Oversize Presentation Board Makes Global Waves

Who made this chart? Aesthetically pleasing 📊 pic.twitter.com/RviMBMW6cR

— vanG0AT (@VanG0xH) April 2, 2025

Seldom can a presentation aid garner so much global media coverage.

Let us, if we can, separate the message from the medium.

For I am known to bang on about this particular tactic once in a while.

And such 'once' is very much to the fore right now with this outdoor setting usage.

Here's how but one commentator, CNN's Jake Tapper put it;

"Mr. Trump busted out a giant chart, as is his want to show the specific details".

It seems that these flipchart page boards weren't the original plan. Here's Trump;

"... it's very windy out here, we didn't want to bring out the big charts because it had no chance of standing. Fortunately, we came up with a little spoiler."

He might have been referring to the kind of huge screens he used at his campaign rallies last year. More likely, the kind of easel with each board mounted on has he's used in the past in front of and beside his podium.

The size duly deployed seems akin to previous displays, like his 'Gulf of America' vibe from earlier this year.

After being handed the prop by his Secretary of Commerce, he explained the columns of the numbers alongside each country named. The left of the pair;

"That's tariffs charged to the USA, including currency manipulation and trade barriers".

(Although the actual formula appears derived from a more prosaic proportional trade imbalance figure). Then the right, yellow one, with their new 'reciprocal tariff' rate. Delivered with trademark justification;

"... in other words, they charge us, we charge them, we charge them less.
So how can anybody be upset?
They will be because we never charge anybody anything, but now we're going to charge."

Such physical manifestation of your pitch should always make a lasting impression.

A table can so often be the ideal way to present data.

Yet strangely there's often the misguided compulsion to snazzily 'dataviz' it up.

In this case, the colours must have got chosen for a reason.

The alternating light-blue/white rows. The yellow end-column. The dark blue background.

The title and labels too. Understated. Set out verbally.

Then there's the volume. Can you really go against the Edward Tufte grain?

"Tables usually outperform graphics in reporting on small data sets of 20 numbers or less".

This table's data set is 25. Being around a mere eighth (13½pc to be precise) of the full set of 185 countries worldwide listed. And yes, including (the ploy for?) the islands only inhabitated by penguins. [Turns out an anti-loophole device, ploy indeed.]

Yet to merely hold one board aloft (of the eight) is to help make the speaker's point.

Even when this was only the 'starting' board.

On 'stage', he surely knew he'd be framed dead-centre of the container. As in set square in the resulting transmission cell. Which in our days of phone screens means portrait viewing gives you less room to play with than when landscape.

The dampening effect here is twofold.

One of the glass angled autocue screens can get in the way.

The bottom-third of his board is obscured.

Lifting the chart up and leaning on the lectern front edge may well counter each of those.

Yet the board still played his card.

Will your prospects remember your hand?