Talking Donald Trump

A Sociolinguistic Study of Style, Metadiscourse, and Political Identity

Jennifer Sclafani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351997690
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Sociolingüística

Talking Donald Trump examines the language of Donald Trump's presidential campaign from the perspective of sociocultural linguistics. This book offers an insight into the many stages of Trump's political career, from his initial campaign for the Republican nomination, up to his presidency. Drawing from speeches, debates, and interviews, as well as parodies and public reactions to his language, Sclafani explores how Trump's language has produced such polarized reactions among the electorate. In analysing the linguistic construction of Donald Trump's political identity, Sclafani's incisive study sheds light on the discursive construction of political identity and the conflicting language ideologies associated with the discourse of leadership in modern US society. Talking Donald Trump provides a crucial contemporary example of the interaction between sociolinguistics and political science, and is key reading for advanced students and researchers in the fields of sociolinguistics, language and politics, communication studies and rhetoric.

1 Language and political identity

Analyzing presidential language

On July 21, 2016, the real estate mogul, entrepreneur, and reality television star Donald Trump received the official nomination to become the Republican Party’s candidate for the 2016 US presidential election. A newcomer to the national political scene, and considered one of the most (if not the most) rhetorically unconventional, controversial, and divisive candidates in US presidential history, Mr. Trump’s road to the Republican nominating convention was followed by the news media as closely as many followed his popular reality television show, The Apprentice.

Donald Trump became famous, and infamous, not so much for his political stances, which were rarely expressed in any detail during his primary campaign. It was rather how he expressed his stances linguistically that fascinated pundits and the public alike. The language of Donald Trump – at the time of writing, President Trump – has been the subject of much debate, both in terms of the rhetorical style in which he has delivered criticism of various individuals and groups, and what some have referred to as the candidate’s general oratorical lack of coherence and substance.

It is not the case that Mr. Trump was the first American presidential candidate in history to have received criticism for his oratorical skills or lack thereof. In recent presidential history, President George W. Bush became known for his “folksy” style and awkward diction. In fact, as Lim (2008) has documented, presidential rhetoric has been considered to be on a downhill path since the birth of the nation. However, the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump has brought studies on the declining discourse of American presidential figures into the mainstream media limelight over the past two years, and has even spurred new studies and commentary in academic and journalistic circles. Scholars of language and gender have weighed in on the sexism and misogyny (e.g., Cameron, 2016; Lakoff, 2016 [February 6]; Tannen, 2016) prevalent in his speech; others have homed in on Trump’s racist discourse (e.g., Murphy, 2016; Schwartz, 2016).

However, the majority of coverage of Donald Trump’s language throughout the 2016 election season, and especially during the primaries, focused less on meaning and more on the candidate’s lack of stylistic finesse and linguistic complexity. For example, a Boston Globe study that received a great deal of attention during the primaries performed a comparative analysis of the grade level of presidential candidates based on transcripts of their candidacy announcements and found that the complexity of Donald Trump’s language equaled that of a fourth grader, earning him the lowest score of 19 Republican and Democratic candidates analyzed (Viser, 2015). The author of the study also cites other nonpartisan studies that have documented a decline in complexity in presidential speech throughout the course of history based on analyses of other types of discourse, including State of the Union speeches and congressional speeches.

It is important to point out that the Globe study employed the Flesch-Kincaid algorithm to determine the average grade-level readability of political speeches, which, when compared with other similar studies, provides us with a seemingly robust quantitative comparison of presidential rhetorical styles from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, but leaves unexplored many of the questions that interest sociolinguists and discourse analysts when approaching questions about language use in political discourse. One of the differences in the way that sociolinguistically informed discourse analysis differs in its approach from the aforementioned studies has to do with the keen attention paid to contextual factors influencing the speech event. For instance, the Flesch-Kincaid algorithm used in the Globe study and others is a test developed to analyze the difficulty of written discourse, but it was applied to spoken speeches. A wealth of literature in sociolinguistics (see Chafe & Tannen, 1987; Chafe, 1994 for an overview) has described in great detail a number of key differences between spoken and written discourse, taking into account both cognitive and social factors. The acknowledgment of the numerous differences between spoken and written language renders any study using metrics developed to analyze written texts on spoken discourse highly problematic, especially when making claims that implicitly postulate cognitive “deficiency” of the speaker by comparing scores of written speech to grade-level reading development. While the “deficit” reading of these studies cannot be attributed to the publications themselves (i.e., the assumption that because Trump speaks at a fourth-grade reading level, he is cognitively incapable of higher order thinking), they were immediately seized upon by media outlets around the globe and were clearly interpreted through a deficit lens.

