There’s a character in Muriel Spark’s novel The Comforters whose function of sowing pain and discord is so entwined with her identity that she simply disappears when she’s alone. Her name is Mrs. Georgina Hogg, and when she doesn’t have access to other people to torment, she has no existence. Spark’s novel is from 1957, so obviously a very online Georgina Hogg of today might find an audience to offend at any hour.

Since Donald Trump unleashed his 24/7 narcissistic insecurity on Americans, I’ve thought that during those one or two hours of the day when he puts down his phone and is cut off from the world, he, like Georgina Hogg, must also disappear. Trump seems to have no existential function without a digital audience or a full-bodied one of at least one. It’s hard to imagine him sleeping let alone dreaming. That would deprive him of his words.

In a profile from 1984, the New York Times noted that Trump “has told people in the communications industry that he is ‘very interested in communications.’ ” And yet throughout his life he has completely ignored the pyramid structure of how one communicates. At the top there’s the message (the place you toggle between truth and lies), then one or more stories to support the message, and finally the words. Trump tends to invert the pyramid and begin with boldfaced words, just like Page Six. “I know words,” he famously told people at a campaign rally in December 2015. “I have the best words.”

Apparently when you have the best ones, you don’t need many. Best, beautiful, perfect can be used for any occasion, any context, any testimony. His go-to rebuttal to any action he disagrees with is disgrace or disgraceful, which is a head-scratcher given how he will use these words a sentence or two before calling someone a dog (Omarosa Manigault Newman) or a pig (Chris Christie). My guess is that he picked up these terms from Roy Cohn in the seventies, during his 21 club charm school tutorials, right around when the Justice Department filed suit against the Trump organization for discriminating against Black prospective tenants in properties across Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island.

Trump’s best words stick with him over the long haul. I used to wonder why he so enjoyed talking about “the generals” in his cabinet until I learned that he had owned the New Jersey Generals, a team in the short-lived U.S. Football League. He talked big on how he could’ve bought the Dallas Cowboys in 1984 but thought it a losing proposition. The league he bought into instead folded after three seasons. I suppose “the generals” was like a penny in the dryer for him: after all these years of clanking around, owning “the generals” is finally a winning proposition.

It was also interesting when witch hunt—his version of Clarence Thomas’s high-tech lynching—was upgraded to rigged witch hunt, because it might lead you to believe that a witch hunt on its own could be fair and balanced. (Once they start rigging witch hunts, well then the whole society’s on the rocks!)

But non sequiturs and logic chain lapses are no obstacle for this strange man. Sometimes I think the most Donald Trump line of all time was spoken by Gene Hackman as the patriarch in The Royal Tenenbaums. “I’m very sorry for your loss,” he tells his young grandsons. “Your mother was a terribly attractive woman.” You can hear the same thought process in a New York Times profile from 1976: “What attracts him to the real estate business? ‘I love the architectural creativeness,’ he said. ‘For example, the Commodore Hotel is in one of the most important locations in the city.’ ”

When Trump first campaigned for president, his speech-giving vocabulary was assessed at the third-grade level. It’s hard to say whether his simplistic language derives from rhetorical limitations or an instinctual genius for weaponizing the vague and oblique. He’s been a litigation obsessive at least as long as he has considered himself a “businessman.” One of the first thigs he learned was to eschew specificity in anything that comes out of his mouth. It’s intriguing his habitual reference to “the other side” when riling his base. The vagueness of “the other side” can mean anything and everything: it’s the apotheosis of otherizing. “A fanatic,” Will Rogers famously said, “is always the fellow that is on the opposite side.” Even when Trump was trying to de-rile his base on the afternoon of January 6, 2021, he couldn’t forego this lifelong tic: “We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it. Especially the other side.”

That said, there is a childlike apprehension to Trump’s words, especially when he is at ease with a friendly interviewer on Fox News. In the classic Yale Club library setup with two chairs placed at a specific distance hearthside, Trump is always leaning forward unnervingly, groping for a near enough distance to whisper like Al Pacino in Glengarry Glen Ross, to go full Ricky Roma in exploiting the hell out of that gratis empathy. Talking to Chris Wallace on July 19, 2020, he whispered: “I don’t agree with the statement that if everybody wears a mask, everything disappears.” He seems to think that is he speaks with a gentle, childlike wonder, the other side will capitulate to his will.

Though Trump starts with the words, the stories aren’t far behind. His all-purpose template is someone coming up to him and saying something (anything in the world) that he (always he) prefaces with “Sir.” Once you hear the “Sir,” you know that Donald Trump will say exactly what’s on his mind but in the earnest voice of a starstruck commoner. Bob Dole was an odd presidential candidate who referred to himself in the third person, but at least you knew he was the one talking about Bob Dole.

After the words, after the stories which may not be true, we get to the lies, because it’s all in service to the lies. Trump’s “people are saying” innuendo is probably where he gets the most bang for his buck: he gets to make up anything, cross any line with no accountability.

Any analysis of Trump-speak is really a story about his intended audience. The same words that shock and terrify Constitution-minded Americans energize and titillate the faithful. Trump’s base knows that what he’s saying is not “true” in the way they’d want their CAT scans to be true. They know that both the message and the scaffolding surrounding it are entirely fabricated. But they glow like parents listening to their children’s clever tall tales. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that they are children who know the other child is making up a whopper but still they love it. They know it’s fiction they’ve heard before, but they want the greatest hits.

When I think about how communication works between Trump and his base, I am reminded of a conversation I overheard years ago while working at Harvard Divinity School. It was more of a spirited debate between two students eating lunch outside. The subject was the Christian Pentecost. One student believed that two miracles took place in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit is said to have descended on the twelve Apostles and other followers of Jesus: (1) these people suddenly began “speaking in angelic tongues” (i.e., gibberish) and (2) each of the observers within the gathered crowd heard God’s message in his native language. The other student believed there was just one miracle that day: the disciples didn’t speak gibberish but had the sudden ability to speak in many foreign languages.

The Harvard students were arguing about the purported miracle’s technical means of delivery. Was it gibberish overlaid by something akin to the U.N.’s simultaneous translation, or was it a direct message in one’s own language? Christians handily made the Pentecost story a cure-all for language barriers created by the Tower of Babel story in Genesis. Finally everyone’s on the same page! I remember the complexity of the students’ conversation giving me a headache, but more so I remember wanting to suggest to them that maybe the disciples spoke their gibberish and the crowd simply heard whatever message they wanted to hear. That is, maybe the “miracle” was all in the people’s heads.

I think that’s the central feature of Donald Trump’s communication: millions of people looking for words onto which they can project established feelings about the country and the world. In the Trumpian Pentecost, the best words are oblique words, because their meaning is only completed upon consumption. Republicans had to have had something massive cleared out of their souls at the time of Trump’s arrival, for how else could he have so immediately and completely given them what they were lacking? If you can call anything about Donald Trump fortunate, it’s that as a would-be authoritarian, he has a limited ideological repertoire. What’s unfortunate for the United States and the world, however, is that the millions of faithful whose feelings have been unleashed and further cultivated by Trump’s words may well go one, two, or a dozen steps further than whatever his innuendo implies. And they won’t go away when he does. §