Robert C Rowland. Democracy Disrupted: Communication in the Volatile 2020 Presidential Election. Editor: Benjamin R Warner, et al., Praeger, 2022.
There is no mystery about why former Vice President Joseph R. Biden defeated Donald Trump to win the presidency in 2020 by more than 7 million votes. Trump won the presidency in 2016 by promising to create a massive revival of American manufacturing and a job boom for the working class. In fact, despite an enormous tax cut tilted toward aiding corporations and the rich, in the first three years of his administration, Trump presided over economic growth and job creation that were a straight-line continuation of the last three years of the Obama administration, a time that Trump had decried as a near depression (Lee, 2020). In defending this record, President Trump simply lied about his accomplishments. The lies escalated over time from 6 a day in the first year of his term to 39 in his fourth and an astronomical “503 false or misleading claims [on November 2, 2020] as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection” (Kessler et al., 2021, para. 1).
Moreover, his presidency was defined by gaffe after gaffe and scandal after scandal, not to mention one impeachment before the election and another after it (Lyon, 2020). Trump did not stretch democratic norms; he obliterated them. Sarah Churchwell’s comment that his norm violation was so radical that “the president and his supporters regularly embrace traditions of American fascism” (2020, para. 29) is exactly on target. Moreover, Trump’s gaffes and norm violation clearly offended one key Republican constituency, suburban women, who shifted strongly away from Trump (Frey, 2020). On top of his many other failures and disqualifying actions, Trump’s response to the pandemic was disastrous as the United States experienced more than twice the deaths per capita of Canada (Editorial board, 2020; Lopez, 2021). In addition, the strong economy that Trump had bragged about shrank substantially by 3.5% after the pandemic forced much of the nation into shutdown (Siegel et al., 2021).
In contrast to the failures and outrages of the Trump administration, Democratic nominee Joe Biden portrayed himself as a “moderate—a practical politician, not an ideologue, eschewing left-wing favorites such as the Green New Deal, Medicare-for-all and defunding the police” (Milbank, 2020, para. 5). Biden’s strategy was to offer the nation boring competence to heal the wounds of the Trump era and lower the nation’s collective blood pressure. In the words of Democratic strategist Maria Cardona, the election was a contest between “competence, clarity and calm versus chaos, chaos and still more chaos” (2020, para. 13). Biden’s campaign and then his new administration were defined by a “plan to be boring” (Stein, 2021). It was a winning strategy. The promise of boring competence defeated the chaos of the Trump presidency.
The real question is not why Biden won, but why the election was so close that a slight shift would have handed Trump a second term. Biden’s victory “was stitched together with narrow margins in a handful of states” (Swasey & Jin, 2020, para. 1), and a shift of 44,000 votes in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia would have led to an electoral vote tie, which with Republicans controlling more state delegations in Congress likely would have re-elected Trump (Kondik, 2021). Moreover, Biden’s 7 million vote margin nationally should not obscure the fact that Trump received more votes than any Republican nominee in history and 7 million more votes than any previous sitting president (Colarossi, 2020; McCarthy, 2021). Biden’s win was quite solid, but election fundamentals suggest he should have won in a landslide. The key to explaining the 2020 presidential election is not to explain why Biden won, but to explain how Trump used rhetoric to expand his own base of support in a situation that normally might have produced a collapse.
One clue that can illuminate the power (and weakness) of Trump’s rhetoric is to recognize that his hold over core supporters did not relate to ideology, but to emotion. Unlike transformational presidents, such as Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, whose political brands were tied to pragmatic small-government conservatism for Reagan and pragmatic more-government liberalism for Obama, Trump lacked a coherent ideological perspective. His promise to build a great wall was about as detailed as any of his policy proposals. In fact, Trump represents what has been called the “post-policy phase of Republicanism” (Plott & Goldmacher, 2021, p. A14). Moreover, much of the nationalist message calling for a tough border policy and trade sanctions was antithetical to the conservative policy vision that had governed Republican politics since Reagan.
