The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, hardbound and
handsome in ersatz leather, are not a beach read. A typical volume, each
a compendium of speeches, statements, and proclamations, weighs four
pounds. That is a lot of Presidential prose, much of it leaden. But it
does tell a pretty good story. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s declaration of
war against Japan appears in the 1941 volume; John F. Kennedy’s pledge
to land a man on the moon by the end of the nineteen-sixties shows up
near the halfway mark of his first volume. The Papers record some ideas
and tropes and tenets that, once introduced, become part of the American
lexicon, changing the country; others fall quickly out of vogue. Yet it
won’t be until 2019, when the U.S. Government Publishing Office begins
to release the papers of President Donald J. Trump, that any volume will
have contained the sentence “not all of those people were neo-Nazis,
believe me,” or the transcribed cry of a crowd in Phoenix,
incited by a President of the United States, chanting “CNN
sucks!”

What the Trump papers will not include—at least, the first volume or
two—is much by way of significant speeches. This might be surprising,
given that Trump talks, and talks a lot. If a shark, by popular myth,
has to keep swimming to stay alive, Trump has to keep talking, keep
emitting sound and spouting fury. He has no off switch, no mute button.
His rambling, off-the-cuff remarks are like the whine of a circular saw
cutting tile all day, a television blaring through the wall all night.
No President in modern memory has made more noise. Yet no President in
modern memory has given fewer speeches to lesser effect.

Kellyanne Conway, the counsellor to the President, said
recently that Trump has used “the power of the bully pulpit” to address the
problem of foreign interference in U.S. elections—a comment with just as
much credibility as Trump’s own insistence, at Tuesday night’s rally in
Phoenix, that he believes, “We are all on the same team. We are all
Americans.” The bully has, in truth, largely abandoned the pulpit. It is
self-evident that Trump prefers Twitter to any other means of
communication, but his indifference to speechmaking is itself an
anomaly. To date, Trump has had two modes of public speaking: free-associating (harangues and monologues) and sleep-talking (scripted
remarks). Trump’s rallies represent, of course, the first of these; so
do his unscripted speeches, which barrel, like a truck without brakes,
into a ditch, wheels still spinning, kicking up gravel. This is what the
world witnessed on August 15th, when the President stood in the lobby of
Trump Tower, in New York, uttered some perfunctory words about
construction permits, and then handed his id the microphone.
Performances like these are not, in any proper sense, speeches at all,
for speeches have structure and direction—they are displays of
discipline, not self-gratification.

Trump likes the former mode. Its appeal may be limited to his shrinking, and
calcifying, hardcore supporters. But Trump appears to prefer it to the
painstaking work of developing a draft and sticking to it. After eight
months in office, he still cannot deliver a teleprompter speech that
does not seem coerced—as Monday’s prime-time speech, about the war in
Afghanistan, made clear. A speech draft, to Trump, is like any other form
of constraint, something to be resented and resisted. Or disowned, as he
did in that Trump Tower press
conference, rehabilitating the white supremacists whom he had
denounced (sullenly and belatedly) a day earlier.

Trump’s failure to give a good speech carries a political price. His
lack of interest in the details of public policy has prevented him from
translating his campaign slogans into concrete proposals. His inability
to maintain, on any issue, a consistent or even coherent position has
undercut his ability to inspire loyalty and respect on Capitol Hill. He
made no big speech about the repeal or replacement of the Affordable
Care Act, just stray comments and scattered tweets denigrating Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Republican Party, and the
legislative process. He has made no agenda-setting address on
infrastructure, not even during the much hyped (by the White House)
“infrastructure
week,” in June, when he spent much of his time at the podium raising unrelated
issues and needling Democrats. On foreign policy, he has made no real
attempt to articulate a Trump doctrine or a Trump world view. On trade,
he has made no comprehensible case for American retrenchment from the
global economy, beyond his assertion that other countries are taking
advantage of the U.S. Politico reported this week that the White House
is creating a “mini war room” on tax reform as it prepares for a fall
push, and that the President will make a “major tax announcement.” But
there is no reason to expect that he will—or even that he can—finally
make a clear and comprehensive policy proposal.

There is a school of thought that none of this matters—that Winston
Churchill, who gave many great speeches himself, was naïve to claim that
a leader who has “the gift of oratory . . . wields a power more durable
than that of a great king”; that Richard Neustadt, the political
scientist who advised Kennedy and other Presidents, was wrong to believe
that “Presidential power is the power to persuade.” The shrinking of
Presidential stature since the days of J.F.K., as well as the
fragmenting of the media environment, has led some skeptics to say that
there is little, if any, power left in a Presidential speech. George C.
Edwards
III, of Texas A. & M. University, has argued that when Presidents “go public,”
they do their goals more harm than good; they are “wasting their time.”

This goes too far. It is true that a speech, in a democracy, is not a
command; it invites action but can’t impel it. And there is a case to
be made—I’m one who has made
it—that
Presidents talk too much while saying too little. Most Presidents,
including Bill Clinton, for whom I wrote speeches, concede this. Yet
those volumes of Presidential papers suggest, in at least some of their
many pages, that oratory can exert, over time, a kind of cumulative
effect—expanding, speech by speech, the breadth of possibility.

Kennedy understood this. In May, 1961, when he issued his call to put a
man on the moon, six out of ten Americans said it wasn’t worth its
estimated forty-billion-dollar price tag. Kennedy spent the remainder of
his Presidency convincing them otherwise. F.D.R. understood it, too. In
December, 1940, he gave a fireside chat later known as his “arsenal of
democracy” speech. He was preparing the American people for the war that
he knew they would need to fight, educating them about the threat posed
by long-range bombers and by the Nazi regime, which some Americans
hoped, at the time, might listen to reason. “No man,” Roosevelt said,
“can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. . . . There can be no
reasoning with an incendiary bomb.” With speeches like these, F.D.R.
moved public opinion by degrees. So did Ronald Reagan, who gave,
essentially, the same speech for a quarter century before he won the
White House, in 1980. His advisers called it, simply, “The Speech,” and
it set out the principles of free markets, smaller government, and
anti-Communism that would define his two terms as President.

Donald Trump, for his part, will keep on talking. He is, as he intends,
dominating the national discussion. But he is not leading it; he is not
driving it in any clear direction. His papers—their pages filling up
with digressions, obfuscation, invective, and lies—will someday reflect
that. And, until his last volume is bound and boxed, the bully pulpit
will await a President who can speak the language of American democracy.

*A previous version of this post misstated Donald Trump’s preferred mode of speaking.