Donald J. Trump is a smug jerk who never has forsaken privileges

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My jaw dropped in amazement when I read the following claims in an article by Dr. John Livingston on March 7, 2021 at the Gem State Patriot News blog titled Our duty to compete:

“....Unlike so many in the elite liberal classes, he has forsaken the very privileges that were once available to him and his family. Privileges that those elites fear they are losing. The great life lesson that Donald Trump learned as he grew older was that privilege corrupts. Those who are privileged—and I am not talking about ‘white privilege’ but social, economic and political privilege, learn early in life that you always do what money can buy instead of what duty demands. Donald Trump turned his back on privilege and chose duty. What an incredible unselfish act. Almost reminds us of our Founding Fathers who pledged their ‘lives honor and property’ for the cause of liberty. Talk about laying it all on the line and being unselfish.

There is one more thing that Donald Trump has that his political enemies are jealous of—the relationship that he has with his supporters—the majority of voters in our country.”

 

Donald J. Trump never has forsaken privileges available to him. He owns and lives in a country club that is described as follows:

 

“The Mar-a-Lago sits royally amidst 20 valuable acres of manicured lawns, vibrant gardens and sweeping sea-to-lake vistas.”

 

How does The Donald get around? An article by Doug Gollan at Forbes on November 8, 2020 titled President Trump’s helicopter is for sale; Make an offer notes:

 

“President Donald J. Trump has long been a high-profile user of private jets and helicopters. Records show he currently owns a Boeing 757, frequently spotted during the campaign that saw him win the Oval Office, a Cessna Citation X, and three Sikorsky S76-B helicopters. Of the rotorcraft, one is currently for sale.”

 

According to another article at Aerotime Hub on June 4, 2016 titled Top 10 facts about Donald Trump’s Boeing 757 that plane has 24 carat gold bathroom fixtures.

 

About the only thing The Donald has forsaken is admitting that he lost the 2020 presidential election. An article by Matthew Impelli at Newsweek on February 21, 2021 titled Read Donald Trump’s full statement after Supreme Court allows prosecutors to access tax returns quotes him as saying he won:

 

“These are attacks by Democrats willing to do anything to stop the almost 75 million people (the most votes, by far, ever gotten by a sitting president) who voted for me in the election—an election which many people, and experts, feel that I won. I agree!”

 

A closeup image of Trump from 2019 comes from Wikimedia Commons.  

 

A Dilbert cartoon with a caution about storytelling

 

The March 8, 2021 Dilbert cartoon titled Traumatic Story has a caution about when to tell a story during a sales presentation. The dialogue is as follows:

 

Salesman: Before I tell you about our newest product, I’d like to tell you a story about a traumatic experience I had as a child.

Wally: Is your story related to the topic, or is it just an excuse to yammer about something that happened to you?

Salesman: I’m trying to manipulate your emotions to short-circuit your critical thinking.

Wally: Okay. Carry on.

 

A 2005 online survey of 16 problems that can affect presentations found the speaker being too nervous ranked last for both harmfulness and frequency

 

Back in 2006 there was a 100-page ebook by Andy Goodman titled Why Bad Presentations Happen To Good Causes, which you can download from the Goodman Center. I blogged about it on August 10, 2008 in a post titled Free e-book on presentations, with a great story.

 

An appendix in that ebook describes an online survey done beginning on January 5, 2005 which had 2,501 responses. It listed 16 problems that can affect presentations, and asked both how frequent and how harmful that was. Frequency was reported on a scale from 1 = Never to 5 = Always, and harmfulness on a scale from 1 = Not harmful at all to 5 = Extremely harmful. Answers were reported on pages 84 and 85 as tables of percentages for each of those five levels (plus Don’t know). But it is not obvious how to compare those percentages between questions.

 

 On October 30, 2015 I blogged about how According to the 2015 Chapman Survey of American Fears, adults are less than Afraid of federal government Corruption and only Slightly Afraid of Public Speaking. That post showed how to calculate a Fear Score from their survey results. These results can be summarized by a Harmfulness Score (or a Frequency Score) similarly calculated by a linear formula and reported on a scale from 1 to 5):

 

Harmfulness Score = [1*(Level 1 %) +  2*(Leve1 2 %)

+ 3*(Leve1 3 %) + 4*(Leve1 4 %) + 5*(Leve1 5%)]/100     

 

Based on harmfulness 13 of 16 problems were ranked above 3 (middle of the scale), but based on frequency just 2 of 16 were.  Harmfulness Scores and rankings for the sixteen problems [and Frequency Scores and their rankings] are as follows:

