When Words Trump Politics

Resisting a Hostile Regime of Language

Adam Hodges

• Publisher: Stanford Briefs
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781503610804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Trumpism has not only ushered in a new political regime, but also a new regime of language—one that cries out for intelligent and informed analysis. When Words Trump Politics takes insights from linguistic anthropology and related fields to decode, understand, and ultimately provide non-expert readers with easily digestible tools to resist the politics of division and hate.

Adam Hodges's short essays address Trump's Twitter insults, racism and white nationalism, "truthiness" and "alternative facts, " #FakeNews and conspiracy theories, Supreme Court politics and #MeToo, Islamophobia, political theater, and many other timely and controversial discussions. Hodges breaks down the specific linguistic techniques and processes that make Trump's rhetoric successful in our contemporary political landscape. He identifies the language ideologies, word choices, and recurring metaphors that underlie Trumpian rhetoric. Trumpian discourse works in tandem with media discourse—Hodges shows how Trump often induces journalists and social media agents to recycle and strengthen his spectacular and misleading claims.

Those who study democracy have long emphasized the need for an informed electorate. But being informed on political issues also demands a keen understanding of the way language is used to convey, discuss, debate, and contest those issues. When Words Trump Politics analyzes the political rhetoric of today. The actionable insights in this book give journalists, politicians, and all Americans the successful tools they need to respond to the politics of hate. When Words Trump Politics is an essential resource for political resistance, for anyone who cares about freeing democracy from the spell of demagoguery.

1

THE CYBERBULLY-IN-CHIEF

If there’s one thing that Trump’s supporters and critics both agree on, it may very well be that he needs to tweet less. Many of Trump’s Republican colleagues in Congress have lamented the fact that his tweets are “not helpful.” Even as his tweets rally his base of core supporters, others who voted for him claim to have done so despite the disparaging remarks that emanate from his Twitter feed. Regardless, Trump’s loud tweets have come to define his persona and have become an integral part of his political brand.

So how should the public respond to a commander-in-chief who is also the nation’s chief cyberbully? The essays in this section suggest we start by untangling his predictable insult-laden tweets from newsworthy messages and follow the advice of the US Department of Health and Human Services website StopBullying.gov for dealing with bullying behavior. Using the presidency to bully journalists, government officials, Gold Star family members, and even deceased senators is a far cry from how President Theodore Roosevelt used the power of the presidency as a “bully pulpit” to draw attention to issues, mobilize support, and lead the nation. Republican leaders and the rest of US society need to keep this historical context in mind when evaluating how the 45th president (or any president) uses—or abuses—the presidential platform.

TRUMP’S FORMULAIC TWITTER INSULTS

Every presidential transition also involves a change in the regime of language. On January 20, 2017, the juxtaposition between the outgoing and incoming regimes was especially stark, something President Obama’s evening farewell address followed by president-elect Trump’s press conference the next morning vividly depicted. However, underlying their many obvious differences is the common rhetorical device of repetition—Obama to inspire and affirm shared values, Trump to peddle insults peppered with gratuitous modifiers.¹

In his farewell address, Obama demonstrated his familiar composure, marked by effective use of timing, repetition, and storytelling, a style well documented by Geneva Smitherman and H. Samy Alim in their book Articulate While Black.² The next morning, Trump demonstrated his own style, marked by visual excess and hyperbole.³ A stack of manila folders on the table next to the podium, which Trump theatrically pointed to as evidence—visible, physical evidence—of his efforts to distance himself from business interests, epitomizes that visually oriented, gesturally rich style.

Presidential styles personify characters from American life. If George W. Bush was the cowboy and Barack Obama the professor, then it seems Donald J. Trump is the schoolyard bully or, to be slightly more generous, the American snake-oil salesman. Out goes the orator-in-chief and in comes the entertainer-in-chief. Yet as anthropologists like Kira Hall, Donna M. Goldstein, and Matthew Bruce Ingram implore us to consider, merely studying the economical, sociological, and psychological dimensions of Trump’s appeal while ignoring the discursive elements of this new language regime will yield an incomplete understanding of what makes Trump’s spectacular show so compellingly pleasing, or offensive.⁴

On the surface—and let’s be honest, from the perspective of the intellectual elite that serves as the foil to Trump’s populism—the styles of Trump and Obama seem to have little in common. Intellectuals love Obama in large part because he talks and acts like one of them. He’s a law professor who provides carefully considered statements marked by coherence, cohesion, and nuance. He embodies the rhetorical style taught in every first-year college writing class. In contrast, Trump is the first-year student who can’t seem to provide a coherent answer to the essay prompt.

