Editor’s Note: Bill McGowan is the founder and CEO of Clarity Media Group, a global communications coaching firm based in New York. He is the author of “Pitch Perfect: How to Say It Right the First Time, Every Time.” Follow him on Twitter @BillMcGowan22. Juliana Silva is a strategic communications adviser at Clarity. The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. View more opinion articles on CNN.
Back in 2016, a Donald Trump rally speech was like a triple espresso for his adoring audiences. Not anymore. If his listless campaign event in Tulsa last month is any indication, the caffeine has been replaced by Ambien.
Trump at the lectern is as bombastic, crass, hostile, boastful and narcissistic as ever. But now the red-hat brigades are sparser and people have been spotted yawning and checking their watches during the tirades. These days MAGA could easily stand for My Attention Goes Awry.
So, what’s missing?
The chants, for one. The key ingredient conspicuously absent from Trump’s recipe for a raucous rally is the three-word chant audiences echo back at him. Many of these chants are distinctive to Trump and emblazoned in our memories, but they turned out to have been highly perishable.
- “Lock Her Up” (boy, does he miss Hillary).
- “Build That Wall” (rendered largely useless now that travel has stalled across the border amid the pandemic).
- “Drain the Swamp” (not advisable given the administration’s record number of indictments).
The common denominators are obvious. All are three-words, they contain a call-to-action imperative and are simple to remember. They often represented the emotional high-water mark of POTUS’ rallies, the ultimate in audience participation. And Trump admitted that they were his secret weapon against ennui. “You know, if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to, sort of, maybe thinking about leaving, I can sort of tell the audience, I just say, we will ‘build the wall!’ And they go nuts.”
Trump’s most prominent slogan, though, was never a chant. “Make America Great Again” doesn’t qualify for two reasons: 1) It’s four words and 2) It was plagiarized from Ronald Reagan.
Trump’s slogans were the prime-cut, red meat he would throw at his base to get them all riled up. Now that they’re all but gone, rally goers, relegated to only vegan offerings on the Trump menu, might need to resurrect an oldie but goodie slogan from 1980’s Presidential politics: “Where’s the Beef?”
The effectiveness of a well-crafted slogan is well documented, not just inside the Beltway, but on Madison Avenue as well. Synonymous with the legendary Nike Swoosh logo is the imperative, “Just Do It.”
“Keep America Great” was intended to be Trump’s updated MAGA, but it was hardly out of the starting blocks before crippling national crises forced its early retirement. It was a slogan that was wrong for the times, given that recent polling shows nearly 75% of Americans believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.
The only other time you find that kind of unanimity is the percentage of Americans who have ice cream in the freezer at any given time.
Two other negatives with “Keep America Great”? Maintaining the status quo isn’t nearly as rousing a notion as fighting to make something happen in the first place. Also, the acronym KAG sounds too much like “gag,” not an image the re-election committee wants to be conjuring up right now.
In the futility category, “Keep America Great” is right up there with Hillary Clinton’s thoroughly bland and forgettable, “I’m With Her,” which is what you tell a maître d’ when you’re meeting your wife at a restaurant and she’s already been seated.
The messaging malaise that has resulted in a dearth of chanted slogans has also infected another wildly popular cornerstone of Trump’s political standup routine: derisive nicknames for his opponents. Analysis of Google searches shows a huge disparity between the popularity “crooked Hillary” registered in 2016 and the anemic response Trump has gotten trying to brand the former Vice President as “Sleepy Joe.” Indeed it’s been reported that Trump himself has suggested he needs a better Biden nickname.
Once upon a time, Trump had a knack for slapping a damaging label on his opponents and making it stick, but now that Midas touch seems to be not even gold plated.
Opting for what most incumbents have done historically, namely running on their record, is a dismal prospect, given the trifecta of tragedy engulfing POTUS: A once-in-a-century health crisis, the resulting and widespread economic pain and social unrest spilling into the streets. The answer to the classic question, “are you better off today than you were four years ago?” becomes untenable.
Rather than run on his record, Trump’s strategy appears to be running away from it –and hiding from the current reality, now that his uncanny ability of changing the narrative to his liking has been rendered impotent by the virus.
This has left him with limited messaging options: protecting Confederate statues and downplaying the coronavirus. And it has made the prospects for the return of memorable rally chants seem slim.
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Even if James Carville, Roger Ailes and Karl Rove were to brainstorm, they would have a hard time coming up with an effective slogan.
After all, with millions of Americans suffering under the effects of an insidious and deadly pandemic, “Save That Statue” isn’t likely to whip rally-goers into a frenzy, nor is his new pandemic mantra “Live with it,” likely to be seen as anything other than what it is: callous and clueless.
