The simple yet powerful message Tim Walz used to expose Trump’s language

Image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr.
John Stoehr
September 20, 2024

Tim Walz was in Michigan recently. In a stump speech, he noted differing views on the meaning of homeownership. He said that for “the real estate mogul, the venture capitalist, whatever,” a house is “just an asset to be traded and sold.” To everyone else, however, it’s “a place to gather around the kitchen table to talk with our kids about what happened at school.”

The message was simple but powerful.

Donald Trump (“the real estate mogul”) and JD Vance (“the venture capitalist, whatever”) stand together as normal men who care about and understand the normal struggles of normal Americans, but they are not normal, nor do they care about or understand normal people’s struggles.

They don’t even know the meaning of owning a house and what it takes to achieve that dream. To them, it’s not real. It’s an abstraction. It has no value beyond its market value. But “to us,” Walz said, it’s so much more.

“That’s what Kamala Harris wants for you,” he said.

Leigh McGowan, a social media influencer who goes by “Politics Girl,” watched the speech. She saw how Walz uses simple words to capture a common experience to rally normal Americans toward the common good and against “the real estate mogul, the venture capitalist, whatever.”

Then McGowan did something useful.

She named Walz’s rhetoric.

“It feels like he cannot possibly be real,” McGowan said. “Here’s this man who is masculine without being weirdly alpha, who hunts, who shoots, who was a teacher, who is a veteran. He’s just a good dad and a great husband, and he believes in the nation. He’s not trying to be president, he doesn’t have bigger ambitions, and he’s happy to be second banana to a woman. It’s like you made him in a lab as the perfect candidate.

“He talks to us in common sense,” she said.

Trump’s uncommon language
If Tim Walz talks in common sense, what does Trump talk in?

Well, it’s common in that grievance and hate are ubiquitous. Beyond that, however, Trump does not communicate using words everyone can understand to relate the joys and sorrows they have experienced.

Virtually every word he chooses says more about him than it does anyone else. So while you don’t have to know anything about Tim Walz to understand his speeches, you have to know a lot about Donald Trump to understand his. Indeed, to talk about his speeches requires a kind of specialized language. And if you don’t know the lingo, you’re lost.

After nearly a decade in the public eye, Trump’s presence has become commonplace. It took someone like Walz speaking in the language of common sense to jolt us out of the normalcy that is Trump. Walz helped us realize we don’t really understand what the man is talking about.

I would even say the impact of that jolt is why McGowan said Walz “feels like he cannot possibly be real.” But it’s not Walz who doesn’t feel real.

It’s Trump.

— (@)

Thanks in part to Walz, it’s clearer now than ever that Trump’s speeches have gotten longer, windier and more rambling. They start out grounded in discernable reality but eventually, they become so abstract as to be meaningless. Here he is, explaining, well, I don’t really know.

I don't think I've ever said this before. So we do these rallies. They're massive rallies. Everybody loves, everybody stays till the end. By the way, you know, when she said that, well, your rallies people leave. Honestly, nobody does. And if I saw them leaving, I'd say, and ladies and gentlemen make America great again and I'd get the hell out, ok? Because I don't want people leaving. But I do have to say so I give these long sometimes very complex sentences and paragraphs but they all come together. I do it a lot. I do it with Raising Cain. That story. I do it with the story on the catapults on the aircraft carriers. I do it with a lot of different stories. When I mentioned Doctor Hannibal Lecter, I'm using that as an example of people that are coming in from Silence of the Lambs. I use it. They say it's terrible. So they say so I'll give this long complex area for instance that I talked about a lot of different territory. The bottomline I said the most important thing. We’re going to bring more plants to your state and this country to make automobiles. We’re going to be bigger than before. The fake news and there’s a lot of them back there. You know, for a town hall, there's a lot of people but the fake news likes to say, the fake news likes to say, oh, he was rambling. No, no, that's not rambling. That's genius. When you can connect the dots. Now, now, Sarah, if you couldn't connect the dots, you got a problem. But every dot was connected and many stories were told in that little paragraph.

A normal person’s common language
Trump may not sound like a rich man, but he’s still a rich man.

When he talks about normal things, it sounds weird.

He has never gone back-to-school shopping. He has never pumped his own gas. He’s never written a check for the electric bill. He does not know what it’s like to be sticker-shocked at the supermarket. He has no idea what it feels like to go from renting to owning. He sure-as-hell doesn’t know how it feels to be forced to choose between food and medical bills.

He does not even know the meaning of a $10 bill. He does not know what it can buy, because $10 to “the real estate mogul” isn’t money. It’s power.

Indeed, $10 means nothing, just as tariffs mean nothing. Tariffs aren’t real economic tools presidents use to address real economic problems. They are abstractions. As such, whether they work makes no difference to him. Whether they cause suffering doesn’t matter. Suffering is abstract, too.

To a normal person, the price of things is about as real as it gets.

To Trump, the price of things is as real as fairy dust.

So he can say, as he did this week, that he will lower “energy bills” by 50 percent. He can say, as he did in January, that the cost of gasoline has gone from under $2 a gallon to “5, 6, 7, 8 dollars.” He can say, as he did this week, that he will decrease the price of food by decreasing the food supply (via tariffs on imports). To a normal person, that makes no sense. To a rich man, sense is beside the point. Money isn’t money. It’s power.

In the end, you don’t have to know much about Tim Walz to understand his speeches, because Tim Walz is himself a normal person. He knows the meaning of a $10 bill. He knows the meaning of owning a home. He speaks in common sense, because his own experience is so common. When he says, “that’s what Kamala Harris wants for you,” it makes sense.

It feels real.