Kirsten Theye & Steven Melling. Southern Communication Journal. Volume 83, Issue 5. November/December 2018.
In July 2015, Donald Trump appeared at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, to discuss his candidacy for president. The conversation turned to Senator John McCain, who spent more than 5 years in a North Vietnamese prison where he was repeatedly tortured (McCain, 2008). Trump remarked about McCain, “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured” (Schreckinger, 2015, para. 3). His GOP opponents were quick to criticize these comments: Rick Perry stated that his remarks “reached a new low in American politics,” Jeb Bush called the comments “slanderous attacks,” and Marco Rubio called them “offensive rantings.” Beyond his primary opponents, Paul Rieckhoff, who founded Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said that Trump’s “asinine comments about Senator McCain’s service are an insult to everyone who has ever worn the uniform—and to all Americans” (Rucker, 2015, para. 7, 8, 11, and 36). The comments about McCain’s war record were not the first time Trump had uttered something shocking. His campaign had started with these comments about immigrants from Mexico: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people” (Kopan, 2016, para. 4). Of course, before formally declaring his candidacy, Trump wholeheartedly embraced unfounded conspiracy theories about President Obama’s birthplace. This embrace would allow him to transition from the world of reality television to the political arena. Long before becoming a birther or even a political candidate, Trump had utilized shock and spectacle to his advantage. This was reflected in his racially charged attacks on the “Central Park Five,” who have since been acquitted but who Trump continues to insist are guilty of brutally raping a jogger in New York’s Central Park in 1989 (Lange, 2016). It can also be found in his manipulation of New York tabloids, his appearances in professional wrestling, his cameos in popular media, the ubiquity of the Trump brand, and, ultimately, in his reality television series. These were all key moves in Trump’s celebrity branding, which allowed a New York-based real estate developer to become an international celebrity.
As Trump transitioned from celebrity to politician, his rhetorical style remained relatively unchanged. The main difference was that now Trump’s outlandish style would be applied to the wide range of policies that concern a president. As we all know, the tone and tenor of Trump’s comments about McCain and Mexican immigrants were not an anomaly. This is the same person who suggested that the United States should commit a war crime when he advised, “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families” (LoBianco, 2015, para. 3). This is the same person who commented that “torture works” and “we should go much stronger than waterboarding” (Keith, 2016, para. 7). Trump’s entire campaign, as well as his presidency thus far, is awash in examples of shocking political incorrectness. And as Trump noted during one primary debate,
I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t, frankly, have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either. (Chow, 2016, para. 2)
Complaints about political correctness have been a staple of talk radio for decades, but Trump has elevated political correctness from minor annoyance to the status of exigence, something that is holding the country back.
Of course, many pundits have pointed to Trump’s attacks on political correctness as a key element of his rhetoric. This leaves rhetoric scholars to answer the question of just how Trump attacked political correctness. Trump’s elevation of political correctness to societal exigence was a self-serving move, because it constitutes a situation in which his outlandish style is not a problem to be corrected but rather a solution to what is wrong with society. Trump scorned political correctness through what we identify as straight talk. This straight talk can be divided into style and content, which are intertwined. It is helpful to think of style as occurring on three levels: large-scale, intermediate, and small-scale (Jasinski, 2001). As might be obvious at this point, we believe that Trump’s large-scale style is that of straight talk. This style consists of parataxis, on an intermediate scale, and a wide variety of small-scale transgressions, such as exaggerations, bumptious language, inaccuracies, and digressions. Though this straight talk style might seem like the strategy through which candidates can win elections, Trump’s elevation of political correctness to exigence also gives the style an entelechial endpoint, on which we will elaborate in the Conclusion.
A Rejection of Political Correctness
Donald Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, is widely noted as “one of the great orators in American history” (Fleishman, 2017, para. 5), often mentioned in the same breath as John F. Kennedy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan. To many, he was a “masterful orator-in-chief” whose “rhetoric reflects his study of the nation’s founding documents … as well as basic texts of our civic culture” (Kusnet, 2016, para. 15 and 3, respectively). Obama was noted for his nuanced approaches to law and policy, his calm and collected “no drama Obama” persona, his cool but polite relationship with those in the media and government, and his occasionally “condescending attitude toward those who ‘cling to guns or religion'” (Tierney, 2016, para. 3). As is often the case, a president’s unique presidential style can inspire a political alter ego to form in his or her wake. So, for example, the born-again evangelical George W. Bush ran as a reaction to the philandering Bill Clinton, and the “smart and dovish professor” Barack Obama ran as a reaction to the “supposedly dumb hawk” George W. Bush (Tierney, 2016, para. 9). And in the 2016 election, we had a brash and bombastic billionaire businessman running as a reaction to the always politically correct and rhetorically polished Obama.
