This Is the Voice

by John Colapinto

  Joseph Goebbels, the head of Nazi propaganda, agreed that what Hitler said was immaterial; it was how he said it. In 1936, Goebbels wrote about Hitler’s voice and its power to “reach out from the depths of his blood into the depths of the souls of his listeners,” to “rouse the tired and lazy, fire up the indifferent and the doubting, turn cowards into men and weaklings into heroes.”43 At no point did Goebbels say that Hitler achieved these effects through the precision of his language, or the rationality of his ideas. Quite the contrary. “The important thing is not whether an idea is right,” Goebbels wrote, “the decisive thing is whether one can present it effectively to the masses so that they become its adherents”—and that was done through the power of Hitler’s voice. “The magic of his voice reaches men’s secret feelings,” Goebbels wrote. “There is probably no educated person in the world who has not heard the sound of his voice and who, whether he understood the words or not [my italics] felt that his heart was spoken to.”44

  A special division of British intelligence dedicated to monitoring Hitler’s speeches for signs of his mental state formed its own theory of Hitler’s voice during the Second World War. Noting that he tended to begin each address in a quiet register that built to a sustained crescendo, British intelligence believed that Hitler, in his fitlike climaxes, entered a “trance” that resembled that of a Shaman—the healers and medicine men of indigenous tribes who transmit “messages from the spirits” through sustained, hypnotic chanting. One intelligence report suggested that the epilepsy-like neural firing in Hitler’s brain was transferred, through his vocal sound waves, to his listeners’ brains where it touched off a symmetrical neural fit, synchronizing them into an entrained state of rage and blood lust.45 Others explained the contagious fury of Hitler’s voice in purely psychological terms, focusing on the depressed state of the German people before Hitler’s rise—a state of defeat and despair that predisposed them to react to the rousing stimulus of a demagogic voice whose sonic furor carried a single message: Germany will rise again.

  One thing is certain: the sound of that voice sparked an extraordinary reaction in the populace that was reflected in the vertiginous growth of Hitler’s crowds: a year after his maiden speech to just over 100 people, he spoke at the Zirkus Krone, the largest hall in Munich, to an audience of 5,600; nine months later, he held a Nazi rally that drew 14,000; two weeks after that, he drew 20,000. These rallies would often degenerate into violent mosh pits as his followers, coaxed to frenzy by his voice, fought each other and Hitler’s stormtrooper security detail.

  To these live audiences were added the millions Hitler reached through the radio. The French-American novelist George Steiner was a child when Hitler consolidated his hold over Germany in the 1930s. Steiner told author Ron Rosenbaum about the “spellbinding” power of Hitler’s voice as it leapt over the airwaves and into the room: “my earliest memories are of sitting in the kitchen hearing the voice on the radio. It’s a hard thing to describe, but the voice itself was mesmeric.… The amazing thing is that the body comes through on the radio. I can’t put it any other way.”46

  Hard as it is to comprehend in retrospect, Hitler first came to power in Germany through normal democratic electoral processes: in 1932, he ran against General Paul von Hindenburg in the presidential elections, and although he came in second, he garnered nearly 37 percent of the vote—a remarkable tally for a man who preached murderous hatred against anyone but Germans of pure “Aryan” blood. Up to this point, Germany’s intelligentsia and business elite treated Hitler as a buffoon and joke. No more. Seeing the fevered following of millions that Hitler had built up, business leaders pressed Hindenburg to make room for the Nazi party within the government. Hindenburg reluctantly agreed and appointed Hitler chancellor. Four weeks later, on February 27, 1933, the German parliamentary building, the Reichstag, was mysteriously lit on fire by unidentified terrorists (many historians believe the fire was set on Hitler’s orders). This triggered a national panic like that which followed the 9/11 attacks in America. Hitler railed that the arson was by communists and Jews bent on overthrowing the government, and convinced Hindenburg to suspend basic civil rights, allowing mass detentions without trial. Some four thousand communists, and suspected communists, were locked up.

  In new elections, a month later, the Nazi party secured still more of the vote: 43.9 percent—enough for Hitler to seize control. Using the very structures of democracy to dismantle the country’s democratic institutions, Hitler claimed that the communist-terrorist-Jewish risk to Germany required desperate measures, and he wrote new laws without the consent of parliament, a dramatic and unprecedented departure from the constitution. Now, on Hitler’s say-so, rival parties could be legally shut down. They were—and their assets seized. Hitler’s stormtroopers, acting legally, destroyed union offices across Germany, and their leaders were interned in the concentration camps hastily being constructed across the country. In July, Hitler declared his Nazi party the only legal political entity in Germany, which empowered him, lawfully, to go after his political adversaries. They were rounded up, arrested, and shot.

