The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, hardbound and handsome in ersatz leather, are not a beach read. A typical volume, each a compendium of speeches, statements, and proclamations, weighs four pounds. That is a lot of Presidential prose, much of it leaden. But it does tell a pretty good story. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s declaration of war against Japan appears in the 1941 volume; John F. Kennedy’s pledge to land a man on the moon by the end of the nineteen-sixties shows up near the halfway mark of his first volume. The Papers record some ideas and tropes and tenets that, once introduced, become part of the American lexicon, changing the country; others fall quickly out of vogue. Yet it won’t be until 2019, when the U.S. Government Publishing Office begins to release the papers of President Donald J. Trump, that any volume will have contained the sentence “not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me,” or the transcribed cry of a crowd in Phoenix, incited by a President of the United States, chanting “CNN sucks!”

What the Trump papers will not include—at least, the first volume or two—is much by way of significant speeches. This might be surprising, given that Trump talks, and talks a lot. If a shark, by popular myth, has to keep swimming to stay alive, Trump has to keep talking, keep emitting sound and spouting fury. He has no off switch, no mute button. His rambling, off-the-cuff remarks are like the whine of a circular saw cutting tile all day, a television blaring through the wall all night. No President in modern memory has made more noise. Yet no President in modern memory has given fewer speeches to lesser effect.

Kellyanne Conway, the counsellor to the President, said recently that Trump has used “the power of the bully pulpit” to address the problem of foreign interference in U.S. elections—a comment with just as much credibility as Trump’s own insistence, at Tuesday night’s rally in Phoenix, that he believes, “We are all on the same team. We are all Americans.” The bully has, in truth, largely abandoned the pulpit. It is self-evident that Trump prefers Twitter to any other means of communication, but his indifference to speechmaking is itself an anomaly. To date, Trump has had two modes of public speaking: free-associating (harangues and monologues) and sleep-talking (scripted remarks). Trump’s rallies represent, of course, the first of these; so do his unscripted speeches, which barrel, like a truck without brakes, into a ditch, wheels still spinning, kicking up gravel. This is what the world witnessed on August 15th, when the President stood in the lobby of Trump Tower, in New York, uttered some perfunctory words about construction permits, and then handed his id the microphone. Performances like these are not, in any proper sense, speeches at all, for speeches have structure and direction—they are displays of discipline, not self-gratification.

Trump likes the former mode. Its appeal may be limited to his shrinking, and calcifying, hardcore supporters. But Trump appears to prefer it to the painstaking work of developing a draft and sticking to it. After eight months in office, he still cannot deliver a teleprompter speech that does not seem coerced—as Monday’s prime-time speech, about the war in Afghanistan, made clear. A speech draft, to Trump, is like any other form of constraint, something to be resented and resisted. Or disowned, as he did in that Trump Tower press conference, rehabilitating the white supremacists whom he had denounced (sullenly and belatedly) a day earlier.

Trump’s failure to give a good speech carries a political price. His lack of interest in the details of public policy has prevented him from translating his campaign slogans into concrete proposals. His inability to maintain, on any issue, a consistent or even coherent position has undercut his ability to inspire loyalty and respect on Capitol Hill. He made no big speech about the repeal or replacement of the Affordable Care Act, just stray comments and scattered tweets denigrating Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Republican Party, and the legislative process. He has made no agenda-setting address on infrastructure, not even during the much hyped (by the White House) “infrastructure week,” in June, when he spent much of his time at the podium raising unrelated issues and needling Democrats. On foreign policy, he has made no real attempt to articulate a Trump doctrine or a Trump world view. On trade, he has made no comprehensible case for American retrenchment from the global economy, beyond his assertion that other countries are taking advantage of the U.S. Politico reported this week that the White House is creating a “mini war room” on tax reform as it prepares for a fall push, and that the President will make a “major tax announcement.” But there is no reason to expect that he will—or even that he can—finally make a clear and comprehensive policy proposal.

There is a school of thought that none of this matters—that Winston Churchill, who gave many great speeches himself, was naïve to claim that a leader who has “the gift of oratory . . . wields a power more durable than that of a great king”; that Richard Neustadt, the political scientist who advised Kennedy and other Presidents, was wrong to believe that “Presidential power is the power to persuade.” The shrinking of Presidential stature since the days of J.F.K., as well as the fragmenting of the media environment, has led some skeptics to say that there is little, if any, power left in a Presidential speech. George C. Edwards III, of Texas A. & M. University, has argued that when Presidents “go public,” they do their goals more harm than good; they are “wasting their time.”

This goes too far. It is true that a speech, in a democracy, is not a command; it invites action but can’t impel it. And there is a case to be made—I’m one who has made it—that Presidents talk too much while saying too little. Most Presidents, including Bill Clinton, for whom I wrote speeches, concede this. Yet those volumes of Presidential papers suggest, in at least some of their many pages, that oratory can exert, over time, a kind of cumulative effect—expanding, speech by speech, the breadth of possibility.

Kennedy understood this. In May, 1961, when he issued his call to put a man on the moon, six out of ten Americans said it wasn’t worth its estimated forty-billion-dollar price tag. Kennedy spent the remainder of his Presidency convincing them otherwise. F.D.R. understood it, too. In December, 1940, he gave a fireside chat later known as his “arsenal of democracy” speech. He was preparing the American people for the war that he knew they would need to fight, educating them about the threat posed by long-range bombers and by the Nazi regime, which some Americans hoped, at the time, might listen to reason. “No man,” Roosevelt said, “can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. . . . There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb.” With speeches like these, F.D.R. moved public opinion by degrees. So did Ronald Reagan, who gave, essentially, the same speech for a quarter century before he won the White House, in 1980. His advisers called it, simply, “The Speech,” and it set out the principles of free markets, smaller government, and anti-Communism that would define his two terms as President.

Donald Trump, for his part, will keep on talking. He is, as he intends, dominating the national discussion. But he is not leading it; he is not driving it in any clear direction. His papers—their pages filling up with digressions, obfuscation, invective, and lies—will someday reflect that. And, until his last volume is bound and boxed, the bully pulpit will await a President who can speak the language of American democracy.

*A previous version of this post misstated Donald Trump’s preferred mode of speaking.