David: Hello there! Welcome to another edition of Lexicon Late Night with me and my co-host Justin. We are going to talk to you today about the same subject we always talk about: the greatest storytellers of all time.Now, this one is a little bit controversial, maybe our most controversial ever. But as we’re recording this, it’s November 2024 and Donald Trump has just won the election. So, Justin, why did that happen?

Justin: All right, opening with an easy question, I see. Why did Trump win? It’s what all the political chattering classes are talking about right now. And you’re asking me for the answers. You did say in the intro that this might possibly be our most controversial episode ever. I don’t know if it’ll be as controversial as our episode about BLACKPINK. We had a lot of the blinkiess kind of mad at us in the YouTube comments.

David: Yeah, I don’t think Trump fans will call me a DILF, though.

Justin: No, they won’t. That’s probably the nicest compliment you’ve ever gotten on one these videos. I want to be that, too. I’m a dad now. Um, okay. Why did Trump win? Well, caveats out at the front. We are not economists. We’re not political experts. We’re journalists of sorts. But mainly what we are is experts in communication and storytelling. So that’s really what we’re going to focus on today. Why did Trump win in terms of storytelling? There’s a million reasons there. And today we’re going to focus on three in particular. The first one is his speaking style. The man speaks in soundbites. He uses punchlines and punch words and power words.

David: Yeah absolutely. His, again, whether you like the guy or don’t like the guy, his speech is something to be studied because it’s really unlike any other human I’ve ever heard speak, to be honest. We all have this thing when we’re younger, I think, where we try and use bigger words to sound smart. But ultimately, as we’ve learned in the Orwell episode, the goal is really to keep it simple. Most people struggle with that because of the need to edit down your words in your head. Now, whether Trump is just a particular idiot that only thinks in simple words, probably not. But through his career, he’s learned to communicate in a way that is very low grade, high readability, as you said on the other video we made, and I’ve seen another analysis video where he kind of chooses his sentences so that they end with a punchline, not only as a joke, but even at the most powerful word in the sentence.

Justin: Right.

David: Like restructure it. So it’s like war, poverty, famine,

Justin: Stupid,

David: Yeah, he’ll he’ll punch with the final word, which is really quite an incredible talent for a communication person.

Justin: Yeah. And we kind of touched on this in the previous video, like whether it’s by design, whether it’s something he crafted over the years or it’s just something that’s purely instinctual, it is a pretty effective way of communicating. You’re talking about that, it’s the Nerdwriter? Yeah, yeah. This is a good breakdown of it. He kind of like, you know, you see those videos of hip hop lyrics where they highlight the rhyme schemes. Trump just does that with like the same word over and over again. But it does have a punchline and there’s a rhythm to the way he speaks too.

David: Yeah. So he’s like mixing hip hop and comedy. I’ve never seen because that’s not how communication works, right?

Justin: Yeah.

David: The verb’s in the middle somewhere, you tail off towards the end and then you start again with the power word at the start. Like I went, I like, I do. To finish with the power word is unusual.

Justin:  Maybe it’s just something from him having been on TV for just decades and decades, he just knows instinctively like what works on TV. And that’s like why, or a big part of the reason why he came to power in the first place. Nobody thought he stood a chance in the Republican primaries. And he just beyond having other tactics in the debates, like just being rude and insulting people and just being entertaining.

David: I didn’t know you could do that.

Justin: Right. Exactly, exactly. Shout out to Shane Gillis. I didn’t know you could do that in this. And then the media were also kind. He played them like a fiddle, right? Because they didn’t expect him to win at all. They just thought it was a novelty and it was good for ratings whenever he was on. So they’d just be like, “check out this crazy thing Trump said”. So that’s part of it, too. It’s not just the words he chooses, it’s just kind of made-for-TV soundbites. Something else popped into my mind when you said, we always try to edit ourselves or like, you know, with the Orwell episode, so we talked about how brevity,and just using simple language is an effective way to communicate. It made me think of this Mark Twain quote, where he goes, I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one. And yeah. And that’s essentially what Trump does.

David: Yeah. And you mentioned I think this is probably the right time to reference this, is that we live in a dumbed down social media age where the news is soundbites, and you’ve got 24-hour news stations where they say the same thing for 24 hours. They should be doing deep journalistic dives into what’s happening around the world. And they don’t because they’re just trying to keep you on the channel a long time. So the profit motive of the news channels and Trump’s super controversial way of communicating, they’re kind of perfect. They’re symbiotic. The media kind of hates him, but they also need him for ratings.