Nor did Trump possess a strong identity as a Republican in the way that both presidents Bush and Senator John McCain did. Trump was an outsider who created a strong emotional bond with his supporters. As Jonathan Martin noted, his appeal was premised on “harnessing the grievance of the party rank and file” because “the core of his appeal is more affect than agenda” (2021, p. A19). Similarly, Timothy Pytell (2020) noted that Trump created an “emotional connection with 40% of the American people” (para. 7), a connection that has “the capacity to eclipse any rational debate” (para. 5). Conservative commentator and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, Michael Gerson, reinforced this point, explaining that rather than ideology or an empowering narrative vision of the American Dream, “the whole Trump movement and now most of the Republican Party, is premised on the social sanctification of pre-cognitive fears and disgust,” and one must add also hatred and grievance (2021, para. 3). The centrality of emotional activation to Trump’s campaign and presidency has been emphasized by social scientists, ethnographic researchers, and rhetorical scholars (Rowland, 2021).
The power of this emotional bond was obvious in the period after Biden was inaugurated. Trump had presided over a political collapse of Republican power in Washington, with the loss of the House of Representatives in 2018 and the loss of both the Senate and the presidency in 2020. Normally, in such a circumstance. the party that had lost power turns sharply against the former president who presided over that loss of power, as Democrats did after Jimmy Carter’s defeat and Republicans after the defeat of George H. W. Bush. Yet Trump’s emotional hold on the Republican base was so strong that a presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference in late February 2021 found that he was the leading contender for the 2024 Republican nomination by more than 30 points (McCarthy, 2021). Another sign of the emotional connection between Trump and his supporters was polling that found that more than 70% of Republicans believed Trump’s outrageous and utterly false claim that he had in fact won the election (Cillizza, 2021; Zilinsky et al., 2021). They believed these claims, despite the fact that “there is not now nor has there ever been any evidence to back up Trump’s wild claims” (Cillizza, 2021, para. 6), a conclusion attested to even by Trump’s own attorney general, arch-conservative William Barr (Gurman & Gershman, 2020).
Trump’s Rhetorical Activation of Negative Emotions
There are four closely related elements in Trump’s rhetoric that explain how he activated the emotions of his supporters. The first element was a nationalist appeal largely to racial identity. He activated fear and anger with nationalist appeals depicting undocumented immigrants, Islamic terrorists, Black National Football League players kneeling during the national anthem, Antifa protesters, or some other group as threatening the nation. In all cases, his nationalist message was untrue but skillfully crafted to tap into a strong feeling shared by many in the White working class and among White evangelicals that they were losing a position of privilege in the nation. In so doing, he drew on the “dramatic rise of a new kind of white populism,” motivated by “fear of social change; fear of terrorist attacks and other physical threats and the crisis to identity that many Whites are experiencing as they struggle to maintain their position” in a nation “in which Whites … will no longer be a majority within a few decades” (Taub, 2016, paras. 3, 5).
The appeal of the nationalist message was not tied to genuine dangers facing the nation. None of the groups that he cast as threatening “Others” in fact posed a serious danger to the nation. For example, undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes on average than native-born Americans, and over the last 20 years, Antifa and all other left-wing groups have committed a total of one murder, as opposed to hundreds by right-wing and white supremacist groups (Center on Extremism, 2020; Goldman, 2021; Ingraham, 2018). Trump’s activation of fear and anger was tied to threatened identity rather than to a genuine threat. The nationalist theme in Trump’s rhetoric created strong emotions most powerfully among voters with an authoritarian personality structure, who fear that they are losing their country (Cox et al., 2017). This rhetoric was self-reinforcing. Researcher Karen Stenner observed that “perceptions of society being filled with groups that pose a threat to the country markedly increase intolerance of specified ‘noxious’ groups” (2005, p. 29). Trump’s rhetoric created perceived “normative threats” that activated “the predisposition [toward authoritarianism] and increase[d] the manifestation of these characteristic attitudes and behaviors” producing strong emotional reaction and “causing those scoring high in authoritarianism to become less tolerant and more aggressive than usual” (Stenner, 2005, p. 17; Hetherington & Weiler, 2009, p. 7).
