Trump’s Self-Interruptions: A Persuasion Tactic

How Trump’s “Tied Tongue” helped him win the White House

Attention plays an important role in persuasion. Capturing and keeping your audience’s attention is critical if you want them to listen to your entire pitch and ultimately buy what you’re selling. But many salespeople view attention incorrectly. Being funny, entertaining, or telling a well-crafted story are all good ways to keep the attention of an audience that is already listening to you. But they do nothing for capturing the attention of an audience that is actively opposed to you.

Another common mistake often made by salespeople is underestimating the value of suspense. They mistakenly believe that a good pitch must get straight to point, strike while the iron is hot. Nothing could be further from the truth. Unless you’re selling something that’s intrinsically sexy, mysterious, unique, or free, the benefits of your product or service probably aren’t that interesting to the listener. Often, the quicker you get to the point of your pitch, the sooner your audience stops listening. Yet, telling the audience why they should buy your product is essential to closing the sale.

Within seconds of engaging a prospect or encountering an audience, you must decide: Are they willing to listen to me? And if they aren’t, there’s a second and even more important question you must ask yourself: Is there some way I can I grab their attention and force them to listen to my pitch against their will? Thankfully, there are a few ways a trained salesperson can do this. I’ve covered one of them in a previous article. Here, I’m going to cover another, subtler method. It’s known as the Zeigarnik Effect. By way of illustration, let’s look back at Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential Campaign.

No matter what else is said about him, Donald Trump is widely recognized as a master of attracting and holding attention. From the moment he enters a room or appears on a TV screen, all eyes are on him for as long as he wishes. He wipes out every other presence around him, directs all eyes and ears onto whatever or whomever he pleases, and controls the tone of almost any conversation he’s having. Things only return to “normal” once he’s said what he had to say, accomplished his goal, and exited stage right. Scott Adams, the author of How To Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, is probably not exaggerating when he says: “Trump’s powers of persuasion are better than I have ever seen from a living human.”

I watched Trump work his persuasion magic especially well a few months ago during his first Presidential Debate with Hillary Clinton. While many have regarded it as the worst performance of his run for office, they fail appreciate that this was his first debate in front of a mixed audience of Republicans and opposition Democrats. He adjusted his tactics accordingly. Early in the debate it was clear to me how he did this. Look at his response to Lester Holt’s first question of the night: “When you look at what’s happening in Mexico — a friend of mine who builds plants said it’s the eighth wonder of the world — they’re building some of the biggest plants anywhere in the world.” Did you spot it?

He began to articulate a thought, then immediately interrupted it. More specifically, he interrupted it with a self-serving interjection. Trump has a friend with relevant knowledge about plants in Mexico, wonderful! A few minutes later he did it again, interjecting a quick comment about his business prowess into a response. And again, attacking Clinton’s unsuccessful record as a politician. Time after time he would start a sentence only to immediately cut himself off with a short self-serving interjection before completing his thought.

As Trump continued to do this, I could see the game unfolding perfectly: he was taking advantage of the Zeigarnik Effect to grab the audience’s attention. Then, while they were listening, he was inserting his pitch: I have friends with relevant knowledge. I have a sterling business record. I’m more suited than Hillary for the job. In other words, Trump was forcing the audience to listen to his pitch despite themselves.

Discovered in the 1920, the Zeigarnik Effect maintains that an interrupted or uncompleted task commands our attention much more than a completed one. In fact, the effect is so powerful that we actually feel uncomfortable until we know the task is complete. It’s why TV cliffhangers are so effective. It’s also part of the reason why songs get stuck in our heads. And, on a micro-level, it’s why we listen to Trump’s interjections even if we don’t want to. And even if they’re exceptionally long, like this one:

As soon as Trump interrupts himself, we’re compelled to pay even more attention to what he’s saying because we feel uncomfortable. We’re held in suspense. On a neurological level we want to hear the end of the sentence, we want the task to be complete and it’s very difficult to pull out attention away until it is. And, of course, that’s exactly where he inserts his pitch.

Trump used the technique so often during that debate that some people on Twitter even began parodying it using the hashtag #TrumpExplainsMoviePlots. To be fair, some of the Tweets are actually pretty funny:

As you’ve probably realized by now: it doesn’t matter how well you argue, the validity of your points, or how well you follow logic — if you do not grab your audience’s attention and then hold them in suspense long enough to get your message across, you’ll never persuade them. You will not win the argument. You will not get the deal done.

Whether he always did it deliberately or not, Trump’s self-interruptions were a simple and effective way to seize and hold a hostile audience’s attention — even for a few seconds. And, in his case, that was long enough. Many news outlets, including CNBC and Time Magazine, reported that winner of the debate was none other than Donald Trump.