The Twitter Presidency

Donald J. Trump and the Politics of White Rage

Brian L. Ott, Greg Dickinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429620362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Retorica

The Twitter Presidency explores the rhetorical style of President Donald J. Trump, attending to both his general manner of speaking as well as to his preferred modality. Trump's manner, the authors argue, reflects an aesthetics of white rage, and it is rooted in authoritarianism, narcissism, and demagoguery. His preferred modality of speaking, namely through Twitter, effectively channels and transmits the affective dimensions of white rage by taking advantage of the platform's defining characteristics, which include simplicity, impulsivity, and incivility. There is, then, a structural homology between Trump's general communication practices and the specific platform (Twitter) he uses to communicate with his base. This commonality between communication practices and communication platform (manner and modality) struck a powerful emotive chord with his followers, who feel aggrieved at the decentering of white masculinity. In addition to charting the defining characteristics of Trump's discourse, The Twitter Presidency exposes how Trump's rhetorical style threatens democratic norms, principles, and institutions.

1
Situating Trump

In his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, Nobel Prize-winning author Sinclair Lewis stories the unlikely political rise of Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, whose angry rhetoric, populist platform, and anti-foreigner sentiment win him the US presidency. A number of commentators have, of course, drawn parallels between the story of Windrip, a cautionary tale about fascism, and the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump (Harris 2015; Beale 2016; Stewart 2017). Frankly, it is hard not to, especially given Lewis’s (1935) uncanny depiction of Windrip as “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic” (p. 86). But perhaps most presciently of all, Lewis (1935) observes that, in addition to being a master entertainer, Windrip possesses an “uncommon natural ability to be authentically excited by and with his audience, and they by and with him” (p. 87). It is no exaggeration to say that Trump genuinely excited—a term that signals his distinctively affective appeal—a significant segment of the American electorate, or to note that he did so and continues to do so in spite of an overwhelming array of obstacles. Consider what we know.

Despite having no prior political experience, despite being temperamentally unfit (LeTourneau 2017), psychologically unstable (Bulman 2017; Gartner 2017; Morris 2017), a sexist (Cohen 2017; Robbins 2017), a racist (Milbank 2015; Coates 2017; Marcotte 2017a; O’Connor 2017), a xenophobe (Milbank 2016), a conspiracy theorist (Cillizza 2017a; Marcotte 2017), and a serial liar (Cillizza 2017b; Kessler et. al 2017; Los Angeles Times 2017; Moye 2017), and despite having committed grave missteps—missteps that would have surely ended a more conventional candidacy—during the campaign (Kirk et al. 2016; Kruse and Gee 2016), Trump eked out a narrow electoral victory to become the 45th president of the United States. At the much-hyped 100-day mark of his presidency, despite failing to accomplish or even advance many of his signature campaign promises (i.e., to repeal Obamacare and to build a wall on the southern border) and reversing himself on others (i.e., NATO and labeling China a currency manipulator) (Garrett 2017), 96 percent of those who voted for him still supported him (Langer 2017). And perhaps most remarkably that support continued largely unabated even after President Trump began to be investigated for obstructing justice in the FBI’s investigation into his campaign’s potential collusion with a foreign power to influence the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election (Tesfamichael 2017).

Given the unwavering loyalty of his base, one cannot help but wonder what makes Trump so appealing to his followers. Understanding this appeal is the province of rhetoric and, thus, rhetorical scholars are uniquely well positioned and equipped to assess Trump’s improbable political success. But doing so effectively requires an approach as unconventional as President Trump himself, for his appeal cannot be accounted for through reference to traditional categories or modes of analysis. In fact, as a preliminary critical step, it is useful to eliminate a few well-known rhetorical appeals. Trump’s success lies not in well-reasoned arguments, as he is clearly neither articulate nor cogent.¹ His appeal lies not in his moral character or trustworthiness, as he is ethically bereft and behaves with utter disregard for the truth.² Finally, his appeal lies not in his beliefs or policy positions, as he demonstrates no allegiance to either (Shapiro 2016). Indeed, post-election surveys of Trump’s supporters confirm these suppositions.³ But if conventional factors such as rational discourse, personal ethos, and ideological disposition offer little basis for understanding Trump’s rhetorical appeal, then what explains it?