The second element in Trump’s message that produced a strong emotional response was his ability to tap into grievance against elites and the media. He was, as Gerson observed, “a virtuoso at the politics of resentment” (2017, para. 1). In this way, Trump created anger and loyal support through “juxtaposition of a (corrupt) political class … and the people, as whose sole authentic voice the populist … bills itself” (Greven, 2016, Introduction, para. 1). Trump’s appeal to grievance was entirely consistent with his nationalist appeals, which defined real Americans “as culturally homogenous,” an approach that allowed him to stoke fear of dangerous Others and also activate a sense of grievance by blaming elites for not taking action against those Others (Greven, 2016, Introduction, para. 2).
Effective political leaders always attempt to create an emotional connection with their supporters. Transformational liberals like Obama and FDR inspired their supporters and created a strong sense of hope for better days to come. Reagan did something similar in support of his pragmatic small-government agenda. Progressive populists like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren also produce strong emotional responses with their focus on how policies can address the growing rich-poor gap. Trump’s emotional activation of core supporters was different from these leaders in two important ways. First, Trump’s emotional activation was focused almost entirely on negative emotions such as grievance, fear, and hatred. In contrast, the transformational figures tapped into positive emotions, such as hope. Second, FDR, Reagan, Obama, Sanders, and Warren all supported policy reform. In contrast, Trump’s focus was not on policy, but on selling himself as the savior of those who believed their way of life was under siege.
With the nationalist and populist elements in his rhetoric, Trump activated fear, hatred, and grievance, strongly negative emotions, that he then drew upon in presenting himself as the political outsider who could bring back a lost golden age of plentiful jobs for all and unquestioned white dominance. After winning the presidency, his persona gradually evolved from celebrity outsider to presidential strongman. The source of Trump’s appeal was not his policy agenda, which was quite unspecific apart from the promise to build a Great Wall and deport undocumented immigrants. Rather, his appeal was tied to his status as a charismatic outsider who promised dramatic action, but provided few details about and almost no supporting argument for that action. In this way, he came across as a typical nationalist populist leader. Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Kaltwasser (2017) noted that “populism is generally associated with a strong (male) leader, whose charismatic personal appeal, rather than ideological program, is the basis of his support” and added that such leaders “connect directly to the supporters” and act as “the personification of the people” (pp. 42-43). In playing the role of charismatic outsider, leaders such as Trump “claim that they, and they alone represent the people” and “treat their political opponents as ‘enemies of the people’ and seek to exclude them altogether” (Müller, 2016, pp. 3-4).
The final element in Trump’s rhetoric of emotional activation was use of a colloquial style to reinforce the other three elements in his rhetorical practice. If Trump had talked like other political leaders, he would not have seemed authentic. Instead, he adopted a style defined by expressions of grievance, bragging about accomplishments real and imagined, and a rejection of norms of decorum. This colloquial style was similar to that of other nationalist populists. The observation of Mudde and Kaltwasser that nationalist populist leaders, who are almost always male, often assume the role of “a man of action, rather than words, who is not afraid to make difficult and quick decisions, even against ‘expert’ advice,” who uses “simple and even vulgar language” is a perfect description of Trump’s colloquial style (2017, p. 64). Trump’s constant attacks, his belittling of opponents, swearing in public, and so forth reinforced the other elements in his message, especially his depiction of himself as a charismatic outsider who could produce magical results.
Transformational political leaders such as both Roosevelts, Reagan, and Obama supported a policy agenda as a way of moving the nation closer to achieving the American Dream. Trump’s approach was entirely different. He developed no coherent agenda and never presented an important policy speech. Even his State of the Union addresses as president were defined by expressions of grievance and demonization of Others he saw as a threat to the nation (see Rowland, 2021, Chapter 4). Instead of ideological argument, Trump used a rhetoric of emotional activation to energize his followers. While Trump’s approach was ideologically incoherent and produced disastrous results, especially when the COVID-19 pandemic struck the nation, it was an extremely potent message for generating strong emotional reactions.
