President Donald Trump, too, has become known for his language -- but for a very different reason. His stump speeches on the campaign trail were famously rambling and unstructured.
The incoherence of the campaign trail followed Trump into the presidency, mutating into what was virtually a self-parody -- see the epic press conference where he answered all questions with the depth of his own tweets.
Now, hold on a minute. Someone is being played here.
It has long been an unspoken law of politics that if you can't do great things then you should lower public expectations.
After nearly two years of incoherence from Trump, the bar is so low that Tuesday's modestly competent speech has him hailed as a modern-day Demosthenes.
On one hand, this is probably little more than the payoff for a longer PR effort -- creating a sense of national relief that the President isn't as shockingly ineloquent as he once seemed makes him look good.
On the other, he has once again managed his most characteristic trick -- by getting us to focus on process, we ignore content. Outrageous content.
In his speech, the President made a clarion call of unity in the United States. Who, one should ask, could be responsible more for the division in America and the lowering of the tone around the glove than Donald Trump, both as candidate and President?
The spirit of Trump's speech was that of the arsonist who sets fire to your house and then offers to help you save some of the furniture. He hopes that, as in the world of soap operas, plot twists can erase the past, so the world of politics will forget all his previous deeds and words.
That is not how it works, particularly in the digital world with copies of everything he has said in circulation.
Language is a legacy -- and Trump's will be phrases such as "bad hombres" rather than the hollow words we heard Tuesday.









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