“Trump is saying to me, ‘Look out the window, there are all those photographers. Maybe we should go out together and announce this.’ And I said to him, ‘I don’t think we should go out together because honestly Mr. President, I don’t know what you’d say and I might have to contradict you.’ He laughed. Then Kelly was standing there, and I said, ‘I bet General Kelly has the same problem,’ and they both laughed. That’s what was happening.” —Senator Charles Schumer, explaining a photograph by Alex Wong to Carl Hulse, of the Times.

One paradox of our current political moment—among too many to count, this might be the deepest—is that Donald Trump, almost certainly the least verbally deft President in America’s history, has also written, on Twitter, or said aloud, from the podium, some of the most widely scrutinized sentences in recent memory. Online, his words travel with a speed that seems only to have quickened since Inauguration Day. In person, he alternates between thrilling rally-style crowds and duelling with, or simply talking at, the White House press corps, in both cases playing, above all, to the cable-news watchers on their couches and in their office chairs. Nobody seems able to ignore him. And so, despite his pose as a “doer in a game usually reserved for talkers,” as Mike Pence once described him, and his famous allergy to text-heavy briefing documents, Trump’s Presidency has become exceedingly—even primarily—verbal. Increasingly, the only way to understand its rhythms is to check the record and untangle his syntax.

It wasn’t so with his predecessor. For all the talk about Barack Obama’s way with a speech, the skirmishes that marked his tenure were generally rooted in the action—or, often, inaction—of the government that he led. Republicans decried the collectivism of the auto bailout and the Affordable Care Act, progressives the creepiness of the drone war and the F.B.I.’s hunger for private communications. Neither group spent much time asking the question that seems so commonplace today: Did you hear what he just said? One exception might be Obama’s infamous issuing of a “red line”—no chemical weapons, or else—with respect to Bashar al-Assad’s murderous dealings in the Syrian civil war. But even there, the proof was in the doing. The doves who rued the initial utterance were generally happy when, after confirming that Assad had, in fact, used sarin gas against his fellow-Syrians, Obama went back on his word and declined to act militarily. And those who complained that in flip-flopping the President had diminished American credibility were, largely, those who would have cheered a military strike, no matter which promises had preceded it.

Obama’s words pointed to possible deeds; even his most high-flown abstractions reflected attitudes that made their way, however altered by contingency or by faintness of heart, into the work of governance. Trump, on the other hand, seems to think that words stand in for, or maybe even supersede, the facts that follow real decisions. It’s telling that the most consequential recent policy announcement of this Administration—the repeal of DACA—was carried out not by Trump but by the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, who, for many weeks beforehand, had appeared to operate under a self-imposed vow of silence, seemingly hoping that the President might forget his name. Trump’s role since then, tweeting out confusing and possibly errant assurances to the “Dreamers” whose lives he has thrown into upheaval, has been that of a bad jazz sideman: he free-associates around a melody he probably never understood.

The great fear, in a nation whose bursts of righteous action have often been spurred on by artful words, is that Trump might prove to be America’s Chicken Little, the loudmouth who convinces us to tune out for good. It’s another paradox, then, that the latest Trump story line, a bipartisan debt-limit deal, features Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, two Democratic actors known better for their back-room exploits than for the power of their oratory. Schumer, especially, is a storied private gabber, in the Senate hallways and on the telephone, but he’s never been much on the stump. This might account, at least in part, for the odd attraction between him and Trump. “We’re New Yorkers,” Schumer told Carl Hulse, of the Times, in an interview about the deal he and Pelosi made with the President. “We’re pretty direct and we talk right at each other.” Schumer excels at informal speech, the kind that allows for the stray bit of bombast or bluster but may not hold up under the kind of attention we pay to Presidential rhetoric—the kind of speech, in other words, above which Trump never rises. What works in the cloakroom can turn disastrous in the Rose Garden. Schumer knows this, but Trump can’t get it into his head.

The most striking aspect of a recent photograph, by Alex Wong, for Getty, is that Trump’s mouth, that maw, is firmly shut. One hand rests on Schumer’s bicep, the other on his opposite shoulder, and Schumer’s pointer finger, mid-flourish, wafts perilously close to the President’s face. Wong captured the picture from somewhere outside the Oval Office, his view impeded by a huddle of violet flowers. The flowers are blurred into near-abstraction, and the tissue-paper effect—the figures are concealed, but not really—suggests the porousness of Trump’s janky operation. Something’s always slipping out.

Schumer’s glasses sit low, at the crest of the bulb of his nose—there’s a clear, unobstructed line between his eyes and Trump’s. His lips are pursed, but open. He seems determined—and in this I hope he stands in for the rest of us—to get the last word.