Nationalist Populism in the 2020 Campaign
Close analysis of the 2020 campaign demonstrates not only the dominance of the pattern I have identified in Trump’s rhetoric but also that it was the only message he had, regardless of the context. Normally, presidents running for re-election extend the themes of their first campaign; lay out an agenda for a second term; respond to issues of the moment, often relating to the economy; and attack their opponent. Thus, Reagan ran for re-election in 1984, celebrating the economic revival that was labeled as “Morning Again in America” (Beschloss, 2016) and defending his Soviet policy as superior to that of Democrats. Given these norms, one might have expected that Trump would lay out an agenda for confronting the pandemic and rebuilding the economy, as well as defending the superiority of policies based in low taxes and deregulation for producing long-term economic growth. He did nothing of the kind. Rather, he doubled down on his core message with slight adaptation to focus on new dangerous Others, notably Antifa, and perceived slights that he could highlight in activating grievance and hatred against elites. While space does not allow a full discussion of all Trump’s campaign rhetoric, the pattern is evident in the most important single speech of the campaign, his Republican National Convention acceptance speech; his debate performance; and his use of social media on Twitter (Thrush, 2020; Trump Twitter Archive v.2, 2020; USA Today, 2020).
In the convention address, Trump failed to lay out a clear agenda for a second term and made almost no attempt to defend his record on the pandemic or a host of other issues. Rather, he stuck to the four elements that produced emotional activation among supporters. Early in the address, he emphasized the nationalist theme using apocalyptic language to describe imaginary threats to the nation:
This election will decide if we save the American dream or whether we allow a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny. It will decide whether we rapidly create millions of high-paying jobs or whether we crush our industries and send millions of these jobs overseas, as has been foolishly done for many decades. Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists and agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens. And this election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life or allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it. (Thrush, 2020, para. 27)
Of course, Trump’s allegation that Biden was a socialist, who supported violent anarchists, was absurd. It is a sign of Trump’s commitment to the nationalist populist message that he presented such ridiculous charges in the most important speech of the campaign. Many similar passages could be cited. Notably, in discussing the pandemic, he attempted to displace blame on a dangerous Other by referring to COVID-19 as the “China virus.”
Trump’s airing of grievance against elites was similarly extreme. He described the Democratic Party as composed of out-of-touch career politicians and extremists:
Our opponents say that redemption for you can only come from giving power to them. This is a tired anthem spoken by every repressive movement throughout history, but in this country, we don’t look to career politicians for salvation. In America, we do not turn to government to restore ourselves. We put our faith in almighty God. Joe Biden is not a savior of America’s soul. He is the destroyer of America’s jobs, and if given the chance, he will be the destroyer of America’s greatness. (Thrush, 2020, para. 29)
Trump was quite direct in attacking Biden as an uncaring, out-of-touch elite. He also linked the populist and nationalist themes when he claimed, “Joe Biden spent his entire career outsourcing their dreams and the dreams of American workers, offshoring their jobs, opening their borders and sending their sons and daughters to fight in endless foreign wars, wars that never ended” (Thrush, 2020, para. 30).
