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Dear Donald, Why So Sovereign?

Assigning a Letter Grade to the Tweeter in Chief

By Chelsea KendrickPublished 7 years ago 4 min read
Top Story - September 2017
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Dear Donald,

I'm writing you to discuss the speech you gave in front the United Nations General Assembly. I'm not too pleased with what I heard from you, and many others aren't either.

In order to communicate my feelings about your United Nations speech in the most polite way possible, I am going to give it a letter grade. I want to be objective because you've heard enough subjectivity from the mainstream media and general public. Outlined below are some of my main critiques. Each guideline has a maximum of five points awarded. Please contact me if you wish to see the full rubric, as I will be summarizing quite a bit here.

Word Choice: Your speech was ridiculously repetitive. You said the word sovereign 21 times. If you were in my English class, you would be getting so many points docked for redundancy and overuse of that word. Who is your speech writer? He needs a lesson in effective writing. Repeating the same word 21 times just gives fodder to the media to make fun of you more than they already do. No one was actually talking about your message because they were too distracted by your addiction to sovereign. You're clearly not a stupid guy considering the empire you built and your future historical legacy, so I know you can do better than this elementary speech. Also, "crush those loser terrorists" was a thing you said. Stay consistent with your use of formal voice next time, please. Despite the overuse of sovereign, your vocab was pretty good and diverse in general. You used relatively complex (for you) words such as obligation and ideologies, and I'm pretty sure you didn't say bigly (or "big league"? The debate rages on). All that to say, you receive a 2 from me.

Focus and Ideas: You stood in front of the UN General Assembly to discuss the state of the United Nations, the world, and America. I have to hand it to you here! You managed to stay on topic, which is pretty rare for you considering that you're known to go on petty rants that have nothing to do with what you were originally talking about. Under the surface of your punchy and redundant words, you said some rather frightening stuff. I take points away for fear-mongering. You talked about putting America first and that whole idea was riddled with implied isolationism. You also threatened to "totally destroy" North Korea because the "Rocket Man" (LOL who wrote that?) is trying to kill himself and everyone else. But ya sure hope that won't happen. You half stuck with this guideline and half didn't, but I'm feeling generous so I'll give you a 3.

Sentence Structure: Honestly, good job, I'm impressed. You managed to actually use full sentences consistently. No qualms here! Here's your 5.

Research: I want to get into some fact checking with you now, since you clearly can't figure out what it means to tell the truth. #FakeNews, am I right? I won't get into to all your false statements, because as always, there are too many to count. I'll just list a few examples for you of places where I feel you could have done more research.

"Companies are moving back, creating job growth, the likes of which our country has not seen in a very long time"

This is not really true. Job growth was actually much higher under Obama. In fact, Obama beat out your highest growth month 28 times over the course of his presidency.

"Our country has achieved more against ISIS in the last eight months than it has in many, many years combined."

Not entirely true. While the reclamation of ISIS territory has accelerated faster under Trump, much more was reclaimed under Obama in the past two years.

“We have more people working in the United States today than ever before.”

This is only true because the population of the US continues to grow. If you look at it from a ratio standpoint, it was higher between 1985 and 2009 than it is now.

I know that's pretty nit-picky, but people care about the small details in the real world, and they will call you out if you get them wrong. Because you weren't entirely thorough in your research, you'll be getting a 1.

The highest score you could have received based on these four categories is 20. Your actual score was 11/20. That's a 55%, or an F by standard American grading conventions. While you did well with your sentence structure, it simply wasn't enough to save you.

I look forward to grading more of your speeches, and I do hope you incorporate some of my feedback.

Sincerely,

A disgruntled English snob

trump
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About the Creator

Chelsea Kendrick

Just an Indiana gal who heard the call of the East Coast. Twitter and Instagram: @chel_bk

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