Who is it that Trump reminds me of?

I was thinking about Trump recently and it struck me there was something very familiar about him and his speech patterns. This in particular caught my attention recently:

Now, Hillary Clinton, commonly referred to as ‘Crooked Hillary’,” he told a crowd in Kissimmee, Florida. “Hillary Clinton gave a speech today having to do with economic development, having to do with a lot of different things. Short speech, always very short. You know?
“She makes the speech, she turns off the teleprompter. Look, what happens, she gives a short speech then she goes home, goes to sleep, she shows up two days later. Remember, short circuit. Remember that, right? Short circuit.”

It was something about the repetition. That sense that he’s trying to make a point with the listener in a chatty fashion. Actually, it sounds not dissimilar to the sort of circular speech patterns many of us dip into when fairly drunk, that same need to impress upon the listener something that really only has to be said once.

But be that as it may, then I remembered. I had a boss who used to slip into this sort of faux-informal ‘let me tell you’ sort of stuff at the drop of a hat. Sales meetings, Managerial meetings, whatever, would sail past, minute after minute, hour after hour, afternoon after afternoon (see, repetition is contagious) where a litany of faults would be uncovered and prodded at to no great effect.

What was always noticeable was that there were no actual outcomes from these meetings (always held on a Friday, once or twice a month or as and when the mood took him). The circular language was, if anything, a sort of therapy for the boss and a means of, paradoxically, avoiding making any actual decisions. There were good reasons for this. The group of companies was cash and investment starved. There was no money for the grandiose plans that were trotted out with alarming regularity. The great scheme unveiled last month was usually forgotten in the rush of enthusiasm, ‘let me tell you’, for this one. Only the most cursory minutes were taken, the group manager being wise to matters.

Occasionally, modish business language would make an appearance. If ‘disruption’ had been a term with any currency in the 1990s you can bet it would have been used with abandon. As it was there were unformed mutterings about synergy and suchlike.

The boss was, it has to be admitted, a fantastic salesperson. He could by sheer force of will convince and cajole others into curious decisions. I often wondered at what his international acquaintances and partners made of things when they finally made it to Dublin and saw the reality of the empire that they had had described to them, this remarkable logistical and sales hub that he had established and which in presentations yours truly provided for him was airbrushed (quite literally) within an inch of its life to offer a somewhat misleading image of its fit for the 21st century modernity and efficiency.

When they saw the crumbling warehouses, and shabby early 1950s office buildings, the run-down retail arms and the small but perfectly formed manufacturing area at the back of a partly refurbished sheds did they find some dislocation between rhetoric and reality.

It’s that that makes it both oddly recognisable with the stuff we’re hearing from Trump, in the sense that it is all too familiar, which also makes me deeply deeply suspicious.