President Donald Trump and His Political Discourse

Ramifications of Rhetoric via Twitter

Michele Lockhart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351038768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Estudios de comunicación

President Donald Trump and His Political Discourse brings together a diverse collection of perspectives on President Trump's Twitter rhetoric. Truly unique in its in-depth exploration, the volume demonstrates the ways in which international and U.S. relations, media and "fake news, " and marginalized groups, among other things, have been the subject of President Trump's tweets. It also features qualitative–quantitative analyses, evaluating tweet patterns, broader language shifts, and the psychology of President Trump's Twitter voice. The purpose of this collection is not only to analyze the language used but also to consider the ramifications of the various messages on both individual and global levels, for which Trump is both celebrated and criticized. Interdisciplinary in approach, this collection is a useful resource for students in political rhetoric and communication, international relations, linguistics, journalism, leadership studies, and more.

PART I

The Campaign, the Twittersphere, and the “New Age” of Rhetoric

Truth versus Reality

1

Seizing the Populist Rhetorical Toolkit

A Comparative Analysis of Trump and Clinton’s Discourse on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign

Francisco Seoane Pérez, Irene Asiaín Román and Javier Lorenzo Rodríguez

A Postmodern Campaign

The 2016 presidential campaign might be remembered as the one in which populism met digital social media. The “insulting” rhetoric of the then real estate tycoon and reality TV celebrity Donald Trump, and who Korostelina (2017, 50) describes as “The Great Insulter”, catalyzed the anger of a frustrated electorate, especially in those counties “with more economic distress, worse health, higher drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates, lower educational attainment, and higher marital separation/divorce rates” (Monnat and Brown 2017, 228). Although Facebook might have been more effective in spreading tailored political advertisements and in raising micro-donations, Twitter became the social medium of choice for influencing the journalistic agenda. Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy on this social network, but it would be her eventual rival who would keep journalists and the public abreast with his tweets.

The 2016 election was in many ways a showcase of digital politics’ darkest features, such as uncivil language, polarization, disinformation, rumors, and lies (Collanyi et al. 2016; Owen 2018; Shanahan 2018). Trump’s own victory as presidential candidate was for commentators like journalist Jeet Heer the confirmation of postmodernism’s wildest predictions. We would be entering a world “where media overload is destroying a sense of a shared reality” (Heer 2017, para. 2). Trump would have been rewarded, in pure postmodernist fashion, for his performance, not for the truthfulness of what he is, a dubious real estate mogul, or what he says: His claim about Obama’s birth outside the United States being the first of his many conspiracy theories (Uscinski 2016). Trump’s reliance on his own celebrity vindicates Daniel J. Boorstin’s early insight that modern fame and name recognition are not grounded on any objective merit but on one’s constant presence in the media spotlight (Boorstin [1962] 2012). Following postmodernist authors like Frederic Jameson or Jean Baudrillard, Heer deems Trump “unreal,” a “simulacra businessman” (Heer 2017, para. 7).

The relevance of social media such as Facebook or Twitter as a source of campaign information was certified by a Pew Research Center report (2016). Nearly half (44%) of U.S. adults followed campaign news on social media and one-fourth (24%) said they read posts from Trump and Clinton (2016). As Williams underscores, the percentage of the American population following the campaign via social media is larger than the proportion of citizens reading either local or national newspapers (Williams 2017).

It is Donald Trump himself who has, in his traditional hyperbolic tone, stated the relevance of social media, and particularly Twitter, for his campaign. Without Twitter, he claimed, he would not have become the President (Baynes 2017). As of Election Day, November 8, 2016, Trump had reached 12.9 million followers, two million more than Clinton (10.2 million followers). The difference in levels of engagement was even higher, both on Twitter and Facebook: In a study that analyzed three weeks during May 2016, the Pew Research Center (2016) revealed that Trump tweeted or posted on Facebook with a similar frequency as Clinton or Sanders, but that Trump received much more attention from users. Trump’s tweets were five times more likely to be retweeted than Clinton’s, and the number of shares on Facebook was eight times higher for Trump than for Clinton. While some argue that Trump did not do well during the televised debates (Decker 2016) and missed the editorial endorsement of traditional pro-Republican newspapers, his Twitter account continued to grow with supporters and engagement. According to a comparative study of the Twitter accounts of Trump and Clinton by Darwish et al. (2017), the Republican candidate beat his Democratic rival on several measures: Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again” resonated much more than Clinton’s “Stronger Together.” The second most frequent category of hashtags benefitting Clinton was about attacking Trump (e.g. #TrumpTapes, #TangerineNightmare, and #InterrogateTrump), which led these researchers to affirm that Clinton “was framed in reference to her rival” (Darwish et al. 2017, 156). Trump was also more effective in promoting campaign activities in swing states (153).

