Trump and His Fireside Rallies

As election rally season ramps up, the detractors of President Donald J Trump will again turn their ire to the abrasive and insulting aspects of the President’s rallies.  Trump’s SOTU was another rally decried a democrat congressman.  Anyone who attends a Trump rally is guilty of latent “racism” spews a talking head on CNN.

However, Democrats would do well to recognize the study of Dr. Elvin T. LIM and the findings he summarized in “The Lion and the Lamb: Demythologizing Franklin Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats.” Far from the fantasy that FDR’s Fireside chats were intimate and personal, Dr. Lim found that FDR’s speeches were effective expressly because they were not in the “intimate rhetorical genre” of Reagan or Clinton. 

By comparing FDR’s word usage between Fireside Chats, Addresses and Radio speeches, Lim concludes that the Fireside Chats endeared the public to FDR because the language used in the “Chats”  introduced fiery “behind the train platform or on-the stump” oratory of the early 20th Century into the radio medium.

Far from being soft and intimate, the language of FDR’s Fireside Chats highlighted hardship and urgent realities and were liberal in their expression of hostility. Fireside Chats were not intended only for “friends”. FDR used them to assail his opponents as often as he greeted his friends. Lim writes:

“In fact, it is probable that no president since FDR has ventured to summon half the bellicosity that FDR did in the brief space of 27 speeches. The Fireside Chats exhibited FDR’s remarkable talent and appetite for name calling.” And the media or the “typewriter strategists” were not above reproach.

Significantly, Lim also noted that these epithets were directed at his domestic opponents and not to Hitler or some other easily denigrated opponent. FDR explained his own strategy: “We cannot bring about the downfall of Nazism by the use of long-range invective,” FDR argued in FC 16. Sound familiar?

Democrats and pundits would do well to recognize that President Trump like FDR identifies his opponents as a minority while he “scrupulously affiliates himself with everyone else on the other.” FDR inserted the salutation “my friends” in his own hand.  Lim’s study established that FDR like Trump “did not hesitate to verbally denigrate his political opponents”, just as he did not shy away from the harsh realities Americans faced at the time.

Lim ends his study with the suggestion that the casual conversational, Reagan/Clinton rhetoric of the post-television age do not take their cue from Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats. However, comparing the fiery and urgent nature of Trump’s rally oratory has much in common with FDR’s oratory in his Fireside Chats. Democrats and the media should recognize that Trump’s Rallies are more FDR than Reagan/Clinton.

UNCLE: “IT WOULD BE DYNAMITE IF I DIDN’T”