How to Drink from a Firehose

A former Obama speechwriter on Trump’s week-one rhetorical strategy—and how you can help beat it

Among presidential speechwriters, “laundry list” is a devastating insult. It refers to a bland recitation of policy proposals with no coherent theme or inspiring message to bind them. (Another devastating speechwriter insult is “Christmas tree,” which means a speech that has something for everybody but no central focus.)

Trump’s second Inauguration Day was a laundry list of Christmas Trees.

First, he gave a speech in the rotunda that promised a “golden age” but was really just a disorganized to-do list. Over lunch, he added more items to the to-do list. Then he went to the Oval Office and signed a whole bunch of executive orders and pardons, a few of which fulfill campaign promises, many of which push the limits of presidential power.

Any traditional “messaging expert” from either party would tell you this was a mistake. Presidents usually try to avoid loading up their speeches and media appearances with too much policy, because policy is boring. They also want to introduce new plans—and the rhetoric behind them—one at a time, to get maximum coverage for each. Trump, for all his general unhinged-ness, frequently tried that approach in his first term, which is how we got “infrastructure week.” Trump’s second-term message strategy seems to be throwing dictatorial spaghetti against a wall to see what sticks.

And it’s pretty smart.

I wish I could take comfort in the fact that Trump sucks at rhetoric, or that he regularly steps on his own message. But right now, the laundry list is the message. What Trump recognizes—and what many of us didn’t recognize for too long—is that Americans want to see their leaders getting things done. Fairly or unfairly, lots of voters felt that Democrats spent four years saying, “We’d love to make an omelet, but we just can’t break any eggs.” Trump is taking the opposite approach. He’s betting that Americans might not approve of breaking each respective egg, but are desperate enough for omelets that they’ll go along.

It's easy to seem like a comms genius during a presidential honeymoon, but so far, Trump’s scattershot strategy is paying off. One CBS article about his immigration crackdown said Trump “invoked muscular presidential powers,” which is a bit like saying Jeffrey Dahmer, “displayed omnivorous taste.” And that’s the kind of coverage Trump wants. MAGA diehards are pumped up. Swing voters who don’t like everything about Trump still see him as strong and decisive. The half of the country that voted against Trump is frightened.

So what do we do about it?

This isn’t just an intellectual exercise. Nor is it only a question for those with columns, newsletters, or podcasts. Many of the traditional homes where patriots like to argue their case — like newspaper op-ed sections — are crumbling or being hollowed out by their billionaire owners. (The Contrarian wouldn’t exist otherwise.) And even before Jeff Bezos started trying to mash the self-destruct button on one of America’s most hallowed papers, it was harder than ever for the pro-democracy side to compete in the marketplace of ideas, because the vast majority of Americans aren’t voracious consumers of political news.

In other words, if America is going to survive this, communicating strategically isn’t just a job for politicians and professional commentators. No matter who you are, defeating Trump’s laundry-list strategy must be on your to-do list, too.

It’s doable. It just requires doing something that can be both counterintuitive and emotionally difficult.

When Trump goes big, we have to go small.

In their excellent book Made to Stick, the brothers Chip and Dan Heath spend a lot of time talking about the idea that people are great at picturing one thing, but terrible at picturing lots of things. Normally, that’s a disadvantage for the party in charge. The Inflation Reduction Act invested over $100 billion in clean energy, which sounds nice. But it’s also such a large number as to be almost meaningless, I could say $1 trillion or $90 gazillion, it doesn’t really matter. All you’d hear is, “a lot.”

But for Trump’s big-government cruelty, big numbers are really helpful. Hitting pause on $40 billion in medical research is, obviously, worse than stopping a single study. But it doesn’t feel worse. It’s abstract, and hard to get your head around.

So what does going small look like during Trump 2.0? It’s going to be different depending on who you are, and who you’re talking to. But here are three basic rules:

Clear Stakes are Better than High Stakes

If you’re reading a newsletter like this one, it might seem obvious that Trump is trying to destroy American democracy and put (at best) an oligarchy in its place.

But saying something like this to someone who doesn’t already believe it is unlikely to convince them. In fact, it might backfire. “People who oppose Trump think Trump is ruining America,” is a mirror-image way of saying, “Trump is extremely effective.”

It's better to focus on something tangible. What is one thing that Trump’s actions are already making worse?

Silence is (Sometimes) Strategy

During Trump 1.0, and in the Biden years that followed, I sometimes heard that “silence is complicity.” And in many cases, that’s true.

But in other cases, it’s important to recognize that some of Trump’s actions are popular – and that instead of litigating them, it’s better to stay focused on the stuff everyone agrees is heinous. Which, unfortunately, there will be plenty of.

Don’t Let Trump Be the Main Character

Like it or not (I don’t like it) Donald Trump won the popular vote. I suspect that over time, many people will regret that decision. But it’s a lot to ask people to regret it after a week.

As a general rule, if Trump is the main character of the story you’re telling, then you’re asking people to weigh in on Trump. Opinions about Trump are pretty difficult to change right now. Focus the attention on someone else instead.

An Example – and a Gleam of Hope

Everyone will have different ways of winning the ideas war over the next four years and beyond. For right now, if a total stranger asked me to sum up this week, I’d say something like this:

“There’s a guy named Daniel Rodriguez. On January 5^th, 2021, he texted his friends ‘There will be blood.’ On January 6^th, when he stormed the Capitol, he grabbed a police officer and shocked him repeatedly in the neck with a stun gun. A jury of peers sentenced him to twelve years in prison for his violent crime. And less than 24 hours after taking office, Trump let Daniel Rodriguez back out on the street.”

I could say more, of course. But that’s the most important thing: a story about one person, who isn’t Donald Trump – and one action Trump took which just about everyone can agree makes us less safe.

The good news, in a week not exactly full of it, is that a decent number of our political and cultural leaders are already zeroing in on these kinds of stories. Trump might be getting more favorable coverage than he deserves, but he’s also wildly overreaching.

Trump isn’t a good person. But he’s good at driving his message. If we stay disciplined, focus on one story at a time, and keep the stakes small, clear, and personal, we can be even better.

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David Litt wrote speeches for President Obama between 2011-2016. A New York Times bestselling author, his newest book, It’s Only Drowning, will be published by Simon & Schuster in June. He also posts under @davidlitt on Instagram and BlueSky, writes the newsletter “Word Salad,” and was born with an innate talent for cooking shrimp.