A second reason that it is worthwhile to reconsider the speech of presidential candidates from the perspective of sociolinguistically informed discourse analysis is that algorithmic studies tend to overlook discourse-level features that play an important role in structuring spoken discourse, like repetition and syntactic parallelism, which are common rhetorical strategies that make spoken discourse not only easier to digest (in a cognitive sense) but also more pleasant (in a poetic sense) and engaging (in a social sense). Linguists have touched on some of these strategies in blogs and mainstream newspaper op-eds, taking a variety of analytic perspectives. For example, Donald Trump’s extensive use of repetition has been described as a substitute for substantive explanations (Lakoff, 2016 [April 6]) or as a technique to strengthen hearers’ neural circuitry and beliefs about candidates’ attributes (G. Lakoff, quoted in Rossman, 2017).

While the type of polyfunctionality associated with repetition and parallelism just described relates to different types of audience appeal, we can also consider polyfunctionality as it relates to the construction of discourse coherence. Given that one of the most frequent evaluations of Donald Trump’s speech is that it lacks coherence, this is a feature that will be considered in depth in this book. Additionally, the algorithmic studies described earlier have not analyzed textual cohesion and its role in the construction of coherence, which are characteristics of a text that rely in part on the use of small, seemingly simple (often one-syllable) words, commonly referred to as pragmatic or discourse markers. Discourse markers have been shown to play important and complex roles in the construction of textual coherence (e.g., Fraser, 1999; Jucker & Ziv, 1998; Schiffrin, 1987), and their role in governing the sequential and hierarchical relations among propositions in a text cannot be quantified by a simple algorithm. This last point is important and especially relevant to the present study given that one of the most common evaluations of Donald Trump’s spoken discourse is that it is incoherent.

Origin of the book

The ideas and analysis presented in this book represent in part the notes I have gathered throughout the past year and half, both in my role as a Washington, DC-based linguist with a background in qualitative discourse analysis and in my role as a participant observer of the American political process. I tend to follow politics with multiple hats on, whether I’m watching a televised debate, press conference, or campaign speech. One hat relates to my role as an engaged citizen and voter, in which I digest political media to inform myself about the candidates, their proposed policies, and the current events that affect my local, national, and global communities. A second hat that I bring to my engagement with political media is as an inhabitant of the Washington, DC, metro area. When I first moved to Washington to attend graduate school, I quickly became aware that in a city where so many people’s livelihoods revolve around national politics, keeping up with politics is akin to keeping up with the Red Sox in my hometown of Boston: whether or not you have any interest in baseball, you need to have some idea how the team is doing to get yourself through the day, since small talk about the Red Sox surfaces as frequently as the weather in other parts of the United States. In other words, staying current with political events is an essential part of one’s communicative competence in many Washington social circles whether or not one’s professional work is directly related to politics. National political news is important to Washington residents in other ways as well, given that non-federal employees’ work lives are impacted by the goings on of the federal government as well. For instance, those who work in the hospitality and services industry were negatively financially affected by the partial federal government shutdown of 2013. On the other hand, DC commuters noticed some relief in the rush-hour traffic flow.

A third hat I bring to this analysis, and the one most important to the study of the language of Donald Trump, is my training in interactional sociolinguistics and discourse analysis with a focus on the discursive construction of identity. My interest in language and identity was not originally political in nature, but focused on language and the construction of regional, ethnic, and gender identities. A parallel area of research I have been involved in over the past decade is the sociolinguistic study of style, which is where I first began examining the language of Donald Trump and where I first became interested in following politics from a sociolinguistic perspective. In 2006, I followed the Washington, DC, mayoral campaign of Adrian Fenty, analyzing his use of phonological features of African American English in different speaking contexts and considering how audience, frame, and setting contributed to his relative use of the vernacular. At the same time, I began a concurrent project on gender, leadership, and sociolinguistic style, and spent time comparing the language of Donald Trump and Martha Stewart, who at the time both served as hosts of the reality television show, The Apprentice. I became interested in the ways that Trump’s trademark leadership linguistic style was embraced and altered by Stewart in her role as a female executive. For example, Donald Trump’s original trademark line of dismissal – “You’re fired!” – was expressed in softer, mitigated terms characteristic of stereotypical “Women’s Language” (Lakoff, 2004[1973]) by Stewart, such as “You just don’t fit in” or “I wish you well, but I’m going to have to say good-bye.”