Justin: Yeah, he’s really a product of our age. Many commenters have said this right. He’s not the cause of this age. He’s kind of just a symptom of it. And it’s kind of just he is like the social media candidate.

David: It’s like if Twitter came to life.

Justin: I mean, I feel like we should throw in some caveats here. Like maybe the reason he speaks like that is because he can’t speak with depth and substance on complicated issues. And he just kind of keeps it high level.

David: He may just be the luckiest man in the world.

Justin: The luckiest he may be.Yeah, right.

David: But let’s get into an example of what we’re talking about here.

Justin: Yeah, sure, sure. So what are we watching here?

David: There’s a clip from the Joe Rogan podcast he was on from where we were recording this about two weeks ago. What I was fascinated by when I saw this was I’ve never really seen him speak naturally before. It’s always been either on a show or on the campaign trail. But what I realized from this, and you’ll see it too, when you see the clip, it really is what we were talking about earlier in terms of how he sets up the sentence, like he’s talking about a serious topic which is exiting Afghanistan and the weapons that were left behind and how they were taken by the Taliban. And he’s explaining how he was negotiating with military general on what to do about it, which all of this is quite high level and could be abstract if someone else is talking about it, but he tells the details like it’s telling it to a baby. Very simple language. But then he punctuates it with very rich detail so that you can really imagine quite clearly what it looked like, what it felt like. And then he ends that little simple story with a punchline and an attack. As a comedian, I think you’ll see the structure of it. It really does. It’s a very unnatural way of speaking, and it’s masterful if it’s by design.

Justin: Mm. Okay, let’s hit the clip.

Trump: I said I want every plane. I want every tank. I want the goggles. They have night goggles. They have all this stuff that these guys now have. He said, sir, it’s cheaper to get out and leave it. I said, so you think it’s cheaper to leave $150 million brand new airplane in there than it is to fly it out with a tank of jet fuel and put it in Pakistan, or just fly it directly back. It’s cheaper to leave it. I said, this guy’s nuts, I’m telling you. He was so stupid. He was so unwise. He was like an unwise man. And there were a number of them.

Justin: I said, this guy’s nuts.

David: What do you think?

Justin: Yeah, I think, I don’t have much to add with the way you described it when you set it up. That’s completely stand-up comedian way of communicating. He sets the scene, as you said, punctuates it with very specific details. And then ‘This guy’s nuts. This guy is really stupid’ is the punchline. I mean, it’s not a joke. Obviously, he’s just telling a story, but he’s borrowing that kind of communication style. Yeah. I mean, you say like stand up comedians do this all the time. The more specific details you can add, the more it adds to the believability of it. Obviously, this was a real situation that Trump was in, presumably. But yeah, like the price of the airplane. And then, yeah, it’s just uh, like, if you wouldn’t say I was in a restaurant, you would say, okay, I was in a McDonald’s. And then this happened.

David: Yeah. I don’t want to break the fourth wall and destroy the magic too much. But most stand up comedy is very practiced. And you mentioned recently you saw Chris Rock, where it’s like every single movement, every single pause. It was really carefully considered.

Justin: Yeah.

David: And obviously that is part of the performance is the pauses and the choice of words. If Trump’s doing this naturally, it’s an incredible skill set, but it almost makes me think that it’s not possible that he could have practiced three hours of a set, could he? Could that have been a scripted bit?

Justin: No. Absolutely not. Although maybe he had it in his head. I’m going to tell this story and then maybe he rehearsed it. I have no idea. That’s a lot of speculating. I think that’s just how he’s honed the way that he speaks in that kind of, like we said, stand-up comedian style. I don’t know if there’s that much more to say on this point, because this actually flows pretty naturally into our next point.

David: Yeah, I think just the final point would be, oh, I guess we need to give a lesson to business people.

Justin: Oh, right.

David: Yes. So the lesson to business people here is that, you know, again, like the guy or don’t like the guy, he is very popular. Like he’s just won a comprehensive mandate by 4 or 5 million votes at the present moment. So whether you like his policies or not, there’s something about him that resonates. And I truly believe it is that simplistic way of communicating. It’s always about the hero. You’re the guide. So he presents a worldview in a way that’s very easy to understand, that addresses people’s pain points at their level and offer simple solutions. That is best practice for any business. Like, we all want to talk about how great our company is and use our big words that we’ve studied and paid so much for. But keeping it simple and focusing on the audience is the.

Justin: Everyone knows Trump does love talking about himself.

David: He does.

Justin: So maybe he does that a little bit too much.

Justin: But you’re focusing on what he does right.

David: Yes.

