Turn off that teleprompter

📍Kathmandu, Nepal (Issue 198)

“Trump can’t keep to the script”, “get back on message”, “talk issues, not personality!”

Lines like this essentially surmise the Republican (and broader) criticism of the Trump/Vance campaign. Why, they ask, can’t he stick to the lines engraved on that teleprompter? Is he stupid? He has one job! It’s his election to lose, they say: just hit Kamala on the border, on inflation, on her record as VP. And, please don’t attack her personality.

But, as we all know, we vote for reasons beyond issues. Did Trump win in 2016 because of his policies? (Of course not). Did BoJo win his original landslide because of his fine-tuned agenda? (He appeared ‘off the cuff’). Does Farage get so much Reform support because of his manifesto? (Nobody read it: it’s because he chats in pubs). Knowing this, it’s clear that Bernie might have beaten Trump were it not for the Democratic primary.

All of these individuals speak without notes. They somehow ‘speak to the common man’ because there is no screen in the way. They speak off-script, sometimes contradicting themselves, often embarrassing themselves, yet talking—it appears—with deep conviction. Even if wrong, it’s obvious to all that their conviction isn’t fed to them by some amorphous ‘Party’. Their mistakes, whether rude or arrogant or misleading, are theirs alone and reveal no script—nobody would type “I’m better looking than Kamala” or “crazy cat ladies” on an auto-cue.

And this is what the public, in essence, wants! Subconsciously, or maybe even consciously, we want people—not faceless Big Brother-like scripts—making decisions on our behalf. Some will refute this claim, claiming we understand policy. I don’t think we do! And I bet the US election will demonstrate (again) that that there is an inverse correlation between reliance on teleprompter and electoral success. In a digital world, we want to appoint people and not machines. Increasingly, regardless of what the polls say, we underestimate the power of talking in public as if speaking to friends: it’s valuable because we see so little of it in politics.

Trump knows this. His party does not. So when there is a party meltdown for his refusal to stay ‘on script’, he goes on. He should probably deviate more! Again, regardless of his policy and the issues, there is something very appealing about seeing somebody willing to make mistakes on stage. To ramble! He realises that people will not vote for him because of his script but because of its absence—because he is a person, not a prop.

While I’ve been sick in bed, I’ve been on YouTube. What else is there to do? And it’s full of long-form interviews where Trump talks and talks and talks without notes (Musk and Theo Von are two interesting examples). Whether you like US politics or not, this is a significant shift: we might see the end of shrink-wrapped performative politics, where everything is planned-out by aids. For too long, too many puppets have been presented to fake crowds (this often happens in the UK).

With personality politics comes, thank god, actual personalities—people, not machines, on both the right and the left. I want more personalities! We must ask, why is the teleprompter used so often? Presumably because most politicians can’t be trusted to be without it. This is tragic. And in the end, if the Conservative Party wants to recover in less than a decade in the UK, it should find leadership willing to sit for unscripted two-hour interviews. They are revealing and force at least some conviction! Isn’t that what we want to see? And even if we disagree with their policies, the agentic individuals who speak honestly, without notes, will build our future, not the cardboard cutouts we’ve accepted for too long.