Alec Baldwin Translates Trump
A fictional memoir written in the voice of Donald J. Trump features 204 exclamation points, nine uses of “trust me,” five instances of “look it up,” 133 cases of “really” (including five “really, really” and two “really, really, really”). That’s all in the book, okay? (“Okay?” appears rhetorically 14 times.)
“You Can’t Spell America Without Me,” a satire by actor Alec Baldwin and journalist Kurt Andersen due out Tuesday, doubles as a dictionary for the commander-in-chief’s singular brand of language. Its authors, both Trump critics, are students of his speech—Mr. Baldwin for his impersonations that roast the president on “Saturday Night Live” and Mr. Andersen for the Trump lexicon he compiled to help create the book.
The parody, largely written by Mr. Andersen, required both authors to channel the president’s voice. Each had their own method of doing so. “It’s just like, stick out your mouth as hard as you can, eyebrow up, masticate—chew the person across from you. I’m chewing you,” Mr. Baldwin says, demonstrating his technique in a recent interview.
Mr. Andersen’s approach was more academic. He pored over unedited transcripts of Mr. Trump’s news interviews. “That allowed the kind of full-on, naked view of how his mind works and how he uses language,”Mr. Andersen says, comparing his Trump language guide to “those short-form English-foreign language dictionaries that people take on vacation.”
Searching a digital copy of the parody yields a linguistic scorecard where “fantastic” beats “amazing,” 72 mentions to 46, but “great” trounces both, at 136. “Tough” bests “strong,” 45 to 32. That’s not counting “toughness,” “tougher” and “toughest.” “Loser” comes in at 13.
(snip)
Nuances of the president’s language at times surprised Mr. Andersen. “He’s famously full-throttle hyperbolic, of course, but he occasionally struggles on the fly to hedge, to try to stay tethered to reality,” he wrote in an email. He cites wiggle language Mr. Trump has used publicly, such as “we probably maybe” and, when the president was describing when a replacement system would be enacted after repealing the Affordable Care Act, the phrase, “most likely be on the same day or the same week, but probably the same day, could be the same hour.”
Another verbal tic: the word “the” popping up unexpectedly. “I hadn’t realized quite how often he uses the definite article when none is necessary or appropriate in English,” Mr. Andersen wrote in the email. The president’s reference to “the cyber” is one that has gotten media attention, along with “the Latinos,” “the women” and “the gays.”
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/alec-baldwin-translates-trump-1509793204
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Now, which book would you rather read: this one or the Brazilian one?
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