We maintain throughout this book that it is primarily Trump’s style. In fact, style may be the only aspect of Trump’s rhetoric consistent enough to account for his appeal. Reflecting on the first five months of the Trump presidency, Rich Lowry (2017) observed for Politico, “the only … unquestioned constant is Trump’s demeanor. Or to put it another way, Trump’s content may be subject to change, but never his style.” Consequently, our chief aim in this book is to explicate and assess Trump’s material embodiment and enactment of an emergent populist style, which drawing inspiration from Carol Anderson (2016), we refer to as “white rage.” For us, style combines Trump’s general manner of speaking with his preferred modality of speaking. To ensure that each of these elements receives adequate attention, we analyze Trump’s rhetorical style across both registers. In Chapter 2, we focus on the affective appeal of white rage, and in Chapter 3, we focus on the president’s unprecedented use of Twitter to widely transmit this affective appeal. But before turning to our specific analysis of Trump’s rhetoric, it is crucial to ground our analysis in the extant literature on style, campaign communication, and presidential discourse, as well as to highlight the stakes of the president’s rhetorical style.

On Style

Style is a complex and challenging concept to define. Part of the difficulty arises from the fact that everything from clothing and cars to writing and speech is infused with style, which in the broadest sense refers to the observable aesthetic qualities or patterns of discourses, objects, events, and practices. Style, in other words, describes the “social appearance” of things or, in the words of media scholar Stuart Ewen (1996), “[the manner in which] human values, structures, and assumptions in a given society are aesthetically expressed and received” (p. 3). Ewen’s definition is a helpful one, as it implicitly highlights that style is expressly rhetorical, overtly political, and manifestly collective. In this section, we explore each of these features in greater depth as a way of situating the analysis of Donald Trump and his discourse that follows in Chapters 2 and 3.

Rhetorical Character

Style has long been regarded as one of the traditional canons of rhetoric along with invention, organization, memory, and delivery, and Aristotle treated it extensively in both his Rhetoric and Poetics. In the classical context, style largely “meant strategic language choice and embellishment of discourse” (Brummett 2016). But over time, the concept has evolved to describe “the aesthetic dimension of communication” more generally (Brummett 2009, p. 249). This includes not only linguistic traits, but also embodied movement, gestures, and nonverbal expression, as well as fashion and appearance. To this list, we would add managerial and leadership behaviors, which in the case of Trump are exceedingly autocratic and authoritarian, and overall deportment or manner, which for Trump we would characterize as obnoxious, overbearing, and oblivious.

While scholars typically do not talk about style as involving a substantive message, it is rhetorical because it conveys a general sensibility about, disposition toward, or way of being-in-the-world. As such, in contrast to more traditional understandings of discourse, the rhetorical dimensions of style are rooted in aesthetic expression and direct sensory experience rather than symbolicity and representational systems of thought. Style, in the words of Bradford Vivian (2002), “is an aesthetic (rather than conceptual) rhetoric; an affective (not rational) communication” (p. 238). Therefore, style is best approached not in terms of meaning and message, but in terms of meaningfulness and mood, i.e., its capacity for transmitting intensive forces and atmospheric-like qualities between and among bodies.

Style, in short, functions affectively. The scholarship on affect is dominated by two major paradigms. The first, which has its roots in psychology and neuroscience, regards affect as an elemental state, i.e., a manifest emotion such as fear or joy, elicited in a human subject by an external stimulus. The second, which draws upon philosophy and more humanistic disciplines, views affect as a prepersonal intensity, i.e., a productive force, that all bodies—whether human or not—exert upon one another as they move and interact. It is this second conception of affect, as productive force, that informs our understanding of style. In this view, affect works to excite, prime, and sway “bodies at a material, presubjective, asignifying level” (Ott 2017, p. 10) by either augmenting or diminishing their state of capacitation.⁴ Extending this point, Brian Massumi (2015) observes that the body’s capitation “is completely bound up with the lived past of the body” (p. 49), meaning that how the body responds to an affective invitation depends upon that body’s memories and tendencies, a fact that has tremendous heuristic potential for explaining the dramatically polarized responses to Trump and his performance of white rage.

