The US needs another ‘great communicator’ to heal the political divide – and neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump are that person

Between Trump’s bully-boy style and Biden’s inability to communicate with half of America, the country is more polarised than ever
The US needs both a message and messenger that everyone can believe in. Biden must take the time to understand why America is hurting

Dave Kauffman

Published: 1:30am, 26 Jan 2022

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I make no apology for the fact that I voted for Donald Trump in the last US presidential election. I believe that the policies he implemented granted Americans the freedom that the country was built on. At the same time, I’m under no illusions about him; his bombastic leadership and communication style have only ripped the American social fabric further apart.

However, I believe President Joe Biden is worse. The lack of accountability he displayed after the blundering withdrawal from Afghanistan shows, in my view, that he is unfit to lead the nation. Beyond that, Biden only seems capable of communicating to existing supporters and alienating the rest of us.

In the run-up to the election, he compared Trump with the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels; the insinuations behind this are reprehensible to anyone who voted for Trump.

If Biden wants his message of unity to be more than a cliché, he must learn to communicate with the entire nation. Vilifying half of them is no way to do that.

America’s division is more than just a feeling. A study co-authored by Brown University’s Jesse Shapiro has found that political polarisation among Americans has grown rapidly in the past 40 years, and has certainly grown faster than in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany.

This polarisation has teeth. While right-wing militias have been on a steady rise since the 1990s, leftists are increasingly taking up arms in response. Are we really surprised that US hate crimes are at their highest level in over a decade?

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High-quality political leadership could soothe this tension; more political blundering and miscommunication could be a match in a tinderbox.

I’m a Republican. I believe that Conservatism has the more astute vision of the human condition; benevolent self-interest is, and always has been, the primary mechanism by which humans organise themselves into a society. I therefore naturally supported Trump, but his leadership style is both a symptom and a cause of America’s increasing polarisation.

In the DISC personality assessment, there are four personality types: D for Dominant, I for Inspiring, S for Supportive and C for Cautious. Trump is what we would call a High D; dominant, decisive, demanding, outgoing and task-oriented. This slipped over into a bully-boy communication style that may have seduced fellow Ds, but alienated the other personality types or temperaments.

Take his presidential campaigns; by resorting to name-calling (“Crooked Hillary”, “Sleepy Joe”), he broke a key leadership principle; you can criticise others’ ideas, but not their character. In doing so, he sent a dangerous message to the American public: I’m a bully and it’s OK for you to be one too.

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This behaviour created the opportunity for Biden to take the high ground. But Biden has missed this chance woefully. Referring to Trump as “sort of like Goebbels” reveals what Biden really thinks of the half of the US population who voted for Trump. A true leader can communicate with those who have different beliefs. Biden’s kind of leadership does the opposite.

And, of course, there’s Afghanistan. Every American watching could see that Biden was being disingenuous when he said “the buck stops with me”. He pointed fingers at the Afghan leaders who “gave up and fled the country” and the Afghan military who gave up, “sometimes without trying to fight”. To blame those you deserted is disgraceful and would not have been lost on the American public.

Weeks later, Biden also referred to the Taliban deal he inherited, which “my predecessor, the former president, signed”.

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So which leaders might we look to, to restore the unity that America so desperately needs? I believe that, in the Republican camp, it was Ronald Reagan who created a blueprint for the kind of leadership America needs today. Asked about age at a debate, he answered: “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

Yet he wasn’t called the “Great Communicator” for witty one-liners. He appealed to every character type; he was the nation’s commander in times of war, and the nation’s grandad in times of peace.

He was able to speak to the dominant, inspiring, supportive and cautious temperaments within the American population; that’s precisely why he was only the second president to win an election by 49 states.

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More recently, Barack Obama represented the kind of communicator that I believe we desperately need; not for his policies, but his ability to make it seem like he was talking to you. Above all, like any good leader, Obama was a listener.

This enabled him to reach across the aisle; he genuinely listened to those with a different point of view. Anybody who watched the 2020 election campaigns would know that this quality is sorely missed in American politics today.

My message for Biden is this: take the time to understand why America is hurting in the first place. Don’t imply that Trump supporters are Nazis. Instead, empathise with why average Americans may feel dejected or left behind by the current liberal status quo. Once you have done that, communicate that message to the DISC types accordingly.

Unity needs to be more than a catchphrase; this country needs both a message and messenger that everyone can believe in. For the past two terms, we have had neither. The current trajectory of name-calling and finger-pointing, on both sides of the aisle, may well end up adding heat to America’s “cold” civil war.

Dave Kauffman is the founder and president of Empowering Small Business LLC, an International Business Coaching firm