His jeremiads against moral decline have made him a fixture of the chat shows and the lecture circuit (where he can command $50,000 a speech).
Management gurus can command $60,000 a speech.Yet the practitioners of this great industry continue to suffer from a severe case of status anxiety.
He currently commands $250,000 a speech, which means it would take fewer than three speeches for him to pay off his entire house.
Mr. Trump commands $100,000 a speech, he said, adding, with his trademark hyperbole, that he was the highest-paid lecturer in the country.
Hunter shows his command of a speech-based free verse learned from William Carlos Williams, using its accents in gritty accounts of determination and endurance, as shown by rural people and the animals they tend.
"Realistically, probably the best you can get is containment and disruption so that Al Qaeda is no longer able to control territory," Gen. Carter F. Ham, the head of the Pentagon's Africa Command, said in a speech in Washington last month.
After presiding over a period of falling real wages that is unprecedented since Victorian times, the pair command more for a speech than their erstwhile constituents could make in a year.
General Petraeus, who has overall responsibility for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as head of the United States Central Command, said in a speech in London on Wednesday, after meeting with Mr. Cameron, that Britain was America's "most trusted and important coalition partner," and he described the security ties between the countries as closer than at any time since World War II.
Thomas Friedman commands $75,000 for a speech, and his books are blockbusters.
Of all the megaphones commanded by a president, a speech delivered to a joint session of Congress is among the grandest.
"The implicit assumption behind that siren call must be that the inflation rate can be manipulated to reach economic objectives — up today, maybe a little more tomorrow, and then pulled back on command," Mr. Volcker said in a speech at the Economic Club of New York a few weeks ago.