Affect, in this view, is a dynamic, inter-relational force produced between and among bodies, all of which bear traces of past lived experience. In treating society as a process rather than a structure, this conception of affect honors Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s radical idea that “There is no ideology, and never was” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, cited in Massumi 2015, p. 84). Understood as asignifying, presubjective, and non-ideological, affect is a “more fundamental concept than rationality,” a concept that “pertains more fundamentally to events than to persons” (Massumi 2015, p. 91). Such a view is particularly well suited to aid in understanding and assessing an emergent political style, especially as embodied and enacted by someone who has been described as a non-ideological pragmatist and “ideology-free populist” (Schneider 2017; see also Scalia 2016; Schmitt 2016). To claim that affect is nonideological is not to suggest that it is not concerned with power. On the contrary, explains Massumi (2015), “Power comes up into us from the field of potential. … It’s the calculable part of affect, the most probable next steps and eventual outcomes” (p. 19). We will expand upon this understanding of affect in the following chapter.

Political Character

In asserting that style mobilizes “affective responses to change or stabilize the existing distribution of power,” James Aune (2008, p. 483) highlights that style is political as well as rhetorical in character. One of the earliest attempts to grapple with style as political is Richard Hoftsadter’s (1965) essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which he delivered as the Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford in 1963. Hoftsadter opens his essay noting that American political life has “served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds” (p. 3). Citing the Goldwater movement at the time as an example of this fact, he argues that behind such movements is a “style of mind.” Dubbing it the “paranoid style,” he claims it reflects “the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” (p. 3). Hoftsadter is careful not to associate the paranoid style with a single political party or ideology, and he finds elements of this style in prairie populism, McCarthyism, Illuminism, and Masonry. Among Hofstadter’s many insights is that the paranoid style entails a widely shared political sentiment or sensibility, though it may be affiliated with a particular spokesperson in a given context.

Style, however, is not only helpful in engaging modes of political address that we can judge as deleterious. For Robert Hariman (1995), “style is a significant dimension of every human experience” (p. 4), including civic and political life. Arguing that the analysis of politics must take account of “the role of sensibility, taste, manners, … and similarly compositional and performative qualities,” Hariman (1995, p. 4) defines political style as “a coherent repertoire of rhetorical conventions depending on aesthetic responses for political effect” (p. 4). Utilizing this definition, Hariman unpacks four political styles, which he labels realist, courtly, republican, and bureaucratic. Based on a careful analysis of these styles across archetypical texts, Hariman concludes that we must rethink understandings of power that reduce it to the exercise of individual agency and coercive force in favor of socially negotiated relations constituted through aesthetic expressions and their interpretation (p. 189).

Drawing upon the work of Hofstadter, Hariman, and others, Benjamin Moffitt (2016) examines the matter of populism. Rejecting previous attempts to theorize populism in terms of ideology, strategy, discourse, and logic, Moffitt argues that populism is best conceptualized as a distinctive political style. Studying 28 populist leaders from around the globe, Moffitt distills the political style of populism into three key features: an appeal to “the people” versus “the elite,” “bad manners” in language, embodied movement, and clothing, and the performance of crisis, breakdown, or threat (pp. 41–45). In each instance, Moffitt maintains that a populist political style can be counter-posed with a technocratic political style. So, for instance, while populists appeal to the wisdom and common sense of the people, technocrats defer to experts and specialists; while populists exercise bad manners, technocrats present themselves in a more formal fashion; while populists invoke the specter of crisis, technocrats appeal to stability or measured progress (Moffitt 2016, pp. 46–47). In light of this dichotomy, which refers not “to modes of governance or ideological dispositions, but to distinct embodied, performative political styles” (Moffitt 2016, p. 47), it is not hard to see why Trump ran against and continues, nearly two years later, to juxtapose himself with Barack Obama.

Collective Character

A third crucial feature of style is its collective character, its capacity to not o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1. Situating Trump
• 2. The Politics of White Rage
• 3. Trump Tweets
• 4. In Defense of Democracy
• Index