that characterization rang true.

In fact, listening carefully to Trump’s actual content it seemed to me that he made “America first” his primary value, and possibly his only one. He asserted that coming together was important but there was no empathetic content or even tone there to support it.

He made firm promises to literally fix all of America’s infrastructure problems… from roads, to overpasses, to bridges, to tunnels, to organizations. All of them.  He also said all the problems of the inner cities… from poverty, to drugs, to police violence, and all that “carnage” will be fixed immediately. And he further asserted that beginning right now it will be “America first” in all dealings around the world.

Thinking as a communication analyst, experience teaches me that with speeches like this audiences will fall into at least three response categories: First, there are those who see these pronouncements as huge over statements; they don’t expect much of this to actually happen; but they are willing to hope that some improvements will be made. Second, there are those who are in really dire situations and actually do expect significant improvements in their personal lives. And finally, there are those who see all of this a pure theatre; they see the lies, personal attacks and vulgarities of the campaign as character traits, and therefore find that the tone of “America first” so aggressively stated to be a threat to the world order, and maybe even world peace.

If poles were completely reliable we could use audience research to see how many people are in each of these categories. We could then determine each category’s preferred media, and we could contact each of them… learning from and responding to interactive dialogue. In this way pragmatic problem solvers could try to work gradually at adjusting each overstatement to doable improvements.

But alas, the campaign proved that our polling is not yet accurate enough to accomplish this. And extreme polarization in congress currently continues without any hope of collaborative pragmatic planning. So from a communication perspective, we are beyond “calculated risk” well in to “high risk” territory.

Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal” argues that keeping the other guys guessing is good. But the entire history of foreign policy, diplomacy, and at least two world wars would warn that this approach could result in international chaos, or even worse.