Voters noticed this stark contrast, and many approved. In the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, Democratic pollster Margie Omero and Republican pollster Neil Newhouse conducted a series of focus groups among what they called “Walmart Moms.” According to Omero and Newhouse, Walmart Moms are women who have children at home and make the trek to Walmart at least once a month. When prompted to discuss what they liked about Candidate Trump, Walmart Moms “praised him as someone who speaks his mind, stands his ground, and is refreshingly politically incorrect” (Cillizza, 2016, para. 3). After more than 7 years of an Obama presidency, many voters were excited to support someone that they viewed to be the rhetorical and stylistic opposite of Obama.
The term political correctness has been widely used since the late 1980s (Allen, 1995), and it has long been “characterized as an excessive attention to the sensibilities of those who are seen as different from the norm (women, gays and lesbians, Black people, the disabled)” (Mills, 2003, p. 89). As Mills (2003) notes, because political correctness is often mocked through exaggeration (suggesting, for example, that liberals want people to be called “vertically challenged” instead of “short”), the values driving political correctness have been undermined. Employing Burke’s pentad, Bello (1996) argues that political correctness depends on emphasizing agent over scene. This emphasis frames the politically correct agents as irrationally promoting sensitivity. By downplaying the scene, it appears that the agents are only trying to limit freedom of expression, rather than address a larger societal issue.
Trump did not need to convince the public that political correctness was a problem for America, because they had been hearing this for decades. What Trump did, though, was give political correctness presence in the 2016 election. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) state that
… one of the preoccupations of a speaker is to make present, by verbal magic alone, what is actually absent but what he considers important to his argument or, by making them more present, to enhance the value of some elements of which one has actually been made conscious. (p. 117)
Shafer (2017) notes that Trump offered the rationale that political correctness was taking too much time, which kept the country from achieving greatness. Though Trump presented political correctness as an exigence throughout his campaign, it was particularly present as he squared off against Hillary Clinton in the general election. For example, in April 2016, Trump accused Hillary Clinton of playing the “women’s card.” (Giaritelli, 2016, para. 3). She responded by stating that she has “a lot of experience dealing with men who sometimes get off the reservation in the way they behave and how they speak.” (Giaritelli, 2016, para. 3). When Trump commented on her reaction in an interview on Fox News, he stated: “It was a very derogatory statement to men. It was almost as though she’s going to tell us what to do, tell men what to do” (Giaritelli, 2016, para. 2). Though Trump qualifies his statement with “almost as though,” he suggests that political correctness will evolve from discourse to policies that limit freedom of expression. Though it would be easy to dismiss this as an absurd fear appeal, such a dismissal overlooks its resonance. Trump’s rhetoric is designed for a context in which political correctness has run amok and threats to freedom of expression do not seem far-fetched.
Trump’s opposition to political correctness likely resonated with the millions of Americans who were feeling somewhat suffocated by political correctness and its impact on what they viewed as their right to free speech. In July 2016, the Pew Research Center released a report documenting that 59% of Americans believe that “too many people are easily offended these days over the language that others use” (Fingerhut, 2016, para. 1). This is partially a partisan issue, because 78% of Republicans agreed with the above statement, whereas only 37% of Democrats did so (Fingerhut, 2016). In the survey, “by a ratio of five-to-one (83% to 16%), more Trump supporters say too many people are easily offended” (Fingerhut, 2016, para. 4). Trump consistently expressed “out loud everything [his supporters] feel—with force, aggression, anger and no shame” and each of his victories felt like vindication for their set of beliefs that had been under siege during the Obama era (Lakoff, 2016, para. 33). Though conservatives had long decried political correctness, presidential candidates had not given political correctness the sort of presence that Trump did. For Trump, the primary exigence facing the country, the factor that was preventing America from being “great,” was not high corporate taxes or lack of a muscular foreign policy. Instead, Trump elevated what had been a stock issue of AM talk radio to the status of a major impediment to the country’s well-being. There is some evidence that this shift toward nationalism, often with racial undertones, has resonated with a segment of the public.
Indeed, since Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, many people have felt free to stop performing political correctness in the public sphere. Hate speech based on presumed religion, race, immigration status, and ethnicity dramatically increased. As the Anti-Defamation League noted, between fall 2016 and fall 2017, White supremacist propaganda on college campuses across the country increased by 258% (Kerr, 2018). The number of White-centered groups has jumped since election day, and many groups are using Trump’s victory as evidence that they are on the right track. For example, a newly formed White supremacist group in Fargo, North Dakota, posted signs throughout the college town that stated, “Trump was the first step, we’re the next” (Schmidt, 2017, para. 5). And one must only see a small handful of the images resulting from the White supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, to see that some Americans believe that a victory for Trump means that the shackles of political correctness are finally broken.