Justin: And that part is speaking directly to the audience, in his case, the American people, and making a case as to how he can make their lives better and making them the hero of the story. It’s the classic grunt test, right? Like Trump definitely the grunt test.

Justin: Yeah, right. You make America great again?

David: Mhm. Where do I do it? Ballot box.

Justin: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Where do I sign up? Go vote.

David: That’s a very simple message there. But basically just communicate. Especially if you’re living in Thailand and not everyone’s going to speak English. So keep your message very simple and clear and use simple words wherever possible. There’s no extra points for using big words. You lose more than you gain from it.

Justin: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I say this almost every time, but if you can take a complex message and make it simple and easy to understand, that’s effective communication. If you’re taking something simple and making it overly complicated, you’re just going to alienate your audience..

David: Indubitably.

Justin: And just just a minor caveat there. We’re speaking primarily about things that are designed for social media, right. So your captions, your videos as well, it’s all well and good to have really thorough research, detailed content elsewhere. Just don’t put your entire white paper as a PDF on LinkedIn.

David: Yes.

Justin: Advertise it on LinkedIn in this Trump style.

David: Yes.

Justin: And then the actual white paper itself can be written in a more comprehensive, educated, detailed manner.

David: But first touch point, keep it simple.

Justin: Yes, yes.

David: All right. Good one. We did it.

Justin: We did it. We kept it simple with 20 minutes on this first point.

David: All right. So that was point one Justin. What else.

Justin: Yeah. Well, so point one is the way that he kind of speaks like a stand-up comedian with this setup, scene setting, punchline with power words. And point two is just his crowdsourcing of policies.The first person I heard make this point was Matt Welch on the Fifth Column podcast. He said he just performs at so many rallies and he does these long three-hour rallies sometimes. And sometimes he’s just spitballing and he’ll throw stuff out and see whether they like it or not, and then refine those bits almost in the exact same way as stand-up comedians refines their material. So you go out, you go out to the open mic, you try something new, you get a feel for it from the crowd, and then you just refine it that way. And then eventually you’ve got your special, you’ve got your hour. Hopefully. Anyway, that’s what the pros do. And that seemingly is what Trump does just with like his policy platform. So things like ‘Build the wall’ crushed in front of the crowd. So he was like, all right, add it to the platform.

David: Yeah. And this is probably we don’t want to get into this too much, but that’s kind of the irony of a democracy, right? That the most popular ideas are not necessarily the good ideas. But if you truly listen to the people, the people don’t always have the best intentions.

Justin: Sure. Wisdom of crowds and all that. But but it is a very kind of grassroots version of the will of the people, I guess.

David: Totally. And even before he had his rallies, like when he was just getting started, I guess like 2013, 14, he was just kind of crowdsourcing all ideas from all the crazy places, pretty much. And posting them on Twitter. And it was pretty much whatever got the most engagement became his platform. So I think Build the Wall actually came from Alex Jones or something had been talking about it, and he just put it on his own Twitter.

Justin: Right.

David: It was the most popular post, and then it became his mantra, pretty much, which again, it’s kind of scary from one angle, but it’s very democratic at the other angle. Yeah.

Justin: Yeah. Right. It’s kind of it’s almost like what consultants do. They kind of listen to the people, try a thing, okay, and then feed it back to them.

David: Yeah, it’s the opposite of McKinsey, right?It’s the low-level McKinsey.

Justin: And also, if you think about it kind of from a social media perspective, it’s like he’s got different content pillars, different content styles. It’s not like as organized as we would have it for our clients where say okay, Monday is thought leadership, Tuesday is product focus, three is client success stories, four is internal stories, and five is provocative, controversial posts or whatever the case may be. But he is definitely tracking his KPIs, seeing what performs well. Absolutely. And then doing more of that.

David: And that’s the lesson. The business lesson is look at what’s working. We all have the things that we want, the products that we want to sell the most, the things we want to talk about the most, the topics we want to focus about the most. They’re not necessarily going to be the things that resonate best. So you need to really look at your analytics, look at your KPIs. And what you were just referencing, obviously we have our content pillars. Lexicon does too, but occasionally I will throw out posts on the weekend just to test out an idea and see how it performs. If it does great, I might bring it into the the main set list if you will.

Justin: Right. That’s like the open mic of LinkedIn posts. So if you see something on Saturday or Sunday on David’s feed, it’s because he’s trying something.

David: I’m working on it. Yeah. So yeah, that’s the lesson then, right? The you got to listen to the feedback that you’re getting from your audience. Like ideally you get once a year, maybe you get customer feedback in terms of a formal feedback procedure, but you can get it every single day on LinkedIn.

