“He goes click, click, click, and like 15 seconds later he shows me my speech, written so beautifully.” This is Donald Trump on Logan Paul’s podcast, describing his first encounter with ChatGPT. “I’ve never seen anything like it. And so quickly… It’s a little bit scary… So one industry I think that will be gone are these wonderful speechwriters.” Gulp.
It’s no surprise Trump thinks the end is nigh for us speechwriters. After all, he’s never had much time for our craft. Much to the frustration of his minders, no Trump speechwriter has ever managed to wrestle the pen from the animal id that riffs and rambles, autocue be damned.
Yet the former president’s dire prediction betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what we do. A good speech isn’t just a collection of lovely words — it’s a distillation of a personality, crafted for human consumption. A good speechwriter, then, must be skilled at deciphering human nature and identifying which facets of a person’s character are rhetorically useful.
In other words, speechwriting starts with empathetic skills which, for now at least, are the exclusive preserve of human beings. A large language model can digest billions of words and make a fairly accurate prediction of what a decent convention speech might look like. It can’t make a nuanced judgement about how to shape an amorphous mix of traits, tendencies and convictions into a well-defined character perfect for a particular moment in American history. Not yet, anyway.
If anything, this high tech age has made speechwriters more important, not less. The public has never been exposed to so many messages, and public figures have rarely had so little time to make their case. In such an environment, the value of original, clever writing — especially writing that conveys character with concision and flair — increases hugely.
Many an unlikely political resurrection has begun with ink from a speechwriter’s pen. Three years ago, after a bruising first year as leader of the opposition, Sir Keir Starmer pinpointed his Labour Party conference speech as an opportunity to turn things around. Critics had cast him as wooden, grey, cautious. Which meant the speech (full disclosure: our company wrote it) needed to be colourful and surprising. We included a joke: “My Dad was a toolmaker. And so, in a sense, is Boris Johnson’s.” We weren’t sure if he’d use it — but he did. It featured in the largely glowing write ups and was an important moment in the long, slow fightback that culminated in victory this summer.
A good speechwriter can do what no machine reliably can: surprise. The best speeches expand our sense of who a speaker is. You can, of course, go too far. The words you put in someone’s mouth ought to plausibly belong there. But if you get it right, a speech will deepen, expand and sometimes completely transform perceptions of a speaker.
There are few better recent examples than the speech Kamala Harris gave at the DNC in August. The address was especially important because, compared to most presidential candidates, she was still relatively unknown. Many Americans had a vague sense that she was kind of progressive. Many had no view of her at all. The speech made a brilliant play for the political centre. Like Barack Obama in 2008, she flipped attempts to “other” her by framing her unlikely story as only possible in America. She eschewed grievance or identity politics and instead gave an uplifting account of her life — from McDonalds to the White House — grounded in a love of her country. You may debate the validity of that argument but it is a winning one for the American electorate — and certainly not something a machine could pull off.
A month before Harris’s big speech, Trump came close to achieving a similar feat of redefinition. Days after a failed assassination attempt, the stage at the RNC was set for a conciliatory address that united his MAGA base with Trump-averse mainstream Republicans. Ahead of the speech, his team insisted Trump was a changed man. Expect a message of unity, they said. It was going well, until he abandoned the autocue. As one journalist said: “The ‘new’ Donald Trump soothed and silenced the nation for 28 minutes last night. Then the old Trump returned and bellowed, barked and bored America for 64 minutes more.” Should’ve stuck to the script, Donald.