Kathleen Hall Jamieson & Doron Taussig. Political Science Quarterly. Volume 132, Issue 4. Winter 2017.
During his first 100 days as the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump launched Twitter attacks against “Fake Tears Chuck Schumer,” members of the Republican Freedom Caucus, and a district court judge; accused his predecessor of “wiretapping” his phone, though there was no evidence for the claim; and baffled observers by appearing to lament a nonexistent terrorist attack in Sweden. Here we argue not simply that Trump’s norm‐shattering rhetoric deviates from that of his predecessors but also that his discursive patterns constitute a double‐edged rhetorical identity or signature. This rhetorical signature both certified Trump’s authenticity as a change candidate to a constituency eager for the disruption of politics as usual and now complicates his ability to govern in a political system still accustomed to those conventions.
Applied linguists have argued that “whereas in principle any speaker/writer can use any word at any time, speakers in fact tend to make typical and individuating co‐selections of preferred words.” Although the concept of a “rhetorical signature” is not invariably attached to the outcome, computerized textual analysis has been used to identify linguistic differences among presidential candidates and presidents. Additionally, rhetoric scholars have isolated lines of argument, patterns of inference, and stylistic idiosyncrasies that not only distinguish one president from another but also affect governance. Here we label these characteristics a president’s rhetorical signature, a concept defined as “the symbolic marking distinguishing his mode of reasoning and expression from other presidents.”
The rhetorical signature that Donald Trump deployed as a presidential candidate, as president‐elect, and during the first 100 days of his presidency includes seeming spontaneity laced with Manichean, evidence‐flouting, accountability‐dodging, and institution‐disdaining claims. By offering apparently impromptu messaging in scriptless speeches and tweets at unusual hours, Trump broke with the sanitized, prepackaged rhetoric of his predecessors. His apocalyptic contrasting of demise and deliverance, parsing of individuals as winners and losers, and demonization of those with whom he disagrees also differentiate Trump’s rhetorical repertoire from that of those who previously held the office. Moreover, unlike his predecessors, Trump dismisses uncongenial evidence from institutionalized custodians of knowledge such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He not only relies on hearsay, anecdote, and suspect information in partisan media but also shifts the burden of proof to those who oppose his conclusions and shuns responsibility for distributing faulty information. At the same time, more so than those who came before him, Trump rejects conventional standards of accountability, denies discernible reality, including some of his own past statements, and, when caught, distracts. Finally, more so than past presidential contenders, when it serves his advantage, Trump questions the integrity of democratic institutions, some of which can hold a president accountable for abuse of power or misuse of evidence, including the electoral system, the courts, the justice system, and the media. These attacks are consistent with his dismissal of American exceptionalism and with his assertion that the country is in crisis. We will treat each signature cluster in turn.
Spontaneous and Unpredictable
By communicating in a seemingly spontaneous, improvisational fashion and in unusual ways and at unusual hours, Trump increases his control of the media agenda, circumvents media gatekeepers, and distinguishes his rhetoric from the scripted, poll‐driven messaging of his campaign rivals and presidential predecessors.
Running for and serving as president have historically been choreographed pursuits of individuals who present deliberate, carefully constructed versions of themselves to the public. Described by her aides as “the most famous person nobody knows,” Hillary Clinton sometimes seemed to deliver answers and speeches authored by a focus group. By contrast, Trump’s overall messaging is neither deliberate nor cautious, and to an unusual degree it appears to be impromptu, reactive, situational, and improvisational. On the stump, the real estate impresario routinely veers off script, once taking 25 minutes to read a nine‐sentence prepared statement “because he kept going off on one angry tangent after another.” Of the performance, a reporter for the Washington Post noted,
[Trump was] ignoring his teleprompters and accusing Clinton of not being “loyal” to her husband, imitating her buckling at a memorial service last month, suggesting that she is “crazy” and saying she should be in prison. He urged his mostly white crowd of supporters to go to polling places in “certain areas” on Election Day to “watch” the voters there. He also repeatedly complained about having a “bum mic” at the first presidential debate and wondered if he should have done another season of “The Apprentice.”
Trump’s tweets include typos and spelling and grammatical errors and sometimes respond to what he had just watched on cable television. For example, on 6 February 2017, minutes after CNN aired a segment about a Saturday Night Live sketch that suggested that presidential adviser Steve Bannon was a puppeteer, Trump tweeted, “I call my own shots, largely based on an accumulation of data, and everyone knows it. Some FAKE NEWS media, in order to marginalize, lies!” This tweet also typifies another pattern: when cornered, Trump delivers visceral counterattacks, a tendency he has explained by saying “I’m a counterpuncher… . I’ve been responding to what they did to me.” Hence his attacks calling Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly a “bimbo” and impugning her motives in asking a tough question in an August 2015 debate: “she had blood coming out of her wherever.” In his third debate with Clinton, this disposition led Trump to respond “No puppet. You’re the puppet” after Clinton alleged that Russian president Vladimir Putin would prefer Trump in the White House “because he’d rather have a puppet as president of the United States.” These characteristics create the impression that Trump says what he really thinks. It is unsurprising that the top quality that Trump’s South Carolina primary supporters reported seeking in a candidate was “tells it like it is.”
The unorthodox nature of Trump’s freewheeling rhetoric increased its entertainment value and potential newsworthiness and, with them, the likelihood that ratings‐driven cable networks would carry his primary campaign speeches and that cable and Sunday morning network hosts would take his calls on air. One result of this for Trump was agenda control; another took the form of disproportionate free airtime. In mid‐March 2016, a media tracking firm estimated that candidate Trump had garnered close to $2 billion worth of unpaid media access, twice the amount accorded to Hillary Clinton.
Manichean
By apocalyptically contrasting the country’s supposed demise with the deliverance that only he can provide, Trump differentiates his central lines of argument from those of his recent predecessors.
It is not the fact that Trump campaigned as an outsider but rather how he made that case that broke new ground. From Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1952 slogan “It’s time for a change” to Barack Obama’s 2008 promise of “Hope and Change,” challengers have pledged to upend the status quo. But in decades past, the case for change was warranted primarily by proposing alternative policies or styles of leadership or a biography better suited to the problems at hand. To this mix, Trump added a Manichean, apocalyptic rhetoric of demise and deliverance, populated with winners and losers, that demonizes those with whom he disagrees.