Along with his activation of fear, anger, and a sense of grievance, Trump presented himself as the heroic defender of real (White) America. Hitting a theme common to leaders of nationalist populist movements, he claimed that he was the personification of the real people of the nation and had fought tirelessly for them:
From the moment I left my former life behind—and it was a good life—I have done nothing but fight for you. I did what our political establishment never expected and could never forgive, breaking the cardinal rule of Washington politics. I kept my promise. Together we have ended the rule of the failed political class, and they are desperate to get their power back by any means necessary. You have seen that. They are angry at me because instead of putting them first, I very simply said, “America first.” (Thrush, 2020, para. 33)
Trump followed by claiming to have produced a string of grand successes on trade, the economy, immigration, and foreign policy. He supported these claims not with evidence, but with shameless bragging, asserting, for example, “And I say very modestly that I have done more for the African-American community than any president since Abraham Lincoln” (Thrush, 2020, para. 48). Later, he even bragged about his administration’s response to the pandemic and the economic downturn that it produced, claiming success at every level. In Trump’s alternative reality, his administration had done everything right by “focusing on the science, the facts and the data.” In the real world, as Jeff Tollefson noted in Nature, “The US president’s actions have exacerbated the pandemic …, rolled back environmental and public-health regulations and undermined science and scientific institutions. Some of the harm could be permanent” (Thrush, 2020, para. 1).
In the convention speech, Trump used the primary elements in his message to create fear and anger, amplify a sense of grievance against elites, and present himself as the strongman hero who would protect the real (White) ordinary people of the nation from largely imaginary threats, while doing little to protect them from the very real threats posed by the COVID-19 virus. He did so by using a colloquial style to demonstrate his authenticity. Trump’s message was largely false, but emotionally resonant for his base of support. Gerson’s characterization of the address in an opinion piece headlined as “nasty, brutish and interminable” was precisely on target (2020).
A similar pattern was evident in the second debate in 2020. I focus on the second debate because of the consensus that the first debate was an unwatchable disaster, primarily because of Trump’s boorish behavior, interrupting Biden again and again (Izadi, 2020, September 29). In contrast, a number of commentators viewed the second debate as “a more substantive debate, one that offered clear contrasts in philosophy, agendas and character” (Balz, 2020, para. 6).
In fact, Trump’s performance in the second debate relied on the same nationalist populist message as in other contexts. He enacted the nationalist and strongman themes by denying all responsibility for the nation’s catastrophic response to the pandemic, blaming China instead, “It’s not my fault that it came here. It’s China’s fault” (USA Today, 2020, “Trump and Biden on COVID-19,” para. 24). He also reinforced the nationalist message by attacking China for unfair trade policy, claiming to have solved the problem by forcing China to pay “$28 billion” to American farmers. Later, he attacked a pandemic relief bill supported by Democrats in Congress because it was “a way of getting a lot of money from our people’s pockets to people that come into our country illegally” (“On the Economy,” para. 46). Even in the midst of the greatest public health crisis in a century, his focus was on non-White Others getting benefits. He also accused Biden of supporting a “catch and release” policy, which he labeled a “disaster” under which, “a murderer would come in, a rapist would come in, a very bad person would come in—we would take their names, we have to release them into the country” (“On Immigration,” para. 26). He also attempted to activate fear of Black crime by attacking Black Lives Matter protesters, who he accused of “chanting ‘Pigs in a blanket,’ talking about the police” (USA Today, 2020, “On Race and America,” para. 31).
Trump enacted the populist theme by claiming that Biden was an out-of-touch elite. In reference to the pandemic, he said, “We can’t lock ourselves up in a basement like Joe has” (USA Today, 2020, “Trump and Biden on COVID-19,” para. 17). He also restated the populist theme by going after Biden’s son, Hunter, for alleged corruption involving Ukraine and China, going so far as to claim: “His son walked out with a billion and a half dollars from China” (“On National Security,” para. 36). Later he referred to allegations that Russia had aided his campaign as “another … Russia hoax” (“On Race and America,” para. 25), ignoring the fact that there had been multiple contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives. Trump also presented the populist theme by claiming that Biden “is going to terminate” “great private health care” plans covering “180 million people,” although Biden in fact supported expanding healthcare access, not curtailing it (“On the Economy,” para. 2). Trump boiled down his attack to the claim that Biden “wants socialized medicine,” although in fact Biden had rejected proposals to enact Medicare for all (“On the Economy,” para. 8). He went even further later in the debate claiming that Biden favored “destroying your Medicare—he’s destroying your Social Security. And this whole country will come down” (USA Today, 2020, “On the Economy,” para. 17).