Twitter and social media were instrumental for Trump on several grounds. First, they allowed him to subvert the agenda-setting power of mainstream news media. His Twitter statements and his own celebrity status granted him $3 billion in free media coverage (Higgins 2016). Second, his campaign reliance on Facebook for targeted advertising helped Trump avoid expenditure on cable TV, saving funds and competing effectively with a much more experienced and financially resourced rival like Clinton (Allison et al. 2016).

Going Low

However sage, Trump’s online campaigning was marred by its unfair play on two dimensions: the circulation of conspiracy theories and the use of an extremely uncivil tone that received accusations of racism and sexism (Korostelina 2017).

Twitter is well known for its propensity to be a platform for astroturfing, by which fake accounts simulate a widely popular uproar for or against a candidate. There is even a black market of fake Twitter accounts that can be used to create false trending topics. The hashtag #HillaryDown was among those promoted by an army of Twitter bots (Shane 2017). In an article entitled “Trump vs. Hillary: What went Viral during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” Kareem Darwish et al. (2017) found that 60% of the shared links in retweets during the campaign included attacks on Clinton, and that half of those linked to sites of mixed credibility. Among such sites, one was created in June 2016 by Russian intelligence: DC Leaks. It was used as a platform to publish hacked emails from notable Democratic donors, such as financier George Soros, as well as other materials from a former North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) commander and Democratic and Republican party staffers. This site was promoted online from several fake Twitter accounts simulating average U.S. citizens, including pictures of individuals and their families in their profiles to make their claims more credible and difficult to trace back to their actual Russian origin (Shane).

Misinformation was used strategically by Trump, according to linguist George Lakoff (2017). When pressured to explain his connections with Russia, the Republican candidate diverted attention by accusing Obama of wiretapping the Trump Tower. Lakoff used this tweet to illustrate four typical strategies in Trump’s tweets: “pre-emptive framing” (para. 7), creating a new scandal with no evidence; “deflection” (para. 8), putting the burden of proof on Obama; “diversion” (para. 9), Trump goes away with his false accusations, diverting attention from his Russian links; and “trial balloons” (para. 10), testing whether this conspiracy theory is believable enough to be used as an effective distraction.

The most memorable speech of the 2016 campaign did not belong to any of the rival candidates, but to the then First Lady, Michelle Obama. During the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 25, 2016, Obama lent Clinton what could be considered the Democratic motto of the campaign: “When they go low, we go high” (Washington Post Staff, July 26, 2016). Just a few days before, the Clinton campaign had aired a TV advertisement with children watching a selection of Donald Trump’s most derisive statements, warning about the dangers of taking such an unconventional candidate as a role model.

Ad hominem attacks, traditionally avoided by presidential candidates, were one of Trump’s rhetorical marks (Jamieson and Taussig 2017). Winberg (2017) uses the term “insult politics” to define “a certain campaign rhetoric that is centered not on criticism per se, but on ad hominem attacks of a disparaging nature aimed at an individual or group” (3; emphasis in original). The insults drew not only media coverage but also editorial criticism and rejection from classic Republicans. So salient was Trump’s disdainful language that The New York Times made a count of the number of people the Republican candidate had “insulted” on Twitter before Election Day. Of the 8,000 tweets Trump published during the campaign, 12.5% were considered “insulting” by The New York Times (Lee and Quealy 2016). These were targeted at 300 individuals. Examples include attacks on Republican rivals such as Ted Cruz: “[…] not very presidential. […]” (Trump May 3, 2016); the mainstream media: “[…] the dishonest media […]” (July 25, 2016); foreign executives: “Mexico’s totally corrupt gov’t […]” (July 13, 2015); and international trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA): “[…] the worst economic deal in U.S. history […]” (May 17, 2016).

The linguistic anthropologist Adam Hodges has identified two roles that Trump would be adopting when insulting and exaggerating: the “schoolyard bully” and the “snake oil salesman” (207). “Insults, by their very nature, accord with the schoolyard bully persona, but those tweets also epitomize the rhetorical moves of the snake oil salesman –the language of advertising at its slimiest” (207). Hodges finds in Trump’s own concept of “truthful hyperbole,” defined by the candidate himself as “an innocent form of exaggeration” (Trump and Schwartz [1987] 2015, 58), the evidence of Trump’s own self-consciousness as a charlatan.

