Here’s What I Just Figured Out About the Way Trump Talks

I’ve been spending some time lately studying President Trump’s speeches, and the deeper I go, the more I see something I hadn’t noticed before.

His speaking style has never been conventional; sometimes it’s so improvisatory and so informal that it’s hard to call his addresses “speeches” at all. (Trump himself calls the way he lurches from one subject to the next the “weave,” which is not a bad way to think about it.) But lately it seems to me he’s been leaning in particular on what linguists and grammarians call direct quotation.

If you say, “She told me she only goes on weekends,” that’s indirect quotation. You’re citing something another person said, but you’re braiding it into your own sentence, your own words. If you say, “She told me, ‘I only go on weekends,’” that’s direct quotation. You’re telling your audience: These are her words, directly as she spoke them.

Consider the way Trump referred to Vladimir Putin at the World Economic Forum at Davos last month: “He said, ‘I can’t believe you settled that one.’ They were going on for 35 years. I settled it in one day and President Putin called me, he said, ‘I can’t believe I’ve worked on that war for 10 years trying to settle and I couldn’t do it.’ I said, ‘Do me a favor. Focus on settling your war. Don’t worry about that one.’” Or what he said at Davos about Somali pirates: “And they say, ‘We’re going to blow up your boat.’ They have powerful weapons. You hit the side of the boat, you blow the whole thing up. The insurance companies are petrified. So they say, ‘Just give them the boat. We’ll give them money instead.’ And I don’t do that. We blow them right the hell out of the water.”

Do you hear it? It’s like Trump is performing a little skit, acting out the conversation rather than just telling you the outcome.

Everyone uses direct quotation to some degree. It is a normal component of fluent human speech and can help to make a point more vivid. But traditionally formal language favors indirect quotation, as more neutral and less performative. Trump has always been one to blow through norms and traditions, and his fondness for direct quotation feels like a natural result.

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John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @JohnHMcWhorter

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