 

01) The speaker was not well prepared: 4.18 [2.43 #13]

02) The speaker did not connect with the audience: 4.04 [2.91 #3]

03) The material was poorly organized: 3.89 [2.72 #7]

04) The objective was not made relevant to the audience’s concerns: 3.86 [2.72 #8]

05) The overall objective of the talk was not clear to the audience: 3.81 [2.56 #11]

06) The presentation ran too long: 3.5 [3.21 #2]

07) Time was not allocated to ask questions or engage the presenter in a discussion: 3.44 [2.87 #4]  

08) The presentation duplicated the content of the slides and/or handouts without adding anything significant: 3.44 [3.40 #1]

09) The amount of material presented was overwhelming: 3.39 [2.81 #6]

10) Technical problems (e.g. poor sound system, malfunctioning projector) disrupted the presentation: 3.37 [2.60 #10]

11) The material was overly complex: 3.34 [2.39 #14]

12) Sufficient time was not allowed for the presenter to cover all the material: 3.22 [2.84 #5]

13) There was not enough information to help the audience make a decision or reach a conclusion: 3.21 [2.49 #12]

14) The presentation was not tailored to the size of the audience: 2.89 [2.38 #15]

15) Translating the material into PowerPoint templates (e.g. bullet lists) made it more difficult to understand, less interesting, or both 2.84 [2.64 #9]

16) The speaker was too nervous: 2.82 [2.18, #16]

 

Note that The speaker was too nervous ranked #16 based on both harmfulness and frequency. So novice speakers (like new Toastmasters) shouldn’t sweat over that. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bar charts for both scales are shown above.

 

Are you an interrupter, or just a cooperative overlapper?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are significant cultural differences in how people have a conversation. At Huffpost on  March 4, 2021 there is an article by Kelsey Borresen titled How to know if you’re an Interrupter or a ‘Cooperative Overlapper.’ Those differences are important. In a blog post on March 2, 2021 titled Which speech delivery habits do the most people find annoying? I described how interrupting was the most common annoying habit.

 

But back in 1984 Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor, described how some people don’t intend to interrupt. Rather, they talk along with the speaker to show they are engaged with them. Another article by Richard Nordquist at ThoughtCo. on February 6, 2019 titled Cooperative overlap in conversation also discusses this topic of turn-taking.

 

The tenth paragraph in Ms. Borrenson’s article links to Chapter Eight by Tannen on Turn-Taking and Intercultural Discourse in Communication in the 2012 Handbook of Intercultural Discourse. Her section about Turn-taking in Intercultural Perspective described a conversation between three New Yorkers, two Southern Californians, and a Londoner. New Yorkers expected shorter pause between turns. Tannen explains:     

“In addition to expecting differing length of pauses between turns, the New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers had different assumptions and habits with regard to simultaneous speech, or overlap. The New York-bred speakers frequently talked along when another was speaking as a show of enthusiastic listenership. Because the non-New Yorkers did not use overlap in this way, they frequently mistook these ‘cooperative overlaps’ as attempts to take a turn, that is, to interrupt. Acting on this interpretation, they usually stopped speaking, so the cooperative overlap did turn into an interruption – a result that each regarded as the other’s doing.”

My image was adapted from an illustration at Wikimedia Commons taken from the Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice.

 

The Democrat party and the Poohblican party

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Names matter. Refusing to use the name of the opposing political party is arrogant. It also is stupid if you call the Democratic Party the Democrat Party. Democratic is an adjective; Democrat is a noun, and if you’re smarter than a fifth-grader then you know those are different parts of speech. But bullies like Joe McCarthy, Rush Limbaugh, and Donald Trump like to refer to ‘the Democrat Party.’ In his 2021 CPAC speech Trump said that:

“The mission of the Democrat party is to promote socialism.”

 

An article by Julie Carr Smyth at the Associated Press on February 27, 2021 is titled What’s in an adjective? ‘Democrat Party’ label on the rise. She says:

“Trump’s lawyers used the construction frequently during his second impeachment trial, following the lead of the former president, who employed it routinely while in office. During a campaign rally last October in Wisconsin, he explained his thinking.

‘You know I always say Democrat. You know why? Because it sounds worse,’ Trump said. ‘Democrat sounds lousy, but you know what? That’s actually their name, the Democrat Party. Right? The Democrat Party. So I always say Democrat.’