A Manichean mind‐set casts the world in simple, dualistic terms. Though candidates from the nonincumbent party in American politics have long painted dim pictures of the state of the union, Trump portrays the nation as a “hellhole” and, in his convention speech, as in “a moment of crisis” in which “our very way of life” is threatened. That earlier address cast Clinton’s record as one of “death, destruction, terrorism and weakness.” In his inaugural address, he described the country in dismal terms without featuring counteracting blessings:
Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted‐out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.
Catastrophe will be averted by Trump’s personal intervention. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” he proclaimed at the end of that inaugural litany. In response to “criminals” and “rapists” crossing the border, the real estate developer promised in his announcement speech, “I will build a great wall—and nobody builds walls better than me.” Obamacare is a “disaster,” but “I am going to take care of everybody.” “We will immediately repeal and replace Obamacare—and nobody can do that like me.” On terrorism, Trump promises that he has a method to defeat ISIS “quickly and effectively and hav[e] total victory.” Although subject to an unintended and literally accurate reading, in a February 2017 press conference, his assessment of his presidential accomplishments was likewise self‐aggrandizing: “I don’t think there’s ever been a president elected who in this short period of time has done what we’ve done.”
In Trump’s world, he has unique capacities to resolve the crises his rhetoric has constructed. “I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me,” Trump said in his convention speech, with a faux‐sheepish shrug that suggested he may have pulled a few fast ones (and also felt unconstrained by grammatical rules), “which is why I alone can fix it. I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens.”
Trump’s rhetoric heralds restoration (Make America Great Again), nativism (Build a Wall), and nationalism (America First) that will deliver his supporters from a rigged system and myriad threats. This orientation entails no coherent ideology and pivots on a handful of specific goals unaccompanied by policy detail (deport “criminal aliens,” bring back jobs, cut taxes, insure everyone at lower cost while delivering high‐quality care). His harkening back to greatness past rarely reveals when the country was great, what was laudable about it, or who was responsible for its past glory (one notable exception is Trump’s nostalgia for the harsher punishments meted out to protesters “in the good old days”). His hyperbolic, fact‐challenged indictments of the supposed crime rate in inner cities and of presumed criminals flooding the southern border, his campaign proposal of a ban on entry of those of Muslim faith, and his suggestion that Hillary Clinton did not have “a presidential look” suggest, however, that he aspires to revive the 1950s world of Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver in place of the 2016 universe of black‐ish, Juana la Virgen, and Constitution‐wielding Gold Star father Khizr Khan (a topic worthy of extended treatment beyond the scope of this article).
Trump’s is an un‐nuanced, categorical language‐laden discourse of dualities and intensifiers. Obama was the “worst” president—indeed, the “founder of ISIS.” By contrast, Trump is the best, claiming credit in his February 2017 address to a joint session of Congress for “tens of thousands of new American jobs” (some of which predate his administration). He even has the “best words.” Neither problems nor solutions are complicated. There should be a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”; the wall at the border with Mexico will be a “great, great wall,” and Mexico will pay for it. He will replace Obamacare with “something terrific.”
Trump’s dualistic world is populated by winners and losers, those who are strong and those who are weak, those who agree with him and those who are corrupt, dishonest, unintelligent, or incompetent. “Sorry losers and haters,” Trump tweeted on 8 May 2013, “but my I.Q. is one of the highest −and you all know it!” Critics such as John McCain have “been losing so long he doesn’t know how to win anymore,” Trump tweeted on 9 February 2017. Of Washington leaders, Trump said in October 2016, “We have a bunch of babies running our country, folks. We have a bunch of losers, they’re losers, they’re babies.” So many have been tagged “losers” by Trump that the Washington Post catalogued them. By contrast, Trump characterizes himself as smart, rich, successful, and a winner supported by other winners.
Demonization is also stock‐in‐trade for Trump. Although personal attacks are a long‐standing and indispensable part of politics, in recent times, those seeking the presidency have typically avoided ad hominem. Not so Trump, who not only rejects the traditional definition of in‐group and out‐group in Washington politics but also attacks his opponents’ appearance (“look at that face,” he said of Carly Fiorina), disparages them (Hillary Clinton is “a nasty woman”), tags them with derogatory nicknames (“Lyin’ Ted,” “Crooked Hillary”), and characterizes their moral and mental health (Obama is “a Bad (or sick) guy”).
Both civility and incivility are “strategic assets,” with calls for comity reinforcing existing power arrangements and incivility a mode of disruption of the established order. We are civil toward our “in‐group” and tend to define an “out‐group” in uncivil terms. “[P]recisely because it evokes a strong emotional response, incivility is … a strategic tool in the arsenal of individuals seeking dramatic social or political change.” Such is the case for Trump.
Evidence Flouting
Unlike his predecessors, Trump dismisses uncongenial data from institutionalized custodians of knowledge such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He not only relies on hearsay, anecdote, and suspect information in partisan media but also offloads his burden of proof and shirks responsibility for distributing unreliable information.
Presumption has traditionally resided with prevailing opinion and existing institutions and the burden of proof with those who propose change. Accordingly, official sources have been granted a presumption of credibility by journalists and political actors and the status of fact attached to the conclusions of expert agencies, which Jamieson has called “custodians” of knowledge. Not so for Donald Trump, who refuses to accept certification of what is known from governmental institutions when it undermines an assertion he is advancing.
In Trump’s campaign announcement speech, the Republican contender claimed that the country’s “real unemployment is anywhere from 18 to 20 percent,” saying of the official government numbers, “Don’t believe the 5.6. Don’t believe it.” For candidate Trump, the unemployment rate was a “phony number” and a big hoax. Trump’s assault on these data was unlike any by a prior contender. Although in 2004, John Kerry and George W. Bush cited different employment metrics, with one preferring the payroll survey and the other the household survey, neither questioned the competence of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produced both assessments.