  Hitler seized control of all opposition newspapers and radio stations and arrested their owners, silencing all dissent. When Hindenburg died in July at age eighty-five, Hitler became both head of the country and the armed forces. He soon launched his war of global conquest—a war that would result in defeat for Germany and the deaths of some 75 million people, soldier and civilian, including a genocide against six million Jews: a staggering Holocaust that had begun, improbably enough, in a smoky Munich beer cellar with an outburst that revealed to Hitler an unsuspected political gift: his voice. As Raoul de Roussy de Sales wrote in the preface to My New Order, “he started as a soap-box orator and spoke his way to power.”47

  * * *

  The horrors Hitler unleashed seemed to alert the world to the dangers of demagoguery, populist movements, and dictatorship. Over the ensuing half century, democracy spread around the world, helped indeed by oratory like JFK’s Ich bin ein Berliner speech. But at the dawn of the new century, political scientists noted a worrying global trend: democracies were beginning to weaken and fail. Since 2010, populist political parties with charismatic, demagogic, antidemocratic leaders espousing anti-immigrant rhetoric, promoting nationalism and de-globalization have gained power and influence throughout Europe—in countries including Poland, Hungary, Austria, the Netherlands, and France.48 Likewise in Brazil and India. The root causes of this lurch from democracy are consistent across all nations: an erosion of living standards for the middle class through growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority of the rich (the very trend FDR had turned back with the New Deal); the increasing multiethnic makeup of countries (which allows for the whipping up of racist sentiment against the other); and a declining legacy media with the rise of the internet and the easy spread of propaganda and fake news.

  When political scientists poll people on their attitudes to democracy today, only one-third of Americans in their twenties and thirties say it is “very important.” In Sweden, a chilling 26 percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds say that having one strong leader would be better than bothering with elections every few years.49 In June 2016, England was swept up in the global populist wave, through an emotional call to nationalism, anti-immigration, and economic self-determinism by the cynical, dishonest, demagogic oratory of Tory Boris Johnson, UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage, and House of Commons leader Jacob Rees-Mogg. To the world’s shock and surprise, England voted to leave the European Union, with Brexit.

  Even with the dangers of demagoguery striking so close to home, America’s political and pundit class continued to declare that it can’t happen here, and in the months, weeks, and days leading up to the November 8, 2016, presidential election, pollsters and other “experts” confidently predicted that the winner would be Democrat Hillary Clinton. Hours into election night itself, the New York Times’s now-notorious “election needle�
� indicated that there was a better than 80 percent likelihood of Clinton becoming the first woman president of the United States.

  * * *

  A little more than one year and four months earlier, on June 16, 2015, Donald Trump, a sixty-nine-year-old failed real estate developer, bankrupted casino magnate, and star of a declining reality television show, mounted a stage in the lobby of the midtown Manhattan skyscraper bearing his name, adjusted the microphone on the podium, and announced his candidacy for president. What everyone would remember was his offensive claim that Mexicans who come to America are “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”—the most nakedly racist statement uttered by a political candidate in recent American history. But the volume and pitch at which Trump blared this piece of hate speech was almost as jarring as the statement itself. His voice cut through the air like a cabbie’s horn on Fifth Avenue. At least to some ears, it was a voice instantly disqualifying as leader of the free world, and not only in terms of the malignant ideas it bodied forth.

  For one thing, it was too high. Multiple studies of voice and electability have shown that speakers with a higher pitch consistently lose to candidates with a lower fundamental frequency50—a finding applicable also to women when going head-to-head against each other in an election. And Trump, despite being relatively tall at six-foot-two, has a notably high voice, indeed several Hertz higher than average,51 which sends a signal not of dominance but submission. This evolutionary “disadvantage” actually explains a peculiarity that has been seized on by every comedian attempting to impersonate him: namely, the unusual way that he purses his lips and pushes them outward as he speaks. The only credible explanation that I have come across for this highly unusual articulatory habit are findings from a scientific paper coauthored, almost five decades ago, by Chomsky’s linguistic nemesis, Philip Lieberman.

  In the early 1970s, Lieberman studied why prepubertal boys and girls can, in many instances, be told apart by the sound of their vocal pitch even though they possess vocal cords and resonance chambers of equal size, and thus should sound identical. He discovered that many prepubertal boys, in an unconscious bid to lower their voice and distinguish themselves from girls, round and extend their lips while talking, increasing the overall length of the vocal tract, boosting the lower frequencies in the voice spectrum, and giving the illusion of a deeper voice.52 For a person like Trump, so consumed by the need to dominate and be the alpha male in every circumstance, it seems likely that—sometime after puberty and upon his perceiving that he possesses a less dominant voice than other males—he intuitively hit on the expedient of rounding and pushing out his lips to lower his pitch slightly.

  Excessive volume was another way that Trump learned to overcome the innate disadvantage of his “submissive” pitch. The blaring, shouting register that he used when announcing his candidacy would characterize all his subsequent public appearances as candidate and later president—even when not standing beside an idling helicopter.