In fact, ‘Democratic’ to describe some version of a U.S. political party has been around since Thomas Jefferson and James Madison formed the Democratic-Republican Party in the 1790s. Modern Democrats are loosely descended from a split of that party.

The precise origins of Republicans’ truncated phrasing are difficult to pin down, but the Republican National Committee formalized it in a vote ahead of the 1956 presidential election.

Then-spokesman L. Richard Guylay told The New York Times that ‘Democrat Party’ was ‘a natural,’ because it was already in common use among Republicans and better reflected the ‘diverse viewpoints’ within the opposing party — which the GOP suggested weren’t always representative of small-d democratic values.

Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who had just led his notorious campaign against alleged communists, Soviet spies and sympathizers, was the most notable user of the phrase ‘Democrat Party’ ahead of the vote.”

The Republican Party Platform for 1976 says:

“Control of the United States Congress by the Democrat Party for 40 of the past 44 years has resulted in a system dominated by powerful individuals and riddled with corruption.”

And the Republican Party Platform for 1988 says:

“The bosses of the Democrat Party have thrown in the towel and abandoned the American worker and producer.”

 

For too long the Democrats have avoided striking back with an insult of their own. An article by Eric Zorn in the Chicago Tribune back on November 3, 1996 titled Is it mopery to flick that ‘ic’ from Democratic only suggested revising the GOP acronym (Grand Old Party) to MOP (Mediocre Old Party). In a web article Gene Hargrove came up with RepubParty (Can and should the Democratic Party strike back?)

I think a more suitable insult is to rename the Republicans the Poohblicans after Winnie-the-Pooh  , a well-known Teddy Bear who has said something that would explain dropping the ‘ic’ from Democratic:  

“For I am a bear of very little brain, and long words bother me.”

Images of a donkey and a teddy bear both come from Wikimedia Commons.

 

The title of that blog post sounds very familiar

 

I just found a post from April 12, 2019 at the blog for a Toastmasters club in metro London called Beckenham Communicators that is titled Joyful Public Speaking; Our Journey from fear to Joy! There also is an accompanying YouTube video with the exact title of this blog (minus the parentheses). That club was chartered on August 29, 2018 – over a decade after I began writing this blog.

 

The author of that post, Florian Bay, also has a web site titled Speak to Lead. He and I both are members of The Official Toastmasters International Members Group at LinkedIn. I suspect that he read some of my blog posts I mentioned there and borrowed unconsciously. I emailed Beckenham Communicators to ask them. Perhaps they will acknowledge the obvious similarity. (Back on June 21, 2008 I blogged about how He ought to be good, he’s using my act).

  

Which speech delivery habits do the most people find annoying?

 I got curious and looked for data from surveys or polls about what speech delivery habits people find annoying. I found a blog post by Robbie Hyman at Words Matter on May 25, 2011 titled What to avoid when speaking to a group which listed percentages for nine habits from a Gallup poll. But he didn’t say when it was done, and I couldn’t find it on the Gallup web site. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A search in Google Books led me to page 98 in a 1999 book by Lillian J. Glass titled The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Verbal Self-Defense. That reference says the poll was done for her back in 1987 for the book Talk to Win. Results are shown above in a bar chart. The top five are interrupting (88%), cursing (84%), mumbling or talking too softly (80%) and a tie between monotonous boring voice and talking too loudly (73%). Note that Robbie Hyman’s blog post missed both the highest percentage (interrupting) and the lowest (foreign accent).    

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A book preview from Talk to Win shows more detail: there is a table listing percentages for both Annoys a Lot and Annoys a Little rather than just the Total. Those percentages also are included in an article by Martha Sherrill Dailey in the Washington Post on April 29, 1988 titled Hear ye, hear ye. That table is shown above.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Results for Annoys a Lot are shown above in a second bar chart. The top three are in the same order as for the Total. Results for Annoys a Little are shown above in a third bar chart. Mumbling (43%) has moved up from third to second, but Interrupting (29%) and cursing (28%) have dropped to almost the bottom of the list.

 

Other articles and blog posts also have reported incorrect results from that Gallup poll. Dirk Moller at Business Connections on October 26, 2010 has an article titled 7 Tips for developing a winning phone voice that claims a recent Gallup poll listed mumbling as the most annoying habit of speech. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An undated article by Linnaea Mallette at K.I.S.S. Speaking Tips titled V is for Vocal Variety said a Gallop Poll reveals that talking too fast annoys 55% of people surveyed. Back on November 2, 2009 I blogged about Gallop Poll: A type of drive-by opinion survey (presumably on horseback).