Justin: Yeah, it’s pretty easy to track your impressions and other analytics as well, but you can just kind of click on your posts and then you can just see how many people are seeing it in their feeds. And this has nothing to do with Trump. But just a point to add on this. If you want your serious stuff to be seen by as many potential customers as possible, you need to have stuff that’s designed to just perform well in terms of impressions. So, I mean, you’ve said this a million times, if you want to get the most impressions, just post a picture of you with a baby or a dog. And then, you know, so many people will see it and like it. But that also means that the people that you actually want seeing your serious thought leadership, white paper kind of stuff, who might actually purchase your services, are much more likely to see that serious content if your other content is reaching a broad audience as well.

David: Yep. Absolutely, absolutely. And obviously we’ve been doing years of testing and refining and KPIs. So if you need some help.

Justin: Yeah. Look at David’s numbers don’t don’t look at mine.

David: All right. We got through that one as well. That was pretty good. So the final topic of all of the things you can say about Donald Trump, whether good or bad, he has a very strong personal brand.

Justin: Yeah. Nobody looks like that guy. No, it’s crazy that we’re so used to it with the weird comb over and the orange caked on makeup. The long tie.

David: Cartoon character.

Justin: Like he’s got a distinct look and sound we already we already discussed how he talks, but the man’s like persona is about as distinct as you can get.

David: For sure.

Justin: And no matter what situation he’s in, whether it’s The Apprentice, whether it’s like a WWE wrestling event, the campaign trail, he’s always the exact same guy.

David: Yeah, I just can’t help but feel like he must have had some kind of, like, image management along the way, because it’s just so consistent. And like, every celebrity who speaks out kind of ends up failing at some point. But this guy speaks out in a way that is insane but somehow doesn’t derail his campaign ever. Like there’s just something about the way he delivers it. There’s something about the way it resonates. It’s that’s why we’re talking about him today. Like, it’s just a very unique person in the 21st century.

Justin: Yeah, yeah.

David: Anyone else would be canceled immediately.

Justin: Well, that’s part of it is that there’s so much. There’s so many controversies. And seemingly every week or every day even there’s something new. And so you just kind of get immune to it, and he just becomes kind of Teflon. You’re just like, all right, whatever. And in this campaign in particular, he’s just been the most scrutinized politician probably in history. So when it came around to this campaign, everybody already knows him. They’ve already made up their minds about him. So the media wasn’t really seemingly that interested in all these little controversies. There’s no more dirt you can dig on him. It was all there. Whereas Kamala, on the other hand, and this isn’t what this episode is about, but people like didn’t know her, so little things that weren’t that big of a deal, like terrible performances, but weren’t that big of a deal, made waves in the media. And Trump kind of just kind of coasted. He was just him the whole time.

David: I think when it comes to personal brand, the key word is persona. And I truly believe that this is some kind of artifice, like what we see of him. Like purposefully brash, purposefully outspoken, purposefully simplistic. Because when he was on Rogan, you still got to see him in a bit more detail. Like he’s not, he seems fairly personable kind of dude. He’s not just a shit talker. So probably being an entertainer in the 90s, he was literally on WWF wrestling. WWE wrestling, where there is a famous type of character, right, the Heel.

Justin: Yeah, right.

David: Where they’re designed to be the bad guy.

Justin: Yeah.

David: Like maybe he’s just playing that character and at a really high level. Like, he knows what his beats are. He knows what his persona is, and he knows that it works for him. Like, even if you don’t like him, you can’t stop talking about him. Like what he said about the news channels earlier. Like he got billions of dollars in free campaign promotion from the media in 2016 just because he talked so much smack pretty much.

Justin: Right. Right. Yeah, I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to speculate that it’s all contrived. I almost feel like it’s genuine. Who knows? But the man does have fantastic instincts. We’d be in remiss not to mention the assassination attempt.

David: Oh yeah. Wow.

Justin: The presence of mind to stand up with the bloody ear. The man just got shot at, and he doesn’t know where the bullets are coming from. This is like Bill Burr’s point on SNL. Yeah, like I’d be cowering in the fetal position, like, okay, I don’t need this job.

David: Totally.

Justin: And just the presence of mind to understand the gravity of that moment, to stand up and just put his fist in the air and go ‘fight’ with his bloody face. Like, there were so many other things that happened. But that moment, we came into work and we were like, well, he just won.

David: Oh yeah. The photo was so iconic.

Justin: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, shout out to the photographers as well who just like, I guess their photographer instincts kicked in and they just kept clicking, clicking. And it looked like it’s like the Iwo Jima photo of our time?