In the second debate, Trump enacted the outsider/strongman theme most strongly at the end when he bragged shamelessly about accomplishments that were wildly exaggerated. For example, he claimed that “I got criminal justice reform done, and prison reform, and opportunity zones. I took care of Black colleges and universities,” before concluding, “I’m the least racist person in this room” (USA Today, 2020, “On Race in America,” para. 33). In actuality, Trump’s record on issues related to race had been widely attacked (Ray & Gilbert, 2020). On the economy, he claimed simply that under his leadership the nation would have “the greatest economy in the world” (USA Today, 2020, “On Climate Change,” para. 16). As these examples indicate, rather than supporting a policy agenda with strong arguments, Trump simply bragged about accomplishments, many of which had not happened.
In the second debate, Trump spent little time laying out a second-term agenda or presenting actual policy arguments critiquing the proposals of Biden. Instead, he restated the same nationalist and populist themes that drove his campaigns and presidency, relying on a vernacular style that he had honed in dozens of campaign rallies. Although the outsider/strongman persona was more subdued than in other contexts, it came through at the end in bragging about accomplishments that were largely imaginary. Even in a debate that created pressures for substantive argument, he presented himself as what conservative commentator Jennifer Rubin (2020) labeled an “unhinged, know-nothing, narcissistic president” (para. 3).
A similar pattern is evident in Trump’s Twitter postings from November 1 through the day following the election, November 4, 2020. He enacted the nationalist theme by claiming that “Biden has vowed to ABOLISH the American oil and natural gas industries”, asserting that “Biden would increase refugees from terrorist nations by 700%” turning “the entire Midwest into a refugee camp,” and bragging that he was “protecting your families and keeping Radical Islamic Terrorists OUT of our Country!” (Trump, 2020, November 2). Trump also labeled left-wing protesters as a major threat to the nation with several tweets attacking Antifa and other groups. In contrast, he promised to protect “our noble history, heritage & heroes,” a reference to protecting Confederate monuments and those of other slaveholders, against “Antifa, the rioters, looters, Marxists, & left-wing extremists. THEY ALL SUPPORT JOE BIDEN!” (Trump, 2020, November 2). In reality, studies found that Antifa and other left-wing groups had committed almost no political violence over the previous quarter-century (Beckett, 2020).
The populist theme was present in many tweets. On November 2, Trump (2020) labeled his opponent as “Sleepy Joe Biden” and said that voting for him was “a vote to give control of government over to Globalists.” On the same day, he claimed that “Biden is the living embodiment of the decrepit and depraved political class that got rich bleeding America Dry.” Also on November 2, he claimed that “Biden is promising to delay the vaccine and turn America into a prison state.” On the same day, he also claimed both that “Joe Biden is bought and paid for by Big Tech, Big Media, Big Donors and powerful special interests” and that “The Depraved Swamp have been trying to stop me—because they know I don’t answer to THEM—I answer only to YOU. Together, we will defeat the corrupt establishment, we will DETHRONE the failed political class … [and] SAVE THE AMERICAN DREAM!” (Trump, 2020).
On occasion, he combined the nationalist and populist messages into a single tweet, as he did on November 2 when he said, “Every corrupt force in American life that betrayed you and hurt your [sic] are supporting Joe Biden: The failed establishment that started the disastrous foreign wars; The career politicians that offshored your industries & decimated your factories; The open borders lobbyists” (Trump, 2020). On November 1 he linked together all of the elements in his message when he said, “Joe Biden is the candidate of rioters, looters, arsonists, gun-grabbers, flag-burners, Marxists, lobbyists, and special interests. I am the candidate of farmers, factory workers, police officers, and hard-working, law-abiding patriots of every race, religion and creed!” (Trump, 2020).
In a number of tweets, he enacted the outsider/strongman theme, claiming, for example, “Our ECONOMY is now surging back faster, better, bigger and stronger than any nation on earth. We just had the best quarter of ECONOMIC GROWTH EVER recorded—a 33.1% increase, and next year will be the GREATEST ECONOMIC YEAR in the history of our Country” (Trump, 2020, October 31). The outsider theme and colloquial style came through when he claimed, “If I don’t sound like a typical Washington politician, it’s because I’m NOT a politician. If I don’t always play by the rules of the Washington Establishment, it’s because I was elected to fight for YOU, harder than anyone ever has before!” (Trump, 2020, November 2).
In his tweets on the two days before the election, Election Day, and the day after the election, Trump did not support a second-term agenda or build a case for his pandemic response or economic record. Instead, his focus was on creating fear and hatred through the nationalist message, activating grievances against political elites as a way of shifting blame away from his own failures, and bragging shamelessly about accomplishments that were always exaggerated and oftentimes imaginary. The odd punctuation, capitalization, and syntax in the tweets I have cited illustrate how Trump used a colloquial style to create a sense of authenticity.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Biden’s message of boring competence reassured enough voters to win election. With a very small shift in votes, Trump could have been reelected. An ill-timed gaffe by Biden, even one that had little to do with his policies or actual capacity for governance, might have produced a very different result. That did not happen in 2020, but it very easily could have happened.
Three important conclusions follow from the analysis of the potency of Trump’s message for activating strong negative emotions. First, ideological argument has quite limited power in contemporary American politics. Trump never laid out a coherent argument for his agenda as either a candidate or a president. He made hardly any effort to make a case for programs he supported in any context. Unlike previous presidents, especially Reagan and Obama who worked hard to persuade the people that their proposals would work, Trump incited hatred against Others, blamed elites for their failure to confront the Others, not to mention any attacks on him, and claimed that his programs were the best ever. Fact checkers savaged him for telling tens of thousands of outright lies. None of these failings had any discernible effect on his approval rating, which varied in a narrow range, usually in the high 30% to low 40% range (Dunn, 2020).
Cultural critics often bemoan what they see as hegemonic reason. Close study of Trump’s rhetoric demonstrates that public reason is anything but hegemonic and often is powerless to confront emotionally powerful falsehoods. The decline in power of public reason is immensely disquieting. Without clear standards for distinguishing strong from weak arguments and facts from lies, there is no way to protect the nation from the charlatan, the demagogue, the bigot, or the warmonger. Reagan and Obama both thought they could win the argument and, as a consequence, their policies were grounded in the world of reason. Absent such a grounding, there are few constraints on extremism.
Second, the analysis of Trump’s rhetoric of emotional activation demonstrates the power and danger of such activation. No one voted for Trump because he presented a strong case for ideologically coherent policy positions. Rather, they voted for him either because of personal or party loyalty or because of his ability to activate fear and hate, displace blame on elites, and depict himself as a heroic defender of ordinary people. It was an absurd message, but also a message that produced several million more votes for a sitting president than previously in American history. Negative emotions like hatred, fear, or a sense of grievance are dangerous because they deny the identity of entire groups of people. In other contexts, messages creating these emotions have led to genocide. Similarly, adulation for the leader is immensely dangerous because it may encourage support for dictatorial, evil, or simply incompetent policies—dangers that were obvious during Trump’s term in office.
Finally, the analysis of Trump’s rhetoric of emotional activation indicates that American democratic institutions are considerably more fragile than had been recognized. After the election, culminating on January 6, 2021, Trump relentlessly pushed the lie that Biden had somehow stolen the election. No evidence supported that lie, and even staunch political allies such as Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and Attorney General William Barr stated publicly that Biden had won the election. Yet Trump convinced tens of millions of his supporters to support the lie, and some of the most extreme supporters attempted to overturn a democratic election through an attack on Congress. The safeguards in American democracy ultimately were sufficient and a democratic transition of power occurred, but it easily could have ended otherwise had only a few important figures in the system been less principled. The success of Trump’s rhetoric in activating negative emotions along with adulation for their leader should be seen as a giant blinking warning sign about the fragility of American democracy.