Though it was not the focus of my early studies on gender and leadership style, in retrospect, it is fair to say that Donald Trump’s language on The Apprentice could be characterized as stereotypically hypermasculine, with unhedged, “bald on-record” (Brown & Levinson, 1987) face-threatening statements. In the context of The Apprentice, one could argue that Donald Trump’s style should be taken as the established norm, since he was the executive producer and star of the original series. By contrast, a decade later, and in an entirely different leadership context, his “presidential” linguistic style, which in many ways does not differ substantially from his reality television style, is now viewed as markedly distinct from any type of discourse we might think of as a “presidential” norm.

In 2011, I taught a course entitled Language and Identity at Georgetown University, which coincided with the 2012 GOP primary cycle. My students and I were all engrossed in the extensive coverage of the Republican race, and with 11 nationally televised debates occurring over the course of one semester, we often turned to this readily available data for examples of the discursive phenomena we were studying in class. At this time, I began examining the Republican primary debate discourse more systematically, focusing on features such as how candidates introduced themselves (Sclafani, 2015), how they managed to refocus their responses to moderator questions through the use of discourse markers (Sclafani, 2014), and how they used narrative-grounded constructed dialogue to portray themselves as powerful yet relatable characters (Sclafani, 2012a).

When a new election cycle began in 2015, I was curious to see whether candidates – and especially Republicans, since I had a direct point of comparison – would follow the same patterns I had observed in the previous race. As the Republican primary debates began in the late summer of 2015, I was struck equally by how similar the majority of the GOP candidates’ strategies were to the data I had previously analyzed as I was struck by the extent to which Donald Trump’s style contrasted with these established patterns. I also began following with interest the mainstream media coverage of the primaries, noticing how much coverage was devoted to elusive identity-oriented characteristics of presidential candidates, like “authenticity” and “conviction” and “likeability.” Donald Trump stood out in terms of these qualities from the historically large number of Republican candidates polling well enough to earn spots in the early debates (17 candidates participated in the first debate on August 6, 2015), coming out as the “authenticity” candidate of the Republican Party (Sargeant, 2015) going into the early primaries and caucuses, earning more favorable ratings than his Republican opponents throughout the majority of the primary season (Real Clear Politics, 2016) and eventually earning the party’s official nomination after gaining over 13 million popular votes, the most of any GOP nominee in history (Bump, 2016). However, as political analysts have pointed out, Trump also received more votes against him (i.e., votes for all the other GOP candidates combined) than any candidate in history, making him, in terms of voter turnout, arguably the most divisive primary candidate in US electoral history.

Given both these record voting numbers and findings from political communication research showing that voters tend to vote according to personality traits like “likeability” and authenticity” rather than a candidate’s experience or policy positions (e.g., Aylor, 1999; Hacker, 2004; Miller, Wattenberg, & Malanchuk, 1986), it is well worth taking an in-depth look at how Donald Trump discursively constructs a presidential image for himself during his campaign. Any reader that has even glanced at American political news headlines in 2016 may be scratching their head when I frame questions about the language of Donald Trump in terms of qualities associated with “likeability.” How can a man who has insulted so many individuals and groups have any qualities associated with the sense of likeability? The problem is that “likeability” is sometimes erroneously equated with “niceness.” It is clear that Donald Trump was by no means nice in any sense of the word during his presidential campaign, nor did he try to be. He blatantly insulted and attacked individuals and groups of every background and status on a nearly daily basis for over a year, and despite his repeated vows to “be more presidential” as his primary campaign came to an end and he transitioned into the general election season, his style has remained essentially the same up until the time of writing, in the early stages of his first term as US president.

So we must ask, despite a consistent display of a straightforwardly nasty persona, why was Trump considered so likeable as a candidate? Robin Lakoff (2000, 2005) has addressed the question of “Niceness”¹ in politics in detail, grounding her discussion of perceptions of what counts as “Niceness” in the political world amidst the increasing erosion of the distinction between the public and private sphere:

Whether in the political or the entertainment arena, as citizens or fans we increasingly want to see, and insist on interpreting, public figures as private friends or family members, looking to their public performances for indications about their private selves and personalities. Increasingly we expect their utterances to sound unrehearsed and off-the-cuff, and increasingly their image consultants, spin-meisters, and speechwriters oblige. Even though on one level most of us are aware that what we are seeing is not the off-the-cuff discourse of daily intimacy, many of us persist in reading it as if it were, and judging its producers by the same principles we use for assessing the characters of people in our intimate lives.

