Linguistic Inquiries into Donald Trump's Language

From 'Fake News' to 'Tremendous Success'

Ulrike Schneider, Matthias Eitelmann, Ulrike Schneider, Matthias Eitelmann

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350115538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

From an abundance of intensifiers to frequent repetition and parallelisms, Donald Trump's idiolect is highly distinctive from that of other politicians and previous Presidents of the United States. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, this book identifies the characteristic features of Trump's language and argues that his speech style, often sensationalized by the media, differs from the usual political rhetoric on more levels than is immediately apparent. Chapters examine Trump's tweets, inaugural address, political speeches, interviews, and presidential debates, revealing populist language traits that establish his idiolect as a direct reflection of changing social and political norms. The authors scrutinize Trump's conspicuous use of nicknames, the definite article, and conceptual metaphors as strategies of othering and antagonising his opponents. They further shed light on Trump's fake news agenda and his mutation of the conventional political apology which are strategically implemented for a political purpose. Drawing on methods from corpus linguistics, conversation analysis, and critical discourse analysis, this book provides a multifaceted investigation of Trump's language use and addresses essential questions about Trump as a political phenomenon.

1

From Fake News to Tremendous Success

Introduction

Matthias Eitelmann and Ulrike Schneider

1.1 The Celebrity President

When Donald Trump announced his ambition to run for president in 2015—starting what would be an unprecedented campaign—he had already firmly established himself as a media personality known to the American public (and beyond).

First and foremost, people had come to know him as a businessman who heavily promoted the Trump brand as manifested in, for example, the New York Trump Tower or various Trump International Hotels in different US states. His public appearances as a businessman consistently strived to evoke an impression of ‘tremendous success,’ which is underlined in several books with catchy titles such as The Art of the Deal (1987), Think like a Billionaire: Everything You Need to Know About Success, Real Estate, and Life (2004), or Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life (2007). In addition, Trump had become widely known as an entertainer: he had cameo appearances in movies (most famously Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, 1992) or TV series (e.g., The Nanny, 1996; Sex and the City, 1999) and was executive producer in the Miss USA and Miss Universe beauty pageants (2001–15). Of course, it was his role as host of The Apprentice (seven seasons, 2004–10) and The Celebrity Apprentice (seven seasons, 2008–15) that cemented his status as a TV icon, reinforcing the impression of business as competition in which only the best can excel while losers are dismissed once and for all (the decisive sentence being Trump’s catchphrase “You’re fired!”). Moreover, Trump had shown serious aspirations of a political career as early as 2000, then running for president as a candidate for the Reform Party, but he decided to end his campaign seeing that chances were slim (Pomper et al. 2001; Sides et al. 2012).¹

Donald Trump’s development from millionaire businessman and TV personality to American president has provoked extensive commentary on striking features of his language use particularly as Trump’s language repertoire ranges from the boastful talk of “tremendous success” to the inflammatory, spiteful discourse on “fake news”—to name but two extremes. The fact that laypeople, journalists, and language experts all show a deep interest in how Trump speaks is due to the significant role that language plays in politics. As the prime instrument of persuasion in politics (Partington and Taylor 2018), language serves to appeal to the electorate, influence opinions to achieve positive results in polls, win over the majority of the electorate to prove successful at the ballot, and—once elected—promote agendas and policies. In this respect, how the political message is conveyed is just as important as what the politician’s message actually is (even though in recent times, especially with the rise of populist parties and politicians all across the globe, content seems to play a minor role at times).

1.2 The Extraordinary President

Against this backdrop, it does not come as a surprise that the media abound with all kinds of claims about Donald Trump’s language, which has been argued to be crucially different from that of his predecessors, political rivals, and other contemporary politicians. Some of these claims—each represented by one exemplary source here—concern perceptions of Trump’s speaking style as non-presidential in various respects:

(i) Trump only uses simple language. (Burleigh 2018)

(ii) Trump is incapable of forming coherent sentences. (Leith 2017)

(iii) Trump predominantly uses negative language. (Blake 2016)

(iv) Trump uses rude language, as evidenced by his extensive use of nicknames for his political opponents. (Flegenheimer 2018)

(v) Trump speaks in extremes. (Pruden 2017)

(vi) Trump only thinks in black and white, adhering to a discourse of dualities. (Cofman Wittes and Goldenberg 2017)

(vii) Trump’s body language is unique in its flamboyancy. (Van Edwards 2017)

Other claims aim at criticizing Trump more heavily, thus questioning his ability as US president more explicitly than by means of the previous claims:

(viii) Trump’s language displays racist traits. (Holloway 2016)

(ix) Trump’s speech does not show signs of normal aging, but rather contains features characteristic of dementia. (Gartner 2019)

(x) Trump has a narcissistic personality, which shows itself in an overuse of certain linguistic elements such as first-person pronouns. (Senior 2019)

(xi) Trump uses typical salesmen’s tactics, adopting the rhetoric of advertisers. (Acuna 2018)

(xii) Trump lies excessively (Dale 2019).

