“Remember This, It’s So Important.”
The problem with techniques like the Rule of Three is that they are only guidelines. Any number of jokes have a premise, feed, and punch line, but without the simplicity of memorization it’s very likely a lot of the deeper structure will lose its effect. It would be like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with a boring first five bars.
Tony Blair for instance, had excellent speechwriters who used the Rule of Three in very sophisticated and often complex ways, but everyone remembers “Education, education, education.” Winston Churchill is responsible for “Blood, sweat, and tears”, but only in a roundabout way. The original quote is “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” In that form it may well have come from a mother chastising her child, but because the public ear naturally edited it into a Rule of Three, a quotation he never delivered helped carry an entire country through the Second World War.
Of course, delivery has a lot to do with the effectiveness of a Rule of Three as well. For anyone who has ever recited the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6:9, the original King James punctuation doesn’t quite reflect how it’s intoned in the average church.
After this manner therefore pray ye: 1. {Our Father which art in heaven}, 2. {Hallowed be thy name.}
Almost nobody says it like that because this is so much more satisfying in a room full of people:
After this manner therefore pray ye: 1. {Our Father}, 2. {which art in heaven}, 3. {Hallowed be thy name.}
Unfortunately for Trump, the speaking skills garnered by a reality TV star have little hope of rising to the eloquence of even a second-rate actor like Ronald Reagan. To borrow Senator Lloyd Bensen’s iconic Rule of Three demolition of Dan Quayle for associating himself with John F. Kennedy in the 1992 vice-presidential debate:
“Mr. Trump, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Mr. Trump, you're no Jack Kennedy.”
Trump's voice and delivery are generally unremarkable, so what do you do when a one-liner could bomb at any moment? Well, if all else fails, just tell the audience what you want them to remember and stick to mechanical repetition. It may be laughable, but dammit, if any man can keep the overall rhetorical bar low enough to get away with it, that man is Donald Trump.
This comes in two forms for the Donald: “remember that” and “it's so important.” The first example comes in line 24 at the same time he’s beginning his Rule of Three warmup. As a matter of fact, he says it three times for good measure:
“One of the things that is so important, at least for me very important, in the big poll which is the big national CNN poll on the economy—so important—Trump 55%, everyone else: nothing.”
Right out of the gate he almost forgets a third “so important”, but like an 18-year-old virgin, at least he crammed it before it was over. If nothing else the sheer awkwardness of the repetition will perk up the ears of any dolt on whom it has somehow been lost that the economy is, in fact, a big deal.
There are several other examples that are much more delicious purely because of how terrible they are. Here’s a shot at Hillary that he wants people to remember, but he so completely botches it he pulls the backup parachute of “for the love of God, just move on to something else.”
“And remember what I said about Hillary: we need somebody who’s strong. We need someone with incredibly energy, but incredible intelligence and all of those things. You know, I know a lot of tough people, but they’re not smart. Not so good. They’re easy. We need tough, we need sma...we need intelli...we need every character. We are so far behind the 8-ball in this country. We owe 19 trillion.”
It is noteworthy that there are three triplets in there too. In fact, all of his talking points that are so important to remember are reinforced with both the Rule of Three and a “Remember This, It’s So Important.”
“[If they] had guns, you wouldn’t have had the carnage that you had in Paris. You wouldn’t have had that carnage. If they had guns you wouldn’t have had that carnage. So important the Second Amendment, and we can’t let these weak leaders diminish it.”
The big outline of his speech can literally be mapped by skimming for a Rule of Three and a “Remember This, It’s So Important” within a few words of each other. The tremendous irony is that if he were any better at speaking it wouldn’t be so effective. It is precisely the use of conservative buzzwords like “Illegal Immigration” and “Obama” fluctuating in and out of a haze of babble that renders his rhetorical light poles highly visible. Once dazed, a quick snap of the fingers reminds the audience that in case they weren’t quite following him, all that bad stuff they were just furious about was because of Hillary Clinton.
That’s so important.'
Politics, Current Events: Anatomy of a Trump Speech Pt. I
Politics, Current Events: Anatomy of a Trump Speech Pt. II, Rule of Three
Politics, Current Events: Anatomy of a Trump Speech pt. III - "Remember This..."
Politics, Current Events: Anatomy of a Trump Speech pt. IV - Gross Anatomy
Politics, Current Events: Anatomy of a Trump Speech pt. V - The Skeleton
Politics, Current Events: Anatomy of a Trump Speech pt. VI—The Organs
Politics, Current Events: Transcription of Trump's Yorktown Speech