The Form and Style of Trump’s Rhetoric
To illustrate the interdependence between the style and content of Trump’s rhetoric, imagine if he had given a detailed speech about why John McCain is not a war hero, with a passage of this sort:
John McCain is purportedly a war hero. Yet I believe he has fallen short of such a label. My definition of a war hero is one who does not get captured. That is, evading capture is a necessary condition to being a war hero. And we all know that McCain was captured.
Such a hypotactic response would leave no doubt that Trump really believes that John McCain should not be labeled a war hero. But Trump’s paratactic style allows him to present such outlandish content if for no other reason than parataxis makes it seem like the rhetor has not completely processed the argument and is presenting a nascent thought rather than a firm position.
Trump’s rhetorical style bears discussing in detail, because it is a substantial break from traditional presidential rhetorical styles. Trump was not the first politician to move away from rhetorical norms, but he has effectively combined a style and content that are both in violation of political norms. Within the popular press, there have been attempts to draw parallels between Trump’s rhetoric and that of Huey P. Long (Cassidy, 2015; Nilsson & Hollandbeck, 2016; Will, 2016), but these parallels ignore the consistency of Long’s economic program in contrast to Trump’s inconsistency. Long made specific promises (e.g., building roads and bridges and providing free textbooks) as a candidate and, as Louisiana governor, “Long delivered on his promises” (Hogan & Williams, 2004, p. 154). During the campaign, and his presidency thus far, Trump has been vague about what he aims to achieve through his policies. And at many points he has been utterly inconsistent beyond advocating for a sort of vague nationalism and building some sort of border wall. What has been consistent, though, is Trump’s attacks on norms, even if this occasionally leads to accusations (from his own party) that he is planning to revoke the Constitution when he threatens the press (Greenwood, 2017).
Trump’s style and his content must be considered as functioning interdependently. If Trump has a single salient conviction, it is that things must be done differently. This argument has allowed him to prosper from his unconventional political style, rather than treat it as a liability. From the outset, Trump’s weakness has been his lack of political experience and skill, but by elevating the presence of the political correctness to exigence, this weakness can come to be viewed as a strength. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) note how the perception of a rhetor following a familiar speaking process can itself be disqualifying. This disqualification can happen when the audience does not share the values espoused by the speaker. In such cases the speaker’s content is viewed negatively, but so, too, is her style. But,
[e]ven when there is agreement on values, one may get the impression that a device is being used when the speaker seems to adopt rules or techniques which, because they are too uniform or too farfetched, do not seem to fit the object in an altogether natural manner. (Perelman & Olbrects-Tyteca, 1969, p. 452)
Finally, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) suggest that “the mere presence of schemes of arguments and techniques of persuasion that are theoretically transferable to other discourses may be enough to suggest the charge of device” (p. 452).
Most notable, Trump’s style is defined by parataxis, not just in his 140-character tweets, of which he appears to be particularly fond, but also in his campaign rallies. When he does form complete sentences, they are often extremely short with minimal use of clauses. Both off and online, Trump’s rhetoric is marked by staccato bursts of repeated phrases. For example, during a primary debate, on the subject of a critical article in The New York Times, Trump said, “That’s wrong. They were wrong. It’s The New York Times, they’re always wrong. They were wrong” (Stevenson, 2016, para. 8).
Trump’s paratactic construction is infused with a variety of small-scale rhetorical moves that deviate from rhetorical norms. Though the aforementioned repetition is the basis for many common rhetorical tropes, Trump’s use of repetition is simple. His comment on The New York Times is an epistrophe, because of the repetition of wrong, but it is paratactic epistrophe. There is no further explanation of why The New York Times was wrong, nor is there any expounding on their misdeeds. This paratactic epistrophe is simply about repeating ready-made sound bites.
Because Trump relies so heavily on repeated phrases, “this repetition means that many phrases are entirely predictable well before their end, and perhaps for that reason, he often leaves the last bits unspoken” (Liberman, 2015, para. 1). This is often demonstrated in Trump’s campaign speeches in which he will start down a well-worn rhetorical path and then interrupt himself with an emphatic pronouncement like, “We need to build a wall, folks.” The wall to which Trump refers was one of his few policy assertions during the campaign, but his parataxis allowed him to avoid offering any clear evidence that such a wall was necessary, effective, or humane.
In addition to repetition, Trump’s parataxis relies primarily on single-syllable words (Shafer, 2015) like this sentence: “I know words. I have the best words” (Bennett, 2016, para. 1). Trump’s style of parataxis is almost infinitely compressible, as his intuitive mastery of the micro-rhetorical world of Twitter shows: “Lightweight Marco Rubio was working hard last night. The problem is he is a choker, and once a choker, always a chokker [sic]! Mr Meltdown” (Thompson, 2016, para. 15).