Yet both draw on the common rhetorical device of repetition within and across speech events, even as they implement this device in different ways and to different ends. Obama excels at this, as evidenced by the inspirational “Yes, We Can” slogan used throughout his campaign and revisited in his farewell address.⁵ Trump also excels in his command of this rhetorical device, as evidenced by his use of repetition in his large corpus of derogatory tweets.

A few weeks before the November 2016 election, the New York Times published a complete list of “The 282 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter.” Of course, it didn’t take long for the list to become incomplete. At the time of his inauguration, the list included 289 people, places, and things; and two years into his presidency the list had grown to 551 and counting.⁶ The Times actually began tabulating the insults in January 2016 after culling through and categorizing over 4,000 tweets Trump made since he launched his presidential bid in June 2015. When the project first launched, the Times reported it had “found that one in every eight [tweets] was a personal insult of some kind.” As of the time of Trump’s inauguration, the list contained 2,268 discrete quotes.

These tweets provide insight into the regime of language ushered in with the Trump presidency. Insults, by their very nature, accord with the schoolyard bully persona, but these tweets also epitomize the rhetorical moves of the snake-oil salesman—the language of advertising at its slimiest. Trump summarizes these moves through the words of his ghostwriter in his book The Art of the Deal: “I play to people’s fantasies. . . . People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and it’s a very effective form of promotion.”⁷

Indeed, the list of Trump’s tweets compiled by the Times is rife with hyperbole and exaggeration. He achieves this through the use of repetition of gratuitous modifiers and intensifiers. Here’s the formula. Start with a small set of nouns. Trump’s favorites include clown, disaster, dope, dummy, joke, liar. Next, layer on the hyperbole and exaggeration by adding a needless modifier. Notably, adjectives far outnumber nouns in the list. Contrary to William Strunk’s advice to writers to use adjectives sparingly, snake-oil salesmen must pile on the modifiers to punctuate the emotional appeal. Trump’s preferred adjectives range from absolute to zero. In between are bad, biased, boring, corrupt, crazy, crooked, disgraceful, disgusting, dumb, failed, failing, false . . . incapable, incompetent, ineffective . . . and, of course, sad, stupid, terrible, weak.

Mikhail Bakhtin, in The Dialogic Imagination, underscores the compulsion to repeat that underlies all language use.⁸ Instead of linguistic creativity yielding unbridled variation, we typically make use of limited variations on a common theme. Trump’s tweets illustrate this variation-on-a-theme approach. Take, for example, one of his most frequently used nouns: disaster. Variation occurs around this theme through the use of modifiers to produce insults such as “a complete disaster,” “a total disaster,” “a horrible disaster,” “a foreign policy disaster,” “a formula for disaster.” You get the point.

The final step is to sprinkle intensifiers—semantically vacuous adverbs—over the message to enhance its emotional impact. Trump’s most often tweeted intensifiers are (in order of popularity) very, totally, so, really. He also likes 100% as an intensifier, as in “100% fabricated,” “100% made up,” “100% owned by her donors,” “100% CONTROLLED” (with ALL CAPS used to amplify the volume of the message). Using this formula, we might anticipate a Trumpian retort to this writer’s essay in 140 characters: “Biased and 100% irrelevant. Has zero credibility. Written by a failing dopey writer. Knows NOTHING! What a clown. Don’t read #WhenWordsTrumpPolitics.”

Although it may be tempting to adopt Trump’s own formula to wage stinging counterattacks, the real value of knowing the formula is to enable our mental spam filters to discriminate between lazy polemics and newsworthy messages. Trump’s formulaic Twitter insults are agents of mass distraction that merely deflect our attention and divide our efforts to prevent the implementation of his worst policies.

HOW TO TWEET LIKE TRUMP

Take a derogatory noun.

Add a gratuitous modifier.

Sprinkle with vacuous intensifiers.

Repeat.

