How to Brief Donald Trump

The New York Times recently ran an article on how different government officials have struggled to deliver intelligence briefings to President Trump. The article also contained observations about the style of the briefer who succeeded:

1. She relies on humor and sarcasm to get her point across and will subtly challenge the president.

2. If Mr. Trump diverges onto irrelevant topics, she will let him talk before interrupting to confidently ask to move on.

3. Mr. Trump, who made his name in real estate, is drawn to subjects like international economic developments. Ms. Sanner highlights that material and tells the president what is in the intelligence for him.

4. Mr. Trump has also shown interest in foreign leaders, particularly autocrats like President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, and Ms. Sanner mentions them to draw in the president on topics that he might otherwise tune out.

5. While Mr. Trump does not appear to read the intelligence reports he is given, he will examine graphs, charts and tables. Satellite pictures clearly interest him, too: He tweeted one from his intelligence brief, revealing the capabilities of some of the government’s most classified spy assets.

What Donald Trump Can Teach Us About Media Training

Roy Peter Clark explains:

A recent NPR report captured the enthusiasm of Trump supporters at a rally in Cincinnati, where the next president thanked the State of Ohio for his victory, patted himself on the back for getting Carrier to stay put and tossed red meat to the carnivores in the crowd on some of their favorite campaign themes.

In turn, the crowd chanted a series of slogans:

On Hillary: “Lock her up.”

On immigration: “Build that wall.”

On Washington: “Drain the swamp.”

I needed to hear them spoken in close proximity to notice that structurally the three slogans were identical. Each began with an imperative verb (lock, build, drain). Each was three words long. All nine words were one syllable in length. Each verb was transitive, that is, it carried an object. And in each case some unspecified subject was order to do something to something else ...

These three-beat slogans seem to be a special form of battle cry ...

“Lock her up.”

“Build that wall.”

“Drain the swamp.”

They are chant-able like many popular sports chants: “Let’s go Mets!”

Their expression in three words offers a kind of completeness: this is all you need to know. And their brevity rings like the gospel truth.

They show fidelity. They are confident, at times to the point of intolerance. Fact checking and wonkery bounce off of them. They seem silly when spoken by an individual. Coming from an excited crowd they express a collective energy, an army of followers ready to go to war for their king.

Donald Trump Explains How to Reframe the Conversation With a Reporter

“When a reporter asks me a tough question, I try to frame a positive answer, even if that means shifting the ground. For example, if someone asks me what negative effects the world’s tallest building might have on the West Side, I turn the tables and talk about how New Yorkers deserve the world’s tallest building, and what a boost it will give the city to have that honor again. When a reporter asks why I build only for the rich, I note that the rich aren’t the only ones who benefit from my buildings. I explain that I put thousands of people to work who might otherwise be collecting unemployment, and that I add to the city’s tax base every time I build a new project.”

How Donald Trump Plays the Press, in His Own Words

Addendum (9/5/2015): And here’s how his reframes the conversation about his competitors:

“Trump is proving to be an extraordinarily powerful orator. The power is not in the arguments he makes, but in the feelings he evokes and the power relations he implies. ‘What went wrong formerly,’ wrote Bertrand Russell in 1952, ‘was that people had read in books that man is a rational animal, and framed their arguments on this hypothesis. We now know that limelight and a brass band do more to persuade than can be done by the most elegant train of syllogisms’…

“We who don’t much read Cicero anymore can forget that contumely, not logic, is the weapon of choice in classical oratory. Trump never mentions Jeb Bush without describing him as ‘low-energy’ (‘a very low-energy person,’ he said in Dubuque). The adjective never varies. Trump does not ever say Bush ‘lacks oomph’ or ‘has no get-up-and-go’ because his goal is not to be smart or varied or interesting—it is to plaster ‘low-energy’ onto Bush as an epithet.