Inductively, Hodges (2017) extracts from the careful reading of Trump’s tweets a formula, a method for producing tweets the Trump way: write a derogatory noun (e.g. “clown”), add a gratuitous modifier (e.g. “stupid”) and a vacuous intensifier (e.g. “really”). The formulaic Trump tweet (“really stupid clown”) is there. Examples include calling Bloomberg’s journalist Tim O’Brien a “[…] really stupid talking head[s] […]” (Trump July 23, 2015) or naming Fox News Channel Chris Stirewalt a “[…] really dumb puppet[s] […]” (October 15, 2015).

Such was the success of Trump’s insult politics during the Republican primaries that rival candidate Marco Rubio tried to imitate Trump’s disrespectful language, to no avail. The defensive reaction by the mainstream media and the Republic establishment to Trump’s disrespectful language were turned into a virtue: This reinforced Trump’s image of an outsider candidate, reinforcing his claim of authenticity (Enli 2017).

Trump broke the norms of presidential oratory, disrupting “the sanitized, prepackaged rhetoric of his predecessors” (Jamieson and Taussig 2017, 620). Although this has brought him notoriety, it has had a negative impact as well: 70% of the general electorate disapproved of him during the campaign (Clement 2016); he won the election with one of the lowest popular votes in history (Kentish 2016), and he had the lowest approval rate of any president when he took the oath of office in January 2017 (Farber 2017). The strategy of rumors and insults is not one without side effects, but it proved effective, perhaps because of the extraordinary polarization of the electorate. Polarization in U.S. society runs so high that any fact-checking revelations are filtered through ideological blinkers, preventing any agreement on the possibility of unbiased evidence (Tharoor 2017).

Although electorally successful, Trump’s insult politics may have alienated many Americans: A poll by Quinnipiac University reported that 64% of U.S. citizens wanted the president to close his account on Twitter (Lui 2017). But authors like Kreis (2017) see a danger of “normalization of right-wing populist discourses” due to Trump’s status as president. A report by the Data & Society Institute has alerted the use of humor, irony, and ambiguity by the so-called ‘alt-right’ to make its racist and sexist discourse more palatable (Wilson 2017).

Personal Connection

When invited to give her account on the 2016 presidential campaign to the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, The Atlantic’s political correspondent Molly Ball confessed she had been impressed by the “sports-like connection” between Trump and his followers (Shorenstein Center 2016). When recalling a rally in South Carolina, Ball said,

It felt joyful, there was a profound catharsis, there was a profound emotional connection that the people in the crowd were making to this performer up on the stage…they were connecting on an emotional level, on a level of identity, in a way that I have rarely seen in politics. I think that’s why people who hard core support Donald Trump cannot be moved off of that, no matter what policy flip-flops he makes or offensive statements…because they’re connected not in the way that people connect with a boring Jeb Bush policy paper that they’ve read on a website, but in the way that they connect with their sports team…they really feel like members of a group, like their voice is being heard in a way that it hasn’t before.

(2016)

Ball was tapping the power of populist rhetoric, the sensation of that personal connection between the political leader and the mass of followers. Although authors like Hawkins (2010) see populism as a “thin ideology” defined by some recurrent traits, such as opposition to elites, willing to overhaul the establishment, or preference for a perceived legitimacy over the codified legality, other authors like Winberg (2017) claim that “populism is not defined by ideology but by rhetoric” (4): The orator presents her/himself as an everyday person against the establishment, embodying the virtues of the nation against an ‘other’ that is constructed as an existential threat to the traditional community. For Jagers and Walgrave (2007), populism can be described as a “political communication style” that could be “thin,” if it merely makes constant references to ‘the people,’ or “thick,” if it goes against political and media elites, or if it discriminates against an ethnicity or set of the population (322). For Laclau (2005), populism is a rhetorical strategy to assemble diverse popular demands into a single, sweeping nationwide neo-identity under empty signifiers, which may be expressions, such as “Crooked Hillary,” by which the anger toward the rival is codified into a catchy slogan, or the populist leader himself, who will embody the idea of a systemic change.

Populism may be blamed for democracy’s bad press for millennia. The first skeptics of democracy were found in classical Athens, with Plato warning of the dangers of mob rule after the death sentence of his master Socrates. The Late Roman Republic limited democracy to the Senate, where the so-called populares claimed to be acting on behalf of the people (Strauss 2016). It was not until the American and French Revolutions, where democracy was enhanced by nationalism yet tamed by liberalism and is protection of individual rights, that liberal or constitutional democracy became a desirable standard of governance. This is why some authors like Cas Mudde (April 2002) claim that populism can be thought of as a hypertrophy of democracy, whereby majority rule becomes illiberal, sidelining the rule of law and the protection of minorities.

Trump may be deemed as the latest example of a tradition of populism in the United States that began with the People’s Party (also known as Populist Party) in the...