‘The best words’: Trump may be a poet without knowing it

Now those words by the new US president have been pulled together as a “collection of poetry” in Norway.

Who knew? Trump the poet?

“What Trump says is closer to poetry and fiction than to reality,” said the Norwegian man who created the collection, Chris Felt.

“We’re appalled that his rhetoric which seems to have little thought or preparation behind it could have won an electoral campaign,” Felt told the newspaper Aftenposten.

The book’s tongue-in-cheek title is “Make poetry great again”  — a play on Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America great again”.

The content is composed strictly from speeches, interviews and other statements that the 70-year-old has given over the years.

Among the choice bits turned to poems in the book are words about his daughter that Trump said around 10 years ago.

“I have said

if Ivanka

were not my daughter,

perhaps

I would be dating her”

Felt said the words may be “terribly macho, pitiful and confusing but when the quotations have space around them I see other facets of him”.

Reading Trump’s words as poetry Felt said he felt in them “more despair, more insecurity and perhaps an inferiority complex”.

According to the publisher Kagge, the first print run was 2,000 copies — one of which has been sent to Trump. Now the question is whether his penchant for superlatives will make it a “bestseller”.

© Agence France-Presse