Trump also disputed the number of illegal immigrants in the country. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security puts that figure at around 11 million, an estimate similar to that of other expert entities, including the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors a reduction in illegal immigration. In contrast, Trump declared, “Honestly we’ve been hearing that number for years. It’s always 11 million. Our government has no idea. It could be 3 million. It could be 30 million.” By dismissing such data, Trump displays a willingness to reject, by extension, the establishment that embraces them.
At the same time that he rejects establishment information, Trump elevates unreliable sources, including anecdote, hearsay, and unconfirmed “news” packaged as fact in such partisan media as Breitbart and occasionally Fox News and in tabloid sources such as the National Enquirer, placing their information on equal or superior footing to that of traditional institutional sources such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Hawaii State Department of Health.
Evidence‐gathering and −certifying institutions employ vetted methods that permit them to warrant generalizations. Trump instead draws broad inferences from single experiences of his own and of others such as his pilot, who convinced the candidate that the government was about to modernize the air traffic control system with obsolete equipment. “I have a pilot who’s a real expert,” Trump explained in a meeting with airline executives. To justify cutting lending regulations, the 45th president cited friends who “can’t get any money because the banks just won’t let them borrow because of the rules and regulations in Dodd‐Frank.” However, industry data confirm that lending is not down.
In like fashion, Trump justified his concerns about illegal voting by relaying a story supposedly told to him by the German professional golfer Bernhard Langer that turned out to be hearsay. The New York Times verified that “Mr. Trump said he was told a story by ‘the very famous golfer, Bernhard Langer,’ whom he described as a friend, according to three staff members who were in the room for the meeting.” In Trump’s telling, Langer, a citizen of Germany, was informed that he would not be able to vote in the United States, while others “who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote” were permitted to do so. Langer, however, indicated that the “situation reported was not conveyed from me to President Trump, but rather was told to me by a friend. I then relayed the story in conversation with another friend, who shared it with a person with ties to the White House.”
In addition to anecdotage, Trump, who has castigated the press for relying on unidentified sources, reflexively cites unnamed individuals. On 6 August 2012, he tweeted that an “extremely credible source” had told him Barack Obama “applied to Occidental as a foreign student” and an “extremely credible source” informed him that Obama “bought his house with the help of [convicted fundraiser] Tony Rezko.” In response to a question about Chicago’s crime problem, Trump reported talking with a “top police” officer in Chicago who allegedly told him that by being “much tougher,” Chicago could curtail its homicides “within one week.” Chicago police subsequently said that Trump had not met with top officials.
In a move that both distances him from a claim and lodges it without conventional evidence, Trump regularly asserts that “many people are saying” whatever he is about to say. In some cases, “many people” tout the business mogul or his words or deeds (“so many people have told me that I should host Meet the Press,” he tweeted in January 2015). In others, “many people” source an alleged fact. “Many people are saying that the Iranians killed the scientist who helped the U.S. because of Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails,” Trump tweeted on 8 August 2016.
Trump’s named sources are not necessarily more reliable than his unnamed ones. He backed his claims about illegally cast ballots by pointing to a forthcoming study from VoteStand that has yet to appear. To certify that he had been “vindicated” in claiming that many among a “heavy Arab population” in New Jersey cheered as the World Trade Towers fell, Trump tweeted an article from the right‐wing site Breitbart. In 2016, he tweeted another story from that source to support his notion that Obama was a terrorist sympathizer, and he retweeted a story from the Gateway Pundit asserting that “THOUSANDS” of Trump supporters had been turned away from an Ohio rally by a Democratic fire marshal. Hundreds had been turned away because of an attendance cap to which the Trump campaign had agreed.
When caught trafficking in misinformation, on a number of occasions Trump has shifted the burden of proof, a move that occurred after the candidate highlighted a photo that the National Enquirer alleged showed the father of GOP contender Ted Cruz with the assassin of President John F. Kennedy. “[Cruz’s] father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald being, you know, shot!” noted Trump, “And nobody even brings it up.” Later, Trump asserted that the supermarket tabloid, which he cast as worthy of a Pulitzer, would not have run the photo if it were “wrong.” The Republican front‐runner then alleged that the Texas senator’s camp “never denied” that it was Rafael Cruz in the photo. Both Cruz and his campaign had issued such a denial.
After the election, on 27 November 2016, the president‐elect contended, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” There was no evidence supporting the new president‐elect’s (which appeared to be drawn from the conspiracy site InfoWars). When CNN reporter Jeff Zeleny called Trump’s allegations “blatant and baseless,” an aggrieved Trump shifted the burden of proof by retweeting a message asking Zeleny, “what PROOF do u have DonaldTrump did not suffer from millions of FRAUD votes? Journalist? Do your job.”
In an ancillary form of proof‐shifting, when faced with a direct challenge to his claims, the president sometimes offloads accountability for faulty evidence to others. Confronted in a February 2017 press conference about his false assertion that his was the highest electoral vote total since Ronald Reagan’s, Trump responded, “Well, I don’t know, I was given that information. I was given—I actually, I’ve seen that information around.” When Fox’s Bill O’Reilly criticized him in 2015 for a Twitter post that publicized inaccurate and racially inflammatory crime statistics, Trump responded, “I didn’t tweet. I retweeted somebody that supposedly was an expert.” When challenged over his press secretary’s heralding of a Fox News commentator’s discredited assertion that British intelligence had wiretapped Trump on President Obama’s behalf, the incumbent noted testily, “All we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind.” Fox News reported on air that it “knows of no evidence” to support the British spying allegation.
Trump’s tropes for dealing with challenges to his conjurings were on display in the dispute that fueled his rise to political prominence: his allegation that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Here the reality show star dismissed the certification of government institutions, in this case literally, by discounting both documents released by Hawaiian state representatives and statements made by state officials. He also reported in 2011, “I have people that actually have been studying it and they cannot believe what they’re finding,” and he tweeted on 6 August 2012 that “An ‘extremely credible source’” informed him that “@BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud.” Though Trump was the one contradicting institutional evidence, he deep‐sixed the burden of proof in 2013 by asking, “Was it a birth certificate? You tell me. Some people say that was not his birth certificate. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. I’m saying I don’t know. Nobody knows.” And he hinted of conspiracies afoot. “Amazing,” he tweeted on 12 December 2013, “the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.” When he conceded Obama’s citizenship in 2016, Trump deflected responsibility for fanning the falsehood by inaccurately alleging, “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it.”