A BULLY IN THE BULLY PULPIT

In her book The Bully Pulpit, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin examines Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership during his time as president.⁹ She argues that in successfully working to enact progressive reforms, Roosevelt created “a new kind of presidency and a new vision of the relationship between the government and the people.” Central to that leadership was Roosevelt’s mastery of the “bully pulpit.” Defined today as a public office or position of authority that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue, the term itself was coined by Roosevelt, Goodwin explains, “to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action.”¹⁰

In American vernacular of the day, bully (as an adjective) meant “very good; first-rate.” Combined with pulpit, or a speaking platform, Roosevelt used the term to refer to the power that the presidency gave him to speak and be heard on vital issues facing the nation, from labor rights to political corruption to consumer food and drug safety. From Roosevelt onward, American presidents employed the presidential bully pulpit to advocate and promote their political agendas. But under the presidency of Donald Trump, the advocacy-oriented bully pulpit as originally conceived by Roosevelt has morphed into a crude platform to engage in bullying behavior.

Bully (as a noun) refers to someone who uses their strength or power to harm or intimidate those who are weaker. The power imbalance between a bully and their prey is a key element of bullying behavior. As defined by StopBullying.gov, an educational website run by the US Department of Health and Human Services, “Bullying is unwanted, aggressive behavior among school aged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. The behavior is repeated, or has the potential to be repeated, over time.” Oftentimes, the behavior moves into the realm of cyberbullying, or the use of electronic communication to bully a person, typically by sending messages of an intimidating or threatening nature.

The government’s own definition is telling when applied to the commander-in-chief. Unwanted, aggressive behavior. Check. Involves a real or perceived power imbalance. Check. Repeated over time. Check. Trump’s tweets could be textbook case studies of bullying even if he is a grown man in his 70s and not a school-aged child.

It is bad enough that, reserving much of his vitriol for journalists, Trump has tweeted that the media is “the enemy of the American people” and frequently takes to Twitter to brand unfavorable press coverage as “Fake Media” or “Fake News.” But many of his Twitter tirades exhibit ad hominem attacks that cross well into the territory of bullying behavior against journalists, politicians, and citizens alike—from Alicia Machado to Serge Kovaleski to Megan Kelly to Mika Brzezinski and on and on. His bullying, personal attacks have continued unabated despite the hope expressed by many that the presidency would change the man for the better, making him more “presidential.”

Ironically enough against the backdrop of Trump’s cyberbullying, Melania Trump made a preinauguration announcement that she would take up the issue of cyberbullying as First Lady—a project that would unfortunately have little impact on the cyberbully in the Oval Office. If there was any hope that the First Lady could do some good in combatting cyberbullying, let alone stage an intervention into her own husband’s bullying ways, that hope faded after Trump took to Twitter to go after the cohosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe show in June 2017. He started by referring to Joe Scarborough as “Psycho Joe” and Mika Brzezinski as “low I.Q. Crazy Mika.” Then, reminiscent of Trump’s misogynistic comments about Megan Kelly during the 2016 campaign, he continued to insult Brzezinski in a follow-up tweet. In response, the First Lady’s communications director released a statement that defended her husband’s tweets about Brzezinski. In addition, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, at that time the deputy press secretary, further justified the president’s tweets by claiming it was an appropriate way for him to fight back against critics.

Let’s be perfectly clear. There is a definite distinction between a president who fights back against critics with bona fide political arguments, and a person who uses the presidential bully pulpit to engage in aggressive personal attacks that seek to harm or intimidate. The former is presidential behavior that engages with the issues; the latter is bullying behavior that shifts attention from the issues because the person either lacks an adequate intellectual response or does not care to craft one.

Part of the problem is that Trump’s tweets are too often accepted by his supporters as sufficient arguments rather than the degrading ad hominem attacks that they typically are (thus, Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s defense of Trump). Rather than critiquing the message (news coverage) in a way that might raise genuine concerns supported by thoughtful reasons and evidence, Trump’s tweets merely insult the messengers (journalists) in an attempt to shift focus from the message.

How should we respond to this hijacking of the presidential bully pulpit? What roles can citi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Cyberbully-in-Chief
• 2. The Post-truth Presidency
• 3. Political Theater and Spectacle
• 4. Responsibility and Deniability
• 5. The Propagation of Conspiracy Theories
• 6. Fake News and Misinformation
• 7. Trump and Terrorism
• 8. Racism and White Nationalism
• 9. Political Resistance
• 10. Supreme Court Politics
• 11. Moving Past Trump
• Acknowledgments
• Notes