Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would—in a heartbeat. And I would approve more than that. Don’t kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work. . . . Believe me, it works. And you know what? If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing.
The corporate media find Donald Trump to be by far the most newsworthy candidate of the 2016 presidential campaign. According to the Tyndall Report, as of November 30, he accounted for more than a quarter of the campaign coverage on the nightly ABC, CBS and NBC newscasts, more than the all the Democrats combined. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have made preliminary attempts to describe his rhetoric.
Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman of the Times “analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences”—95,000 words, we are told. Four days later, Paul Schwartzman and Jenna Johnson of the Post did a “review of the businessman’s speeches, interviews and thousands of tweets and retweets over the past six months.” The Times article focuses more on the content of the speeches while the Post identifies what they call campaign strategy. Unfortunately, neither article describes the process by which the analyses were done or provides any meaningful data. I assume they simply read the speeches and recorded their impressions.
According to the Times, Trumps’s speeches are characterized by “constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery.” They identify several overlapping themes.
- Us vs. them. Trump takes advantage of the human tendency to categorize people into ingroups and outgroups, and to show ingroup favoritism, but he carries this to an extreme by characterizing the outgroup as inherently evil. In this exchange with a 12-year-old girl, he describes terrorists as “animals,” then makes a promise.
You know what, darling? You’re not going to be scared any more. They’re going to be scared. . . .We never went after them. We never did anything. We have to attack much stronger. . . . We have to be much smarter, or it’s never, ever going to end.
Trump identifies the grievances of his audience, and attributes these problems to disliked groups, as when economic problems are blamed on Mexican immigrants. According to the scapegoat theory of prejudice, prejudice, discrimination and violence toward minority groups increase during times of economic hardship.
- Ad hominem attacks. Trump frequently attacks the person rather than his or her ideas. As Ted Rall points out, we have Trump to thank for introducing the word “stupid” into campaign discourse. According to the Times, he used the word “at least 30 times.” (Unfortunately, this number is meaningless without something to compare it to. How often do other candidates use such negative descriptors?) Other favorite adjectives are “horrible” (14 times) and “weak” (13 times). No target is out of bounds, including mocking a reporter with a disability.
- Violent imagery. ISIS is described as “chopping off heads,” and Trump is going to “bomb the hell out of” our enemies. “Attack” is a favorite word. At one rally, Trump appeared to endorse the roughing up of a “Black lives matter” protester in the audience.
- Creating mistrust. Trump tries to create suspicion about scientific facts and other data provided by the government and the news media. His audience is told that “nobody knows” the number of illegal immigrants or the rate of increase of health care premiums, when in fact reasonably accurate estimates are available.
- Ingratiation. If you’ve seen films of Adolf Hitler, or American demogogues such as Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace, you known that they are not attractive or charismatic speakers. Trump, however, is a practiced entertainer. He is relaxed and informal (a favorite word is “guy”). He flatters his audience. While other candidates are stupid, he claims that no one is smarter than the American voter.
The Post adds two comments about Trump’s campaign strategy.
- Message testing. Trump takes an experimental approach to constructing his stump speech. He tries out various lines, using audience response as the criterion of success. The article describes a joke about Bernie Sanders’ hernia operation that was tested, revised, tested again and eventually abandoned when it did not get laughs.
- Consistent presentation. Trump repeats the same words and lines in almost every speech. Of course, all candidates have a standard stump speech. The difference may be that Trump appears to be ad libbing, but is not.
I found two other reports which compare Trump’s rhetoric to that of other candidates.
Matt Viser of the Boston Globe transcribed all the speeches in which the candidates announced they were running for the presidency, and analyzed them with the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test. The test uses word and sentence length to determine how difficult a passage is to understand. The results are expressed as a grade level. Trump’s speech was the simplest. It could be comprehended by a fourth grader. One hypothesis is that candidates try to match the educational level of the audience they are hoping to influence.
Angie Drobnic Holan, the editor of PoliFact, a political fact checking website, published an analysis of the ratings of all the statements by 2016 candidates that she has fact-checked since 2007. Trump scores second only to Ben Carson in dishonesty. Of 70 Trump statements, 76% have been found to be false, mostly false, or “pants on fire”—reserved for the worst lies. There seems to be a relationship between honesty and party affiliation.
PoliFact describes the process by which statements are selected and analyzed. There are two possible sources of bias in these data. They do not analyze a random selection of candidate statements. Maybe front-runners or people who are disliked by reporters are subjected to greater scrutiny. And since the content of these statements varies, there is no uniform method of deciding whether a statement is true or false.
To my knowledge, no one has done a scientific content analysis of Trump’s rhetoric. Such an analysis would require selecting a random sample of statements to be analyzed, operationally defining the speech categories to be counted, and comparing Trump’s totals to those of other candidates. Unfortunately, the time and effort required to do such an analysis makes it unlikely that it will be done until after the campaign is over.
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