Even though he too is confined by the 140-character limit on Twitter, Trump’s style of parataxis often allows him to fit several sentences into a single tweet. Beyond being monosyllabic, Trump’s rhetoric is simple in its lack of familiar tropes like alliteration or anything of the sort. Phrases like “Crooked Hillary” and “Lyin’ Ted” do not seem particularly artful. This is because Trump’s rhetoric is designed for quantity, rather than quality; he does not count on a phrase like “Lying Ted” to stand on its poetic qualities. These labels are so inartful that they somehow seem authentic. This inartful quality allows Trump to achieve the dissociation from rhetoric that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) believed could enhance a rhetor’s ethos. In more contemporary terms, the simplicity of these constructions gives the appearance that they are Trump’s words and they have not been screened by any focus groups or consultants.
Yet Trump’s simple ad hominem attacks are rhetorical in the sense that they create metonymies through their perceived authenticity and dogged repetition. The abstract concept of crookedness, or corruption, was firmly attached to Clinton. And the notion of untruthfulness was attached to Ted Cruz. By creating these metonymies, Trump was able to deflect salient criticism that he was actually the corrupt candidate and/or a liar. Barry Brummett has noted that within popular culture, this use of metonymy is more important than exposition.
Because the public must still perform its function of rendering judgments about an impossibly complex world, metonymy is the “master trope” for public discourse today, rendering that complex world into images that the public can use to make its judgments. The media metonymize the great issues of the day into forms that the mass public can grasp. What the public finally receives as “public discourse” in this era is not merely a watered- down version of great debates occurring in distant halls but is a radical transformation of issues into a different form of public discourse. If we look for public discourse to be expositional, we will simply miss its changing metonymic nature. (Brummett, 1991, p. 27)
This metonymy works quite well within Trump’s paratactic constructions, where little to no explanation is offered for his claims. Metonymy is also a rhetorical strategy that is well suited for the brevity that is imposed by social media.
In the early months of his presidency, Trump has used the microblogging site Twitter as his primary means of direct communication with his external publics. Tweeting is an activity that is naturally impulsive because it is incredibly easy, can be done from virtually any location, can be done at any time, and takes just a moment to write and distribute (Ott, 2017). Trump takes full advantage of the impulsive nature of Twitter, often tweeting foreign policy threats and comments about television show ratings before dawn (Remnick & Osnos, 2017). Twitter also offers something of infinite value to the president: a direct line to the American public without having to deal with the filter of the “failing,” “fake,” “dishonest” news media (Abadi, 2017).
Trump’s rhetorical style is unique enough that many organizations and individuals have felt the need to formally assess his grammar and vocabulary level. Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute found that his grammar averages at just below the 6th-grade level because of the fragmented sentences and his limited vocabulary (Liberatore, 2016). A separate study of his press conferences and campaign speeches found that when the speeches are run through the Flesch-Kincaid grade level test, his results place him at the 3rd- and 4th-grade reading level (Shafer, 2015). Of course, these assessments are meaningless without direct comparison to other presidents and presidential candidates. For contrast, in the same Carnegie Mellon study, Ronald Reagan’s grammar tested at the 9th-grade level and Bernie Sanders’ vocabulary tested at the 11th-grade level (Liberatore, 2016).
While speaking, Trump frequently interrupts his sentences with other thoughts and then interrupts those interruptions with sidenotes. This pattern of starting a sentence, repeating parts of it, and then interrupting it with a new thought in the worst-case scenario leads to utterances like this one, in which he attempted to state that he was opposed to an Iran arms deal:
Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us. (Paskin & Voorhees, 2015, para. 3)
Remarks like the one above are proving to be a headache for the world’s translators. Trump’s “confusing logic, his tendency to jump quickly from topic to topic and his lack of attributions for so-called facts make his remarks sound like a puzzling jumble” (Schmidt, 2017, para. 7). Translators are left with the option of attempting to exactly translate Trump, which would make his meaning virtually impossible to decipher in many languages, or to use a heavy hand to try to shape his utterances into sentences (Schmidt, 2017).
It is clear that the form of Trump’s rhetoric was unusual for a presidential campaign, but of equal or even greater importance are the contents of Trump’s tweets and rally speeches. In his words, we can see evidence of his preference for framing his policy proposals in terms of direct causation, rather than systemic causation (Lakoff, 2016). For example, rather than considering the systemic reasons why Mexican people might be illegally entering the United States, Trump proposes to build a wall to physically keep them out. His solution to the more than 33,000 gun deaths each year (Casselman, Conlen, & Fischer-Baum, 2016) is to make sure that more people have guns so that they can defend themselves against gun violence (Lakoff, 2016). In his rhetoric, Trump promises to solve incredