Japan's first lady pretended not to speak English when she sat next to Trump at G20 dinner

face->palm

I get my car repaired because the brake linings are gone and they tell me no those linings have been gone for months they can’t touch them but if I pay them $100 per month for the next 12 months they will fix the car in a year’s time.

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And that doesn’t mean he doesn’t communicate effectively. In fact, it’s sometimes more effective to use that type of speech, as long as you make it clear that you’re going on a tangent, and Trump makes it very clear. And it’s clear when he’s coming back to idea #1, too. People think this makes him a bad speaker, but I remember reading that it’s a sign of intelligence to be able to do that. Obviously there’s an intelligence somewhere in there, and I think that’s about the extent of it, but there it is.

He’s better in front of a crowd than in an interview, where he sounds befuddled more often than not. But it’s not fair to anyone to give the text of their speech, which doesn’t denote inflections, and Trump’s speech is about 45% inflection. Without it, you can try to diagram his sentences and make him look like a bad speaker, but add in his inflection and it’s very clear what he means and where he’s going with any individual thought. Again, I refer to his stump speeches, not to his one-on-one interviews, which read poorly, but then again, if I saw the video of an interview I think he’d be a lot more clear than he is on paper.

And of course, as always you have to ignore content ("$12 a year", etc) when grading his speaking ability. I think a lot of the “trump is a bad speaker” bias comes from what he says rather than how he says it.

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Effective ≠ eloquent. (Facts are still facts, and words still have meaning, dammit.)

Being effective doesn’t equate to being well spoken.

Oration is not an easy endeavor; there’s a reason that more people are allegedly afraid of public speaking than they are of death.

45 IS a bad public speaker; that his audience has set the bar so low is completely beside the point.

That word…

What he says is often despicable; how he says it is always grammatically mortifying.

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And just the fact that he can speak for an hour, with no notes, makes him better than 90% of people at public speaking. If eloquent means “persuasive in speaking” then he’s definitely that, much moreso than Hillary Clinton was; if it means “clearly expressing or indicating something” then you can argue the “clearly” part but I would say that there has never been a time i’ve seen where I didn’t know exactly what he was trying to impart. I’ve never thought “what the hell does he mean by that?”

I’ve thought “what the hell is he doing?” or “oh my god you have to be kidding me” but never “I don’t get it”.

So no, I do not agree that he is a bad public speaker. He is often bad during interviews, but not public speaking. Most public speakers have their speeches pre-written so it’s not even a fair comparison. For someone who has spoken for so many hours and had every speech picked apart, there are surprisingly few moments when he’s verbally painted himself into a corner.

And of course Donald Trump has some intelligence, and clearly verbal intelligence. Being persuasive to a crowd is one form, and connecting with people, even if they aren’t the people who write dictionaries and diagram sentences, is a skill, too.

That’s not what eloquent means.

You’re sea-lioning here, though I’m not sure why; but it doesn’t even matter.

Quittin’ time: 'bye.

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Citation needed.

Disclaimer: your own posts do not count.

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Gurl… the struggle is real

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Me, I’d kept it on on display to scare naughty little kids…

Apparently there was a joke floating around the SovBloc countries at the time, along the lines of Khrushchev being offered a deal to sell Stalin’s carcass for an insane amount of hard western currency. Nikita Sergeyevich is very interested at first, but declines in horror when he learns that the body is supposed to be brought to Jerusalem, as that place has a bit of a reputation regarding resurrections.

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Watch out, kids… Stalin’s coming to get you!!! Very scary!

By who? Israelis or Palestinians or someone else? Russian emigres?

Wasn’t specified by whom - doesn’t need to be for the joke to work.

(For what it’s worth, how about vengeful Trotskyists who are not aware that they were tricked into working for a CIA propaganda scheme?)

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Yup. After he becomes an animatronic Stalinesque exhibit in his Presidential Masoleum (because can you imagine what his Presidential Library would be like?).

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trump knows how to BS just fine.
but nothing he says has any substance

Not according to the cast of Saturday Night Live.

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If you’ve seen any end to the list of moments where Trump has babbled incoherently, demonstrated complete ignorance of the subject at hand or flatly contradicted himself during a public speech it’s only because the news networks have to cover other things too once in a while.

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Someone needs to 'shoop some headphones on her, and it’s just like every public transportation anywhere…

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I have occasionally used ASL to get those annoying pushy mall kiosk salesmen to leave me alone.

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I appreciate your attempt to be fair, but he’s not “persuasive”. He isn’t persuading anybody of anything. He’s telling 30% of the country what they already think-that libtards are evil, the media is evil, brown people are evil. He hasn’t changed anybody’s mind. He’s using a known dialogue technique-listen to what the other person says and repeat it back to them, and they will think you are really smart.

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I learned a new phrase today. Thx

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