(Lakoff, 2005, p. 174)

Lakoff connects the privatization of public discourse not only with the rise of the mass media but also with the ascension of women in the public sphere in the late twentieth century and the accommodation of public discourse to admittedly stereotypical understandings of women’s preferences for particular genres and styles of public discourse, which she claims is a source of the rise of the mixed genre of infotainment.

While the connection between gendered discourse and the importance of niceness in the political world may seem irrelevant to a discussion about the nastiness of a male politician, I hold that the gendered nature of niceness and nastiness are not only complementary but also part and parcel of the same phenomenon. As Lakoff remarks, on the one hand, we may assume that expectations regarding polite behavior of men and women in the public sphere converge as gender roles converge in society. However, “if at the same time as roles are apparently converging, there is a strong if unspoken conservative pressure to restore the old dichotomy, we may find ourselves in a complex and ambiguous situation” (p. 178). Indeed, in 2016, with the first woman winning a major party nomination for the American presidency, the unspoken pressure to “restore the old dichotomy” has risen to the surface in political discourse in rather straightforward terms. And it is of course not only evolving gender norms that precipitated the rise of a candidate like Donald Trump; the rise of right-wing populism as a backlash to the political and economic forces of globalization around the world has been widely documented by other social scientists (e.g., Wodak, 2015). Even if the social structures of these “old dichotomies” that Lakoff refers to are sometimes left underspecified in terms like “America” on campaign slogans, we find them clearly articulated in the discourse of Donald Trump’s campaign and in the talk of his supporters.

As Lakoff (2005) documents the rise of Nice in politics, she cites Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush as exemplifying Nice personae through appeals to approachability, folksiness, informality, and emotionality, as opposed to candidates like Bob Dole, Al Gore, and John Kerry, who were widely perceived as distant and aloof elitists. When factoring gender into the equation, Lakoff claims that while the connection between Niceness and masculinity are straightforward in political discourse, the connection with femininity is problematic (p. 182) because of the double bind for women in leadership roles (Jamieson, 1995; Lakoff, 2004[1973]) in which “nice” and “powerful” are mutually exclusive character traits for a woman to aspire to project in the public sphere.

While Lakoff’s discussion of Niceness predates Hillary Clinton’s first presidential bid, much has been written about the double bind as it relates to the presidential candidacies of Clinton in both scholarly outlets and the mainstream media (e.g., Lim, 2008; Meeks, 2012; Romaniuk, 2016; Sclafani, in press; Tannen, 2016) regarding the gender stereotype challenges she faces, the media coverage of her campaign, and her discursive strategies for straddling the competing needs to project authority and likeability. Given the rising prominence of niceness over the past couple decades in American political discourse, one might expect a nice GOP candidate to have prevailed in the 2016 primaries. However, among 17 candidates, the least nice of all prevailed as the most likeable. This may be due to what Lakoff (2005) predicted: the clash between gender convergence in the public sphere and growing conservative pressures to restore traditional norms have resulted in an ambiguous and complex situation that has given rise to a “No More Mister Nice Guy” momentum based on a slightly modified throwback to a pre-Nice era of hegemonic masculinity (see e.g., Brooks, 2016).

With this background in mind, we come to the central questions that this book addresses: What, exactly, does Donald Trump do through language in his public appearances throughout the primary season to create an “authentic” and “relatable” presidential persona among the field of GOP candidates? How does he manage to pass a “likeability” test despite his consistent nastiness? How does he distinguish his brand among the 16 candidates against whom he is vying for the nomination? In order to answer these questions, I will first utilize tools of a sociolinguistically informed discourse analysis to highlight elements of Trump’s style that set him apart from his primary opponents and analyze the functions of these strategies. However, questions about Trump’s language and its effectiveness in his...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• 1 Language and political identity
• 2 Trump’s idiolect: discourse-marking devices
• 3 Trump’s idiolect: interactional devices
• 4 Parodies of Trump as metadiscourse
• 5 The sociolinguistic co-construction of political identity
• References
• Index