Day and night they never stop saying:
“‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,’
who was, and is, and is to come.”
— Revelation 4:8b

On Tuesday, I sat in a ballroom with 1,000 of my closest Evangelical friends, and was eager to see The Donald preach and give an Altar Call worthy of a Billy Graham Crusade. I looked for a song sheet with Just as I Am. …

Franklin Graham gave a crowd-pleasing introduction. But the congregation was not as emotional or boisterous as the normal Assemblies of Trump. Although the evangelical executive advisory board named afterwards is mostly Southern Baptist and independent charismatic, the audience response was more Presbyterian than either Baptist or Charismatic — restrained with mostly modest applause.

Trump took questions from the gathering moderated by my favorite Baptist Preacher, Mike Huckabee. (Full Disclosure: My wife Charmaine worked on Mike’s 2008 campaign.) Trump answered simply with his routine speech and didn’t, as the journalists say, ‘commit news.’ His three-point homily was on religious liberty, jobs and judges.

His topics were short and simple with word-pictures and vignettes.

Alveda King was there and would know what Trump was doing. Her uncle gave a simple, repetitive speech when he said, “I have a dream.” He did not say, “I have a ten-point plan. …”

Trump knew his audience and emphasized the power of public religion in the market square. He told the story of football coaches “about to do battle” on the gird-iron who were forbidden to allow their teams to pray. A voluntary prayer terrifies the un-godly. Trump would bring back permission to pray in public. We got a symbolic statement of purpose but no procedures and no details. Like any good sermon, however, he spoke to this father of three Division 1 student-athletes. I actually got choked up.

The Trump ‘conversation’ followed his usual style: repetitive and simple. But there was a surprise in the candidate’s tone and delivery. Trump was humble. This was different from the Trump Towering ego I noted previously here at The Stream.

Repeat, Repeat, Repeat

The few reporters who attended were actually bored. They had heard most of the same speech a dozen times. But many, if not most, in the audience had never met or heard Trump speak before. Snippets of a campaign rally speech on television are very different from an in-person delivery of a message.

As mentioned above, my wife Charmaine was a senior advisor to Mike Huckabee during his presidential run in 2008. Your Business Professor followed the campaign, driving the mobile-homeschool “Huck-a-Truck” with our five children. With repetition, the stump speech became very familiar to me. So I watched the crowd’s reaction to Huckabee’s talks and speeches with great interest.

Most of the attendees in the crowd were enthusiastic supporters, so they knew Huckabee’s basic message and campaign themes. But hearing it in person often meant “hearing” the message anew. Eyes would light up; a face would lift up and the message would be received and understood and, finally, heard.

Repetition and reiteration will catch the listener’s attention. This can be done in spoken communication but not so much on paper. Repeating a written phrase on a hard copy script gets dull fast. What sounds melodious over the air, looks gassy and redundant on paper. This is why Trump’s extemporaneous speeches often don’t read well and seem disjointed and repetitive. As George Bernard Shaw said, “Tell’em what you’re gonna tell’em. Tell’em. Then tell’em what you told’em.”

But I repeat myself …

Communicating the Spoken Word

Trump is a master of simple repetition. Political pundits don’t much like this, but it is actually the right way to communicate the spoken word. Jack Welch and his wife, former Harvard Business Review editor-in-chief, Suzy Welch, remind leaders to “Over-Communicate”:

It’s your job to communicate your message, your values, what’s right about what’s happening, and what’s wrong — over and over and over again. There can be no lack of transparency. Everybody has to be on the same page. Even when you’re ready to gag over the message, you have to keep communicating it.

Just because you say something once, it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. Too often, managers think, “Hey, I told my team what to do.” … But you also have to make it your mission to follow up — relentlessly — to see that things are moving in the right direction.

Alliteration helps the reiteration. Even Julius Caesar stayed within the 140 Twitter character limit reporting one of his military victories, “veni, vidi, vici.”

I came, I saw, I conquered. The details followed.

Willard Marriott, founder of the Marriott hotels, tells us (again!) of the value of “stump speeching”:

If you’ve got a grouchy room clerk, or … the waitress doesn’t say hello, you won’t enjoy your stay. And every time I make speech, and I mean every time, I talk about these things. We want to help people—not only our customers, but the people who take care of our customers.

Consultant Tom Peters wrote in Fast Company,

Leadership takes an almost bottomless supply of verbal energy: working the phones, staying focused on your message, repeating the same mantra until you can’t stand the sound of your own voice—and then repeating it some more, because just when you start to become bored witless with the message, it’s probably starting to seep into the organization.

Trump clearly pursues the same strategy, either by training or intuition. He will repeat a message until it is heard in the ear, then in the brain, where it can be sounded in the heart.

This, not policy details, is Trump’s strength as a communicator. But will it be enough, especially for those who are still skeptical of him? On Tuesday, not everyone answered the altar call. And some of the unconverted are holding out for more details.