Yves here. Given Trump’s advanced age, and the eventual confirmation of suspected Biden decrepitude, the media and Trump opponents have jumped on what they depict as signs of Trump cognitive decline. One area they have harped on are his very loosely structured, extemporaneous speeches at his rallies. Lambert, who carefully parsed Trump’s presentation at a 2016 rally in Bangor, roused himself to compare that performance with a 2024 rally in Las Vegas. His bottom line:
My extremely subjective view, then, is that from Trump’s language, his mental acuity in 2024 is the same as it was in 2016: His techniques are the same; his humor is the same; the texture of his language is the same. You don’t have to respect Trump’s language, or even like it, but it has not changed. (It’s also very, very hard to imagine Biden improvising in front of a crowd for over an hour. Trump makes a lot of jokes about teleprompters, underlining this difference.)
The point here is that Trump’s much-derided rally style is a schtick. This post explains why it works and therefore why Trump keeps deploying it.
Mind you, that does not mean that there has not been or will be examples of Trump cognitive impairment, such as disorientation, losing his train of thought, or physical difficulties. But his established unstructured rally mode is not evidence of that.
By Loren D. Marsh, Research Fellow, Humboldt University of Berlin. Originally published at The Conversation
In recent news cycles, there has been a persistent and growing narrative that Trump’s appearances are undisciplined, meandering and damaging his chances in the election. Trump’s critics believe he is narcissistic and impulsive, and that there is no consistent strategy or larger plan behind his rhetoric. Indeed, in many outlets this view is ubiquitous and practically unquestioned.
However, with half of the US electorate on his side, Trump’s chaotic speaking style is clearly no barrier to success. If his public appearances are indeed so shambolic, why do they continue to fire up his supporters, and even attract new ones?
Trump’s critics are obviously missing something about how his rhetoric works. They may rationalise that many of his supporters don’t take him literally or assume that it’s “just an act”, but if this were the case, why would so many voters follow someone they don’t actually believe?
Evidently, explaining Trump’s appeal requires a different kind of tool for analysing political messaging. It is here that we can turn to ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who invented the science of storytelling, and gave us precisely the tools we need to understand Trump’s rhetorical success.
As a classics scholar, my research has cracked the code of Aristotle’s seminal narrative theory of muthos in his Poetics, written in the 4th century BC. Muthos is a timeless theoretical framework that can reveal the inner workings of any narrative – even Donald Trump’s.
Muthos in a Nutshell
Aristotle recognised that any story or narrative contains two kinds of events: muthos and episodes.
The muthos is a small, limited group of events that are tightly connected by cause and effect (lightning struck the tree, then the tree caught fire). With these events, it is necessary or probable that each will cause the next. They are the core of the story and crucial for its emotional impact.
Because each event in the muthos leads directly to the next, none of them can be changed, eliminated, or reordered without changing the essence of the story itself. You can imagine these central muthos events like billiard balls a table. A person hits the first ball, which then hits the second ball, which hits third ball, and so on until the balls come to rest. To reach their final arrangement, they must hit each other in a specific way, meaning the number of these events is inherently limited.
The “episodes” are the narrative’s other events, which are only loosely connected by cause and effect (lightning struck the tree, then it started to rain). These are related, chance or tangential events that do not necessarily have to occur as a direct effect of what happened before.
While not as central to the core story and its emotional appeal, the episodes are in no way less important or interesting. In fact, since they don’t necessarily follow from previous events or directly cause the following ones, they are often the most sensational and visible part of the story.
Both muthos and episode events are crucial for building a narrative with maximum impact. But narratives are by no means confined to the realms of fiction.
Trump’s Narrative: Episodes Feed the Muthos
A presidential campaign itself can be viewed as a story, with both muthos events and episode events that play out in the media.
Trump’s candidacy has often been criticised for its chaos and drama, featuring an endless series of sensational or suspenseful distractions: brazen lies, incendiary campaign promises and court cases, to name but a few. However, to his supporters these events are not the real story of Trump’s candidacy, they are just the episodes. Beneath all the lurid drama, Trump carefully maintains a very coherent muthos: that he is an outsider defying a corrupt establishment.
Trump’s story can be summed up as follows. The US is run by corrupt insiders (Democrats and their ilk) who attack an outsider (Trump). By defying the insiders, the outsider proves that he cannot be corrupted.
In order to defy and defeat the insiders, they have to first attack him, and Trump deliberately provokes these attacks. Much of his erratic, unpredictable behaviour serves this exact purpose. It could be something as serious as refusing to admit he lost in 2020, as offensive as insisting Haitian immigrants have an appetite for Ohio cats, or as mundane as exaggerating his crowd sizes. Those are episodes.
His reactions to the attacks he provokes form his muthos – while his behaviour seems erratic, Trump never changes his behaviour, alters course, or apologises in the face of establishment attacks or criticisms of his own attacks. This convinces his followers that he cannot be corruptly manipulated or pressured to act as the insiders want.
Trump’s consistently defiant actions and statements are the events in his narrative that make it necessary or probable that his followers believe he is an anti-establishment outsider. They are the muthos parts that sit at the heart of his story.
