56. TRUMPIAN – A PSYCHEDELIC KALEIDOSCOPE OF LINGUISTIC SHAPES

Reading a typical Truth Social post from President Donald Trump is a wild ride, rhetorically speaking. Apart from the name-calling and the ALL-CAPS DECLARATIVES about how weak his enemies are, there's the weird thing he does with capitalisation, where he caps the beginning of words for seemingly no good reason. Trump doesn't save his odd linguistic choices for social media; he's got a unique way of speaking, too, including a habit of referencing huge, abstract figures: "Millions and millions" and "Billions and billions." There's also his sweeping use of "everyone" and "everybody." The times he's claimed "everyone agrees" are almost too numerous to count. Add to this his use of the third person: "They all want the endorsement of Trump," he said of his political influence in 2021. "It's a very important treasure."

Rhetorical genius?

Leaving aside the obvious lies and exaggerations, is he just blithely ignorant of language conventions or is he consciously crafting these messages to look and sound the way they do?

Some experts believe Trump genuinely does use language and style as a weapon, including Jennifer Mercieca, a professor in the department of communication and journalism at Texas A&M University and the author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump. "Trump has been attacking American minds for the past nine years," she said. "He uses language to prevent us from holding him accountable for his words and actions."

They're eating the dogs

"When Trump settles on a topic and hammers away at it using lies or outrageous bluster, it has the effect of setting the agenda for everyone," said linguist Daniel Midgley. The infamous "they're eating the dogs" statement during the presidential debate was "so weird and unhinged" that it was all anybody could talk about for two weeks. "The story was debunked and ridiculed, but that didn't matter because what was everyone discussing? Immigration, an area where Trump feels solid," Midgely said. "And as a consequence, no one was talking about Kamala Harris' plans for cutting taxes for middle-class families or securing the right to choose."

Intense emotion

Some believe there is value in studying how Trump speaks. As Mercieca sees it, Trump is constantly feeding outrage content into the public sphere ― through rallies, tweets and interviews. "He is the first president to take advantage of outrage media and the algorithmic bias toward outrage and use it for campaigning and the presidency." When he uses capital letters in social media posts, it's designed to signal to the reader that something is important or to link an intense emotion with the words. "It's hard to convey emotion online, so we frequently use emojis ― Trump uses capitalisation," she says. "It's not too different from what 18th-century typesetters did when they had a controversial pamphlet."

Never ever

Jesse Egbert, a professor of applied linguistics at Northern Arizona University, has studied Trump's distinctive linguistic style, comparing it to all previous presidential candidates back to Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960. One thing Egbert found is that, compared to past candidates, Trump is far more likely to use what he calls "boosted stance" to intensify claims and get a heightened emotional response from his audience: "always," "never" and other intensifiers like "so much more." Trump has always claimed that "If I were president, Russia would have never, ever ― I know Putin very well. He would have never ― and there was no threat of it either, by the way, for four years ― have gone into Ukraine and killed millions of people when you add it up."

Manipulative adolescent

In an MSNBC interview, linguist John McWhorter commented that the way Trump speaks is "oddly adolescent." Could someone whose speech is the equivalent of a teen boy's truly succeed at being manipulative? Is he a skilled orator in his own way, or just another undisciplined yapper on the internet (or maybe a bit of both)? It could be said that he actually does think he knows what he's doing with language, though perhaps not fully consciously. That doesn't mean that Trump is plotting it all out, reading Aristotle's "Rhetoric" or even thinking too deeply about how he sounds. At the heart of it, he's much more of an ad-libber, whose speech and text might make his messages easier to understand and absorb for those who are receptive to it. It probably helps with his demagoguery, the 'man of the people' vibe. While all the strategies he uses have been used by others ― fascist regimes, for example ― his particular style is all his own: Trumpian.

- Chris

PS: When Trump recently derided the 8 million dollars being spent on research into "transgender mice" (the science concerns transgenic mice), I wonder how much purpose is actually embedded in his wording and whether he is conscious of his faux pas. 🤔