Accountability Dodging
More so than his predecessors, Trump rejects conventional standards of accountability, denying discernible reality, changing and reversing past positions casually, and, when caught, distracting.
Sometimes inadvertently and sometimes by design, U.S. leaders have said things that later proved to be untrue. There was no missile gap in 1960. Lyndon B. Johnson had already escalated in Vietnam in 1964 when he pledged that Asian boys would carry the fight there. In his Iran‐Contra speech, Reagan confessed that he had traded arms for hostages, saying, “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.” And, at times, the person in the Oval Office has carefully crafted his statements to admit exceptions that the country was not likely to hear whispered between the spoken words. Clinton did have sex, although perhaps not literally sexual relations, with “that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” Obama had authorized the presence of U.S. forces on the ground in Libya even if they were not wearing boots and hence not “boots on the ground.”
By contrast, Trump has repeatedly dismissed discernible reality on matters both great and trivial and denied that he made statements whose existence was documented. Contrary to his claims, rain did not stop falling as soon as he began his inaugural address; the crowds for that event were discernibly smaller than those at his predecessor’s first inauguration; by the end of his first 100 days, he had not been on the cover of Time magazine a record‐breaking number of times; his Electoral College victory was not more substantial either than any president or any Republican president since Ronald Reagan; and Barack Obama did not found ISIS or “wiretapp [sic]” his successor’s phones.
Not only was Trump’s claim that he had explicitly opposed the Iraq War from the beginning contradicted by a record indicating lukewarm endorsement, but also, contrary to his denials, Trump did mock a New York Times investigative journalist who suffers from arthrogryposis, which impairs joint movement in the limbs, and he did challenge the competence and credibility of the agencies he demeaned by putting “intelligence” in quotation marks while dismissing their conclusion that Russians had attempted to influence the election in his favor. Accordingly, it was disingenuous for Trump to tell intelligence agency personnel that the media “sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community.”
In like manner, during a 25 January 2017 interview, when ABC’s David Muir challenged Trump’s claim that Clinton had won the popular vote by banking three to five million “illegal votes,” Trump parried by saying, “I didn’t say there are millions. But I think there could very well be millions of people.” When asked earlier by Muir about reports that he had told congressional leaders on 23 January 2017 that he lost the popular vote because of 3 million to 5 million illegal votes, Trump noted that the meeting was supposed to be confidential, but then he added, “I said it. And I said it strongly because what’s going on with voter fraud is horrible.”
Rather than denying a statement, Trump or his surrogates sometimes recast intent. Trump’s invitation to Russia to locate and disclose Clinton’s deleted emails was a joke, he said, as was his statement that global warming was a hoax manufactured by the Chinese. And White House press secretary Sean Spicer reconstructed the incumbent’s allegation that his predecessor had tapped Trump’s phones by saying the phrase “wiretapping” referred to “a whole host of surveillance types of options.”
In addition to denying past statements and reimagining intent, Trump sometimes changes positions casually. Issue consistency has traditionally signaled a candidate’s intellectual coherence and strength of character and allows voters to forecast conduct in office. Accordingly, in 2004, John Kerry fought the George W. Bush campaign’s portrayal of him as a “flip‐flopper,” saying it “doesn’t reflect the truth.” When one of Mitt Romney’s advisers suggested a campaign is “almost like an Etch‐a‐Sketch” and Romney could run differently in the general election than he had in the primary, Romney declared, “The issues I am running on will be exactly the same…. The policies and positions are the same.” When a change of position was undeniable, candidates justified it, as Obama did in explaining his “evolution” on same‐sex marriage.
By contrast, Trump shifts position with minimal explanation and attacks others for positions he himself had shared. As a candidate, he urged in a foreign policy speech, “We must as a nation be more unpredictable. We are totally predictable.” One dramatic turnaround occurred when President Trump failed to make good on his promise to jail his democratic opponent—despite the fact that a recurrent anti‐Clinton refrain of his supporters was “lock her up.” Indeed, Trump told Clinton in a debate, “If I win, I’m going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation,” and he proclaimed that if he were president, “you’d be in jail.” But after the election, when attendees at a Trump rally chanted “lock her up,” Trump shrugged it off. “That plays great before the election—now we don’t care, right?” Likewise, although in April 2017, he indicted his predecessor for not intervening in Syria, when his predecessor was actually confronting the issue, Trump urged Obama not to intervene.
In a similar vein, the Republican contender had criticized H‐1B visas for specialty workers before speaking highly of them. When confronted with the contradiction, Trump declared, “I’m changing. I’m changing.” He then issued a statement returning to his first position. Although he did imply that he had misunderstood the question, Trump did not indicate that he worried about a flip‐flop. After winning the Republican primary, he also reversed his stand on the federal minimum wage with the rationale, “It’s a change. I’m allowed to change. You need flexibility.”
In at least one instance, Trump averred that his positions are flexible because they are opening bids rather than ironclad promises. “By the time it gets negotiated, it’s going to be a different plan,” he said of his tax plan to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. Had the change in position not occurred mid‐campaign but instead in the context of an actual negotiation, one might argue that Trump’s posture here acknowledges political reality better than his predecessors did.
When members of the press focus on his unkept promises or suspect claims, Trump attacks their motives (they are driven by “blind hatred”) and redirects attention. With questions swirling about funds that he had promised veterans, in May 2016, he called a press conference focused on “berating the journalists covering his presidential campaign in unusually vitriolic and personal terms.” After the event, reporting concentrated on Trump’s treatment of the media rather than whether promised donations had been made to bona fide veterans groups.
