For a Republican, it is hard to be more of a D.C. insider than James Rosebush.  Rosebush was a deputy assistant to President Reagan, the chief of staff to first lady Nancy Reagan, and a senior adviser at the White House.  As the CEO of an international consulting firm, he continues to live in Washington and was surely one of the 4% of D.C. citizens who voted for Trump in 2016.

In his forthcoming book, Winning Your Audience: Deliver a Message with the Confidence of a President, Rosebush shares many of his fascinating experiences in the Reagan White House beginning as a young "advance man" for the president in 1981.  This is the rare "how to" book that is grounded in historically significant speeches and other media events.

What I found most compelling about the book is Rosebush's take on Donald Trump.  Unlike so many old Reaganites and Bushites, Rosebush gets the man and understands his style.

In comparing Trump to Reagan, "the great communicator," Rosebush does not sell Trump short.  As he sees it, both men have grasped "the importance and value of being in a synchronous cadence with their audience."  Both have fed their audiences what they have wanted and needed to hear.  "Every speech for both leaders," writes Rosebush, "has been a value play — Reagan's designed to achieve policy gains, and Trump's more political."

Rosebush's description of Trump's speaking style captures what so many of Trump's opponents have failed to grasp at their own peril.  Writes Rosebush:

Trump is a master at knowing his audience, having absolute confidence in his beliefs, defining good and evil, using repetition, and being consistent, loud, and simple in his use of words. These tactics have won him loyalty and large, boisterous crowds that show excitement about his points of view and appreciation for his sticking with them.

Trump's enemies underestimated him in no small part because they had grown so used to speaking and hearing what George Orwell famously called "political language," designed "to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

In Winning Your Audience, Rosebush shows the aspiring speaker and student of history how to ground words in reality.  Better still, he does so in a way that is both informative and entertaining.  This is a vanishing talent.  How Rosebush preserved it inside the Beltway deserves another volume.