David: Yeah, I think because it was during the the campaign, it was almost dismissed quickly because it was pro-Trump maybe to talk about it too much. But I think in time that will be seen as an Iwo Jima type photo.

Justin: Yeah.

David: It really is an incredible display of bravery, leadership, insanity maybe?

Justin: Right. But also just like, wait a minute, I need to use this moment. I need to stay in character. So like just the presence of mind there is brilliant. But like it is, that’s the first moment where I went, okay, that’s pretty cool. I had to admit it. And so I don’t know if this is exactly related to his persona, but it’s just, it’s instincts for the moment.

David: Yeah, absolutely. His instincts, they they don’t… If I was his campaign manager,

I don’t know if I would have made the choices that they made. I don’t think I would have been brave enough to put him in McDonald’s, serving French fries in the drive through, or put him in the garbage truck with the high vis vest on. These were really bold things that somehow just worked for him.

Justin: Yeah, yeah. Because whenever these politicians do these campaign stunts,

it always seems so contrived, like, well, I’m going to roll up my sleeves and I’m just a regular Joe.

David: Yeah.

Justin: And then. But Trump doesn’t act like a regular Joe. He’s Trump, but just at McDonald’s. Yeah. And so he was “Careful, there’s some fake news over there.” And then like him putting the fries into the little cup holder thing and going like, “Never touched the hands. Never touched the hands. “He was just so proud of himself. He seemed like he was having a blast. And it’s kind of amazing how well that worked. And the garbage man thing too. Like, just leaning into it. Maybe we could even play a really brief clip from the garbage man speech. Yeah. And, like, that’s just top tier trolling. And he took a moment to, like, make fun of himself, saying that the vest made him look slimming. And then that’s why his staff convinced him to do it.

David: Yeah. Well, we’ll come to the business lessons in a second. But obviously in America, politics is big business. Everyone has an opinion about it. It’s everywhere. You can’t escape it. But like we saw in that clip, from an external perspective, American politics is mostly entertainment. It’s very light on policy usually, and doing that kind of stuff where whether you want to say it’s good or it’s bad, the nicknames, the garbage man, the McDonald’s stuff, it gets headlines, it gets coverage, and it is entertaining. It’s funny for a neutral perspective anyway.

Justin: Yeah, yeah it is. It’s the most American thing ever. It’s cheeseburgers and wrestling and money. Yeah, totally. Totally.

David: So that’s why he wins. Like, if people are confused why he wins, he is. He’s playing the game of American media perfectly.

Justin: Mhm. So what’s the lesson for business leaders?

David: Persona. It really is like there’s no better example of a persona. Maybe it’s authentic. Maybe it’s not, but it’s very consistent. He knows his tone of voice clearly. He has his key topics he focuses on. He has his sentence structure laid out perfectly. So if you’re a business leader, you don’t want to necessarily be saying the things Trump is saying. But you can own your niche. You can speak in your own language. You can focus on your key topics. You don’t have to be boring. You don’t have to be dull. You can mix humor in there. Just don’t be scared of taking a stand for things. Have a persona that, you or I, we talk some shit on LinkedIn.

Justin: Sure, absolutely. I’m like, hey, look, he’s swearing.

David: Oh no, we’re allowed to swear.

Justin: Look how authentic you are.

David: We’re grown ups. Yeah, that’s my persona. I just swear a lot.

Justin: I mean, a lot of, like, you know, this is going to come across like we’re fans of the guy. And there’s aspects of it that we definitely respect, like the things that we’ve outlined in this video. But, you know, seeing as you’re swearing too, the man is one of the greatest bullshitters of all time.

David: No doubt.

Justin: Distinguishing that from lying, right? Because liars have some respect for the truth, because they’re doing the opposite of it, and they expect you to believe the negation of the truth. Whereas with him, he’s just he’s just going.

David: Yes.

Justin: So maybe don’t do that as a business leader. But if you could do it with that kind of confidence, simple language, sentence structure, ability to kind of listen to what your audience wants and meet them in the middle. There’s what you want to do, there’s what your audience wants, and the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle there. And if you could do it with a strong persona, that’s a pretty winning recipe.

David: Absolutely. These things are a bit complicated to do by yourself, so if you need some help developing a persona, putting together your content, calendars, content pillars, give Justin a call.

Justin: That’s right. Make your LinkedIn great again.

David: Absolutely. Yes. All right. Thanks for listening. As always. We’ll see you for the next episode.

Justin: See ya.

David: Sawadee krhup.

Justin: Khrup phom.