Similarly, after his bumpy rollout of a travel ban, as media focused on its questionable constitutionality and inept execution and as protesters took to the streets against it, Trump unexpectedly forecast an impending announcement of his nominee to replace the late Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. Redirection also occurred when media attention was focused on Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from Justice Department investigations involving the Trump campaign after it was revealed that, contrary to his sworn testimony at his confirmation hearing, Sessions had met with a Russian official during the campaign. That topic all but disappeared from the news after a series of early morning tweets by the incumbent president accused his predecessor of wiretapping his phones.
Institution Disdaining
Making himself the arbiter of the legitimacy of institutions able to hold him accountable, Trump attacks the integrity of the electoral system, the competence and impartiality of specific judges and individuals within the justice system, and media outlets that expose his factually incorrect claims or issue stories inhospitable to his agenda. These assaults are consistent with his rejection of the notion of American exceptionalism.
Because the courts, Congress, and the presidency rely on “sociological legitimacy,” their authority can hold so long as “the relevant public regards it as justified, appropriate, or otherwise deserving of support for reasons beyond fear of sanctions or mere hope of personal reward.” Among the factors bolstering an institution’s credibility is the belief that the institution is trustworthy, competent, dedicated to the public good, and faithful to its mission and norms. Although past presidents have disagreed with their actions and decisions, unlike Trump, they have not challenged the fundamental legitimacy of the electoral system, the courts, the justice system, or media. Indeed, in key moments, Trump acts as if such entities are bona fide only to the extent that they deliver results consistent with his needs, an assumption that makes him the arbiter of institutional legitimacy.
Rigged Election System
During the campaign, the Republican nominee alleged that a loss for him would mean that the election had been “rigged.” He would accept the results, he told a crowd of his supporters, “if I win.” In so doing, he attacked the credibility of the process by which a representative system of government functions. Tellingly, after Trump’s controversial statements, his running mate Mike Pence—a more conventional politician—explained that the election was “rigged” in that it was being unfairly covered by the press. But just hours later, Trump tweeted, “The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary—but also at many polling places—SAD.” This rhetoric deviated from the tradition of celebrating democratic institutions and, within them, the peaceful transfer of power.
Attacks on the Competence and Integrity of Judges and the Justice System
In the past, when presidents have criticized judicial decisions, they have done so without questioning the integrity or competence of the judge issuing the ruling. So, for example, Richard Nixon’s lawyer said the president was “disappointed” with the Supreme Court ruling requiring him to turn over the so‐called Watergate tapes. In his 2010 State of the Union address, the Democratic incumbent indicted the Citizens United ruling by forecasting that it “will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.” But Obama did not attack the members of the Supreme Court. Instead, he urged “Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps correct some of these problems.”
By contrast, Trump impugned the integrity of judges in a number of noteworthy instances. He attacked the impartiality of the U.S. district court judge presiding over a class‐action lawsuit against Trump University by alleging that as an American of Mexican descent, the judge had an “inherent conflict of interest.” “He’s a Mexican. We’re building a wall between here and Mexico,” declared Trump. In similar fashion, the newly elected president responded to a federal judge’s stay of the incumbent’s executive order temporarily barring entry to the United States of those from seven Muslim majority countries by tweeting, “The opinion of this so‐called judge, which essentially takes law‐enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned.” A George W. Bush appointee, that jurist had been confirmed by the Senate with 99 votes. Trump then impugned the patriotism and intelligence of that judge. “Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril,” he tweeted on 5 February 2017. “If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!”
As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit considered the constitutionality of his revised executive order, the incumbent engaged in apophasis and attacked the judges’ motives by noting, “I don’t ever want to call a court biased, so I won’t call it biased… but courts seem to be so political, and it would be great for our justice system if they would be able to read a statement and do what’s right.” After that court unanimously rejected the government’s case, on 11 February 2017, Trump tweeted, “Our legal system is broken.”
Rigged Justice System
When opportune for him, Trump also calls the legitimacy of the FBI and the justice system into question. After FBI director James Comey announced the agency’s decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her handling of classified State Department emails, the Republican party nominee declared that it was the “best evidence ever that we’ve seen that our system is totally rigged.” When the FBI reopened its investigation after discovering a new cache of messages, Trump backed off (“It might not be as rigged as I thought”) but resurrected the charge when Comey announced Clinton would face no charges (“Right now, she is being protected by a rigged system. It’s a totally rigged system.”). The FBI, Trump implied, was deserving of support only so long as it acted in accord with his interests.
Attacks on the Integrity of the Media
Trump insulates his followers from reporters’ exposure of his inconsistency, lack of facticity, and the impracticability of his plans by labeling the legacy media “FAKE NEWS,” questioning their motives, and identifying them as enemies of the American people. In campaigns past, leaders have charged the media with bias. In 1969, Vice President Spiro Agnew famously cast reporters as “nattering nabobs of negativism,” a label more alliterative than Trump’s attack on BuzzFeed as “a failing pile of garbage.” Prior to Trump, the pinnacle of candidate‐press antagonism occurred between Nixon and reporters in 1968 and 1972. Indeed, Nixon told his cabinet that “[t]he time will come when they will run lies about you, when the columnists and editorial writers will make you seem to be scoundrels or fools or both and the cartoonists will depict you as ogres.” In a private conversation with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Thomas H. Moorer, in February 1971, Nixon said, “The Press is your enemy… . Now, never act that way … give them a drink … treat them nice…. But don’t help the bastards. Ever. Because they’re trying to stick the knife right in our groin.” Reporters such as Daniel Shorr even found their names on Nixon’s “enemies list.” But whereas Nixon privately cast the press as the enemy of his administration, Trump publicly declared, “The FAKE NEWS (failing @nytimes,@NBCNews,@ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy. It is the enemy of the American people.”
Between Nixon and the ascent of Trump, talk radio conventionalized the argument that the mainstream media are liberal outlets intent on supporting big government and electing leftist leaders. As part of that effort, said Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and their imitators, the liberal or “drive‐by” media distort data, field pro‐liberal narratives, and hold conservatives to a higher standard than liberals. Donald Trump not only carried the assumptions of talk radio into a presidential campaign but also penned reporters in an assigned area at his rallies, invited his audiences to boo their presence, and suggested that, if elected, he would look into loosening libel laws to permit politicians to sue reporters and their news organizations for defamation.