Claims such as these lean on language features in order to make inferences about Trump’s political persona—at times, along the lines of ‘if you don’t like the content, ridicule the vessel.’² Some of these assessments, however, do not entirely hold water, and thus they offer an easy target for dismantlement.

A case in point concerns the first claim about Trump’s allegedly simple speech style, which has been repeatedly commented upon in various press articles. In order to relay to the public how simple Trump’s language is, his speech style is variously characterized as that of a third-, fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-grader (Shafer 2015; Smith 2016; Schumacher and Eskenazi 2016; Spice 2016; Burleigh 2018) or, in Shugerman’s (2017) sensationalist terms, he is speaking “at the level of an 8-year-old.” The message that authors attempt to drive home is that Trump talks like a (pre-)pubescent schoolchild—unable to produce anything more elaborate. Case closed.

Yet, we need to take a step back and look at the studies underlying these reports. Most of them are based on the so-called Flesch-Kincaid test (Kincaid et al. 1975), a tool to measure reading comprehensibility. The test estimates the complexity of written texts based on sentence length and numbers of syllables per word (the assumption being that multisyllabic words are part of a more formal, sophisticated vocabulary). It then estimates at which grade level students should be able to read and comprehend the text.

When applied to Trump’s spoken language, the Flesch-Kincaid test renders spectacular results—with the special bonus that they now seem to be empirically validated. At second glance, however, this method is highly problematic, since speech and writing are two different modes of communication (Ong 1982): we do not speak the way we write—let alone use syntax and vocabulary similar to the most complex sentences we can read. Spoken language will therefore generally receive a lower score than writing, even if produced by the same speaker (see also Liberman 2015).

Another confounding factor is that the word count of a sentence is heavily dependent on transcription and punctuation—consider the difference between “I came. I saw. I conquered.” (three two-word sentences) and “I came, I saw, I conquered.” (one six-word sentence). In other words, the length of a sentence depends on the transcriber’s choice of commas and full stops. In the case of Burleigh’s (2018) study, which relies on transcripts made by different persons over a span of eighty years, we cannot be sure to what extent punctuation practices have changed.

1.3 The Ordinary President

One fact that does show up across the Flesch-Kincaid tests is that Trump uses simpler language than other politicians. His way of communicating might be “a deliberate projection of the ‘normal guy’ ethos” (Partington and Taylor 2018: 190) and thus form part of his communicative strategy to appeal to ‘the people.’ As Thoemmes and Conway (2007: 215) argue, with reference to Tetlock (1981), “successful candidates are aware that lower complexity increases their likelihood of winning—so they make their rhetoric simpler on purpose with that strategic goal in mind.” In this respect, the use of simpler sentences and a less varied vocabulary does not indicate lower cognitive skills, but rather shows political chutzpah—Trump simply seems to go to greater lengths to appear like the ordinary guy next door. Thus, the alleged simplicity of Trump’s language becomes a feature of rhetoric or communicative style. To explore this, we would want to know just how varied his vocabulary is compared to that of other speakers, how many distinct words he uses, and to what extent a political purpose might be behind what we observe as a less distinct, less enriched vocabulary.

In order to shed light on any such particularities, more fine-grained linguistic analyses are needed that take larger amounts of data into account. To be sure, there are already a number of previous studies that take a closer look at Donald Trump’s language from a linguistic perspective. Of particular interest has been Trump’s allegedly distinct speech style (Degani 2016; Hunston 2017; Ahmadian, Azarshahi and Paulhus 2017; Donadio 2017; Casañ-Pitarch 2018), with a particular focus on linguistic traits such as discourse markers, for example, believe me ³ (Lakoff 2016a; Sclafani 2018) or his “rhetorical signature” (Jamieson and Taussig 2017). Other studies use sentiment analysis, investigating to what extent emotions evoked in Trump’s speech are particularly negative (Jordan and Pennebaker 2016; Jordan and Pennebacker 2017; Hoffmann 2018). Another strand of research has focused on metaphorical expressions contributing to a discourse of dualities (Lakoff 2016b; Lakoff 2017; Nguyen 2018; Pilyarchuk and Onysko 2018; McCallum-Bayliss 2019).

1.4 The Twenty-First-Century President

Trump’s communication style is also symptomatic of a general twentieth-century style shift, which has also had ramifications on politi...