  Blaring volume is an instinctive reflex for weaponizing the voice, and one exaggerated by blowhards and domineering personalities everywhere, but Trump’s use of this approach also derived from a most unlikely source: the years he spent in the 1980s and 1990s playing host, at his Atlantic City casinos, to the WWE professional wrestling championships.53 There, Trump absorbed important lessons about how to whip up popular support from exactly the disaffected, blue-collar, Rust Belt demographic that would enthusiastically (and decisively) pull the lever for him in the election. Although professional wrestlers are supposedly athletes and fighters, the ones that become most popular with the public—who “get over,” in wrestling parlance—are those who dominate in the verbal smackdowns at ringside. Hulk Hogan, by no means the most skilled in the ring, nevertheless became the most famous, and well-paid, wrestler of his era thanks to his shouting matches against opponents. Trump’s vocal style is pure pro wrestling.

  At first, the media treated Trump’s candidacy as a joke: television covered it as a ratings-grabbing car crash, and online platforms as clickbait. The Huffington Post put all Trump coverage in their Entertainment section. (“Our reason is simple. Trump’s campaign is a sideshow.”)54 But six months later, Trump was the front-runner for the Republican nomination and feeling emboldened. On December 7, 2015, he held a press conference in which he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”—a proposal that smacked too much of an earlier demagogue’s demonization of an entire religion. Arianna Huffington announced that her site was shifting Trump coverage from the Entertainment to the Politics section owing to Trump’s “vicious pronouncement,” which showed that his campaign had “morphed” into “an ugly and dangerous force.”55

  In reality, the ugliness and danger had been there for all to see for decades. In 1973, Trump and his father were charged, by the Department of Justice, with discriminating against potential tenants on racial grounds.56 In 1989, when five Black and Hispanic teenagers were arrested and railroaded into confessing to the beating of a woman jogging in Central Park, Trump took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for their summary execution.57 (DNA evidence and a confession by the actual perpetrator later exonerated all five suspects, but Trump, during his presidential campaign, said that he still believed them guilty.)58 In 1990, it emerged, from the divorce deposition of Trump’s first wife, Ivana, that Trump kept, beside the marital bed, a copy of Hitler’s speeches: My New Order—the collection translated by Raoul de Roussy de Sales. “If I had these speeches,” Trump told Marie Brenner of Vanity Fair, “and I’m not saying that I do, I would never read them.”59

  In Fear, a chronicle of Trump’s political ascent and first year in office, author Bob Woodward says that Steve Bannon, in agreeing to work on Trump’s campaign, did so only after careful evaluation of Trump’s advantages over Hillary Clinton. It all came down to their voices. “He spoke in a voice that did not sound political,” Bannon told Woodward. “Her tempo was overly practiced. Even when telling the truth, she sounded like she was lying to you.” Hillary’s voice, Bannon added, came “not from the heart or from deep conviction, but from some highly paid consultant’s talking points—not angry.”60

  As shockingly angry as Trump’s voice sounded, it was not unprecedented in modern presidential politics. In 1992, Pat Buchanan, a former special consultant to Richard Nixon, had mounted a primary challenge for the Republican nomination against George H. W. Bush. Although never descending to Trump’s simian bellowing, Buchanan spoke in snarling, pugilistic tones that, at the time, were startling. But Buchanan’s effort to whip up a populist movement founded on splitting America along divisions of race, income, and “cultural values” got nowhere. America was, at the time, entering one of the longest economic booms in history, the country was not at war, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were years away. Cicero would have known that it was not an opportune moment for a demagogue.

  But by the time Donald Trump faced off against Hillary Clinton, America was in very different condition. A Republican-controlled House and Senate had blocked every Obama initiative, resulting in political paralysis in Washington. Large segments of the Midwest had been decimated by the decades-long flight of factory jobs to the developing world: unemployed factory workers had succumbed to the anger and resentment that Obama had warned against in his “More Perfect Union” speech, when he beseeched Americans not to see “opportunity as a zero-sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.” Trump did the precise opposite. In campaign rallies that filled 2,000-, 3,000-, 8,000-, and 20,000-seat arenas, Trump urged out-of-work white Americans to see their predicament as the fault of Mexican immigrants and other dark-skinned interlopers. As a solution to terrorism, he repeated his call for banning Muslims from entering the country. Rather than try to heal the growing partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans, he fired up red state voters by vowing not only to beat Hillary Clinton, but to jail her. Sacrificing reasone
d argument to brief, quick-fix slogans that could be roared from the podium, and echoed back to him in unison by the thousands who packed his rallies, Trump led his followers in chants of “Build the Wall!” “Lock Her Up!” “Make America Great Again!” His stadium rallies became cauldrons of violence. When a heckler at a rally in Las Vegas was manhandled by Trump’s supporters, Trump shouted from the stage: “You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on stretchers, folks!” To the roars of the crowd, he added: “I’d like to punch him in the face.”61 At a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Trump told the crowd how to handle protesters: “Knock the crap out of them, would you?” he said, to a cyclone of cheers and laughter. “I will pay the legal fees, I promise you.”62 At a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, Trump hinted at a more draconian method for dealing with his Democratic rival than merely locking her up. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks,” Trump said. “Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know!”63