For Trump, “fake news” conveys both the notion that the mainstream media are biased and that they fabricate information. “Remember, don’t believe ‘sources said’ by the VERY dishonest media. If they don’t name the sources, the sources don’t exist,” Trump tweeted on 30 September 2016. At the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump said the media “have no sources. They just make them up when there are none.”
According to Trump, the press is guilty not only of sins of commission but of omission as well. For example, on 6 February 2017, the incumbent suggested that the media had failed to report on terror attacks, and the next day he alleged that reporters were ignoring the fact that the murder rate was the highest it had been in 47 years (it was not).
At the same time, Trump invokes media bias to explain that his words, intent, and actions are being misconstrued. “The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!,” he tweeted on 6 January 2017. On 18 February, he posted, “Don’t believe the main stream (fake news) media. The White House is running very well.” On 15 February: “The fake news media is going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred… .” And on 20 March, in the wake of stories suggesting the FBI was investigating possible coordination between his campaign and Russians trying to influence the election, he tweeted that the whole thing was “FAKE NEWS.” The existence of the investigation was confirmed by the FBI director at a congressional hearing that day.
Trump’s attacks on constitutionally mandated or protected institutions complement his denial of American exceptionalism. The term “American exceptionalism” “has historically referred to the perception that the United States differs qualitatively from other developed nations, because of its unique origins, national credo, historical evolution, and distinctive political and religious institutions.” The country and its people are “special, exceptional because they are charged with saving the world from itself … America must be as a ‘city upon a hill’ exposed to the eyes of the world.” Trump’s predecessors have traditionally employed a rhetoric that embraces the broad outlines of this notion. By contrast, Trump said in 2015 that he “never liked the term… . I want to take back everything from the world that we’ve given them… . I’d like to make us exceptional.” Exceptionalism, in Trump’s construction, means not being an exemplar to the world but rather reclaiming possessions from it, and it is not an abiding feature of the United States but an achievement that Donald Trump can deliver.
Until Trump, no major party candidate or U.S. president had compared a leader of the other party unfavorably to a despotic head of state. Yet Trump casually contended that Russian president Vladimir Putin is “a better leader than Obama because Obama’s not a leader.” Whereas presidents have condemned past abuses of U.S. power, usually in oblique terms, Trump is the first to suggest that the nation’s past action is morally equivalent to anything on the order of Russian president Putin’s killing of dissidents. In an exchange about Trump’s praise for the Russian leader, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly noted, “Putin’s a killer,” to which Trump responded, “There are lots of killers. You think our country is so innocent?” The distance between that assertion and Ronald Reagan’s reiteration that American is a shining city on the hill demonstrates the extent to which Trump rejects the key self‐definition of America as exceptional. By indicting America’s key institutions, Trump reinforces this rejection and advances his claim that the country is in crisis and in need of his strong leadership.
Certification and Complications
In his break from the convention of carefully scripted rhetoric; in his portrayal of the country as facing demise and himself as a heroic deliverer; in his dismissal of the authority of institutional custodians of knowledge; in his rejection of conventional standards of accountability; in his attacks on the legitimacy of democratic institutions; and in his denial of American exceptionalism, Donald Trump represents a change in American presidential rhetoric.
Trump’s rhetoric aided his cause as a candidate because it signaled a rejection of both the status quo and political convention to a constituency eager to see those things shaken up. In the Republican primary, Trump performed well in some troubled parts of the country, where middle‐aged white mortality is highest and where dissatisfaction with the direction of the country appears to be profound. In the general election, exit polls indicated that Trump attracted supporters for whom “can bring needed change” was a more important candidate quality than “has the right experience,” “cares about people like me,” or “has good judgment.” Some of Trump’s voters did not hold him in high regard—60 percent of voters held an unfavorable view of the Republican nominee, but 15 percent of those voters pulled the lever for him anyway. Trump voters endorsed the disruption that the candidate signaled.
As president‐elect and in his first 100 days as president, Trump deployed the same spontaneous, Manichean, evidence‐flouting, accountability‐dodging, and institution‐disdaining rhetoric that he used as a candidate. But the communicative patterns that helped him win the presidency create challenges for Trump as president because the president of the United States exists in a world filled with agents and agencies that embrace traditional forms of evidence and argument and agreed‐upon standards for adjudicating challenges to what is known and knowable. President Trump is accountable for his rhetoric in ways that candidate Trump was not because the U.S. governmental system is built on checks and balances and because the leaders of other nations will protect their countries’ reputations from false allegations. To specify how, we explore some downsides attached to each signature cluster.
Spontaneous, Improvisational Messaging Becomes a Liability
Although Trump’s seemingly spontaneous tweets conveyed change and authenticity to at least some voters, even some of his supporters see them as problematic in governance. A March 2017 Fox News poll found only 35 percent of Trump voters approving of his Twitter habits. The dangers lurking in his spontaneous, ill‐considered relay of unfounded allegations were evident when Trump propelled his presidency into an ongoing congressional investigation with a 4 March tweet saying, “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” And Trump jeopardized his prospects for legislative success when he attacked Republicans in the Freedom Caucus for their opposition to his first health insurance reform attempt.
Manichean Rhetoric of Demise, Deliverance, and Demonization Minimizes Support from Aggrieved Republicans and Sabotages Outcomes He Seeks
The list of Republican leaders demonized by Trump is considerable. Although the House and Senate remained in Republican control, in his inaugural the president declared, “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capitol has reaped the rewards of government while the people have bore the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth.” Naming and calling names, Trump has vilified Republican senators Marco Rubio (“Little Marco”), Lyndsey Graham (“I ran him out of the race like a little boy”), Ted Cruz (Lyin’ Ted), and John McCain (“not a war hero”; “always looking to start World War III”). Trump also ridiculed Jeb Bush, the brother of a former Republican president, and famously broke with the rhetoric of campaigns past by accusing Bush 43 of lying and failing to keep the country safe (“They said there were weapons of mass destruction … and they knew there were none”).
