BLOGPOST ARCHIVES #6: DONALD TRUMP BLOGPOSTS
Blog posts over the past 10 years about the effectiveness of Trump as a communicator.
My study of the ABT began in 2011, moved slowly for four years, then took a big jump in 2015 as three big things happened.
The first was the publication of, “Houston, We Have A Narrative.” The second was the start of narrative training in the form of, “Story Circles” (which we ran for 5 years with over 50 in-person Demo Days with the various organizations we trained in the ABT).
The third and possibly most important development was the start of my studying the communications dynamics of Donald Trump with his emergence as a presidential candidate (18). I quickly noticed the ABT structure of his style of communication in everything from his speeches and debate performances to his simple slogan which quickly caught fire.
As I looked into the amount of ABT structuring present in his speaking I began to see two simple metrics. I’ve now had a decade of studying the two metrics in great depth and am nearing completion of an entire book about them titled, “From Lincoln to Trump: Metrics for Measuring Narrative Strength.”
One of the many adventures I’ve had so far with the narrative metrics was in 2016 when I managed to team up with veteran Democratic party strategist James Carville (81) in an attempt to enlighten the Hillary Clinton campaign of the power of the ABT. Sadly, we got nowhere in that effort and her campaign flamed out (detailed in the bestselling book, “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign”). I detailed my efforts on Park Howell’s podcast in an episode we recorded on the morning after the election that shocked the nation.
In the decade since then I’ve tried to point out repeatedly that the quantitative study of the ABT reveals that basically, “Trump Knows Narrative” — a conclusion I’ve been drawn to from the start (39) to the present (145).
Here are 23 other posts about Trump and narrative over the past decade. I tried to warn folks about this guy. Everything I warned of has come true. For better or worse.
#186) The Banality of Evil: Stephen Miller has Lousy Narrative Intuition
#161) Trump Went Off-Script at CPAC and (Predictably) Scored a Narrative Index of 36
#158) Trump’s Embattled Rose Garden Speech vs Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (His Narrative Match)
#154) Story Circles Testimonial: “I began to see narrative structure everywhere …”
#145) Trump Still Knows Narrative: 5 Recommendations to Democrats
#127) THE NARRATIVE METRICS GAME: How Will Trump’s State of the Union Score?
#111) Trump Continues to Know Narrative: He relishes being laughed at
#110) Banning Trump from Twitter: Valarie Plame Advances a Great Narrative
#79) Let’s Listen to the First Paragraph of Trump’s Inauguration Speech
#64) The Narrative Index: Looks like Trump Wrote his Own Rotten Al Smith Speech
#59) PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE 1: Five Narrative Criteria to Watch For
#18) Trump Language Analysis: Analysts Bringing AAA’s to an ABT Fight