Those wronged had little incentive to defend the incumbent Republican president. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s attack on the “FAKE NEWS” media as the enemy of the American people elicited defenses of the press by McCain (R‐AZ), who noted, “if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press”; by Graham (R‐SC), who said, “Senator McCain was right to say that we need, as politicians, to understand the role of the press and jealously guard it”; and by George W. Bush, who remarked, “I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy.”
Nor did the Republican establishment or the conservative Freedom Caucus rally to Trump’s call to support his first major legislative initiative, his effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Why risk an unpopular vote to salvage the credibility of a president ill disposed to share credit and quick to blame those in Washington for the demise from which he has promised deliverance? Moreover, it was McCain who called on Trump to retract or prove his claim that his predecessor had tapped his phones, and Graham who both insisted that Trump needed to apologize for the claim and, as head of a Senate subcommittee with oversight over the FBI, proved a diligent pursuer of information from the FBI about allegations involving the Trump campaign.
Candidate Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric of demise and deliverance boomeranged as well when his second executive order’s suspension of entry from certain countries was stayed on the grounds that its discriminatory intent was made plain by Trump and his surrogates in the campaign, for example, by the candidate’s aforementioned call for a “complete and total shutdown of Muslims” entering the United States. In like fashion, Trump’s past demonization could backfire in the prosecution of Bowe Bergdahl, the American soldier who was captured by the Taliban after going AWOL from his post in Afghanistan in 2009. During a rally in July 2016, the presumptive Republican nominee characterized the soldier as “a traitor,” asserted without proof that “five and maybe six” people were killed looking for him, and expressed longing for what he characterized as the “old days” when he averred that the response of the government would be, “Bang. Twenty years ago, it was bang.” In other words, Trump believed Bergdahl should be summarily executed. Unsurprisingly, Bergdahl’s attorneys contend that such statements by a Commander in Chief make it impossible for the accused to get a fair trial.
Evidence Flouting Confronts Traditional Standards of Evidence and Inference
Also problematic in the Bergdahl instance is the incumbent’s comfort with unsupported supposition and his casual relationship with ascertainable fact. As Errol Morris argued in the New York Times, “The claim that Mr. Bergdahl cost the lives of five or six servicemen remains unsubstantiated,” and does not satisfy the Military Rules of Evidence. “Since the president has declared that this is something that actually happened, who in the government would want to stipulate that the president is telling a falsehood?”
Traditional standards of evidence also tripped up the 45th president when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that his executive order temporarily banning immigration from seven Muslim majority countries failed to establish a unique terrorist threat from the affected countries. “The government has pointed to no evidence that any alien from any of the countries named in the order has perpetrated a terrorist attack in the United States,” declared the unanimous ruling. At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security issued an internal report leaked to the press noting that only a small number of individuals from the seven countries that were the subject of the temporary ban had been involved in terrorist activities.
Along the same lines, Trump’s claim that he would replace the Affordable Care Act with a plan that would cover all Americans with higher‐quality care at lower cost was undercut by the Congressional Budget Office’s projection that 24 million fewer Americans would be insured under the original Trump‐Ryan plan. The findings of this expert institution “rattled” moderate Republicans in Congress and contributed to the bill’s demise.
Trump’s attacks on custodians of expert knowledge also proved problematic in governance when the March 2017 jobs report contained Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment numbers for which the incumbent sought credit. After his boss touted the new data, White House press secretary Sean Spicer responded to a question about Trump’s past dismissal of job numbers by laughingly saying, “I talked to the president prior to this, and he said to quote him very clearly. They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.”
The incumbent’s disposition to treat suspect information in partisan media as fact has created problems for Trump as well. In February 2017, the incumbent suggested that something awful had happened in Sweden the night before. “You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers,” declared the incumbent. The Swedish prime minister responded with a tweet asking, “Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking?” Trump later explained that his comment had been a reference to a story on Fox News. In a similar vein, it was apparently reliance on the imaginings of a conservative radio host capsulized on Fox News that led the incumbent president to tweet the self‐damaging false allegation that his predecessor had wiretapped him.
Accountability Dodging Undone by Accountability Structures
The results of the investigative process that followed President Trump’s tweeted allegation that his phones had been wiretapped by his predecessor illustrate the difficulty that a sitting president faces employing the maneuvers Trump used to avoid accountability for his birther claims. At a 20 March 2017 hearing of the House Intelligence Committee, FBI director James Comey stated unequivocally that neither the FBI nor the Justice Department had any evidence “that supports those tweets.”
Institution Disdaining Meets Institutional Defense
Although most Republican officeholders held their tongues, the strongest, most sustained pushback against any of the signature clusters of Trump rhetoric came in response to the businessman’s assaults on individual judges, who, in one instance, were superintending a case being brought against him over Trump University and, in another, ruling on the constitutionality of one of his executive orders. In the former, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan characterized Trump’s attack on the impartiality of Judge Gonzalo Curiel because of his Mexican American heritage as a “textbook definition” of racism. Moreover, when President Trump called U.S. District Court Judge James Robart a “so‐called judge” after the jurist stayed Trump’s immigration suspension, Senator Ben Sasse (R‐NE) declared, “We don’t have so‐called judges. We don’t have so‐called senators. We don’t have so‐called presidents.” “[A]ny president has to be careful in making comments that are specific to a judge rather than to his ruling,” said Senator Susan Collins (R‐ME). In his 21 March confirmation hearing, even Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court called rhetoric such as Trump’s on the judiciary “disheartening” and “demoralizing.” Democratic responses were sharper. “Our federal court system is the most independent, competent court system any country has in the world,” said Senator Patrick Leahy (D‐VT), a former Judiciary Committee chair. “If you have somebody tweeting that they’re not honest, not competent, that destroys one of the three main branches of our government.”
Indeed, the vast majority of leaders at home and abroad, with whom Trump needs to work and who have the capacity to hold a president accountable, respect the legitimacy of democratic institutions. As a result, Trump’s linguistic overreach has been circumscribed even by members of his cabinet. Trump’s former director of homeland security, John F. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, contradicted Trump’s characterization of locating “criminal aliens” as a “military operation.” “There will be no use of military forces in immigration,” Kelly said. In a similar vein, Defense Secretary James Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general, in effect countermanded Trump’s claim that the United States might seize Iraq’s oil. The proposed seizure would violate international law. Trump was uncharacteristically silent on Mattis’s statement.
Conclusion
We close with the question, what can signature rhetorical elements tell us about habits of mind and how they affect governance?
In the past, some presidents have been mentally fragile. For example, the debilitating stroke that Woodrow Wilson suffered left him physically and mentally dysfunctional during his final years in office, and a Nixon adviser has been quoted saying that when his boss would “drink a little scotch… a switch would click and he’d get paranoid.” Nixon’s deteriorating psychological state in his final days in office also has been documented.
Moreover, as his rambling concluding statement in the second general election debate of 1984 suggests, Ronald Reagan may have already been showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease at that time. Indeed, a reporter who covered the White House for the Wall Street Journal recalled that “[b]y early 1987, several top White House advisers were so concerned about Reagan’s mental state that they actually talked among themselves about invoking the Twenty‐fifth Amendment of the Constitution, which calls for the Vice‐President to take over in the event of the President’s incapacity.” However, with few exceptions—specifically, Reagan’s rambling 1984 debate finale—ongoing evidence of incapacity would have been available only to those in an inner circle and not available to the public at large. Not so in the Twitter age with a president who appears to post before thinking and seems burdened with few undisclosed thoughts.
Already, some critics who are ill disposed to key Trump policies have expressed concern about Trump’s mental acuity, based on language largely in the public record. For example, Elizabeth Drew supports her claim that “Trump’s possible mental deficiencies are… a troubling question” by explaining, “If one compares his earlier appearances on You‐Tube, for example a 1988 interview with Larry King, it appears that Trump used to speak more fluently and coherently than he does now, especially in some of his recent rambling presentations.”
His perseverating about such matters as the size of his inaugural crowd, or the fantasy that three to five million illegal voters denied him a popular vote victory … or, as he told CIA employees, the number of times he’s been on the cover of Time (sometimes inflating the actual number)… suggests that there may be something troubling about his mental state.”
The New Yorker’s George Packer also educes rhetorical evidence for his claim that “Donald Trump has already proved himself unable to discharge his duties.” “Last week, at a White House press conference, the President behaved like the unhinged leader of an unstable and barely democratic republic,” Packer notes.
He rambled for nearly an hour and a half, on script and off; he flung insults at reporters; he announced he was having fun; and he congratulated himself so many times and in such preposterous terms (“This Administration is running like a fine‐tuned machine”) that the White House press corps could only stare in amazement.
More interesting than musings in liberal outlets is the anxiety about President Trump’s evidence‐free, reality‐denying discourse voiced by an editorial in the reliably conservative Wall Street Journal:
If President Trump announces that North Korea launched a missile that landed within 100 miles of Hawaii, would most Americans believe him? Would the rest of the world? We’re not sure, which speaks to the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to his Presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence‐free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods…. Two months into his Presidency, Gallup has Mr. Trump’s approval rating at 39%. No doubt Mr. Trump considers that fake news, but if he doesn’t show more respect for the truth most Americans may conclude he’s a fake President.
The Twenty‐Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gives the vice president and the cabinet of the executive branch the power to remove the president, should they find him “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” The likelihood that those personally selected by a president would invoke this amendment is, of course, vanishingly small and the evidentiary burden to warrant such action, daunting.
But the mere fact that Trump’s public statements have fueled speculation about it is evidence that he has engaged in rhetoric that disrupted political and discourse norms. Specifically, as we have argued, he eschews scripted language, depicts himself as the heroic savior of a country in free‐fall, dismisses the authority of key custodians of knowledge when it is convenient to do so, refuses to honor traditional standards of evidence and argument, breaches long‐lived canons of civility, attacks the legitimacy of a number of democratic institutions, and rejects the conceit of American exceptionalism. Just as a golden, block‐lettered “Trump” expressed his brand in business, this spontaneous, Manichean, evidence‐flouting, accountability‐dodging, institution‐disdaining rhetoric serves as his signature in politics. Although these signals were acceptable—or, given the available options, acceptable enough—to a sufficient number of battleground state voters to secure Trump an Electoral College victory, his early failure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, stalled efforts to change immigration practices, discredited allegation that he was wiretapped by his predecessor, and 36 percent approval rating at the end of his second month in office suggest that these signature rhetorical elements may be serving him less well in his early months of governance.
The dual realities of Trump’s electoral success and early governing struggles increase the importance of asking and the difficulty in predicting the extent to which his disruption of political norms will be embraced by future American politicians and whether a Trumpian rhetorical approach will remain appealing to a significant swathe of the American electorate or, alternatively, be discredited by its originator. Trump’s electoral victory could incentivize an army of imitators; his difficult tenure could scare potential imitators off; or he could serve as a demolition man who lays waste to old political practices before someone else constructs a new style of political rhetoric unlike both the incumbent’s and his predecessors.
The evidence is nonetheless strong that a president’s rhetorical signature holds explanatory power about the nature of a presidency. That power was on display in Trump’s April 2017 about‐face on military intervention in Syria, when the president authorized the use of lethal force against a sovereign nation without a compelling argument for national self‐defense or a legislative or United Nations warrant. In this case, his improvisational, situational disposition combined with his susceptibility to media stimuli, willingness to abandon past positions, and disregard of institutional prerogatives (that is, the war‐making powers of Congress) to explain why, without congressional approval or a publicly articulated long range plan, the incumbent authorized a cruise missile response to a chemical attack by Syrian president Bashar al‐Assad’s forces on civilians, although after a similar gas attack in 2013, he had urged the Obama administration to “stay the hell out of Syria” and intervene only with congressional approval. The 45th president’s explanation for the about‐face? Images in media he was watching of “beautiful babies … cruelly murdered.” Assad’s poison gas had, of course, brutally ended the lives of beautiful babies in 2013 as well. This approach to governance would have been surprising coming from any of Trump’s predecessors. But the incumbent’s signature rhetoric suggests that such unanticipated moves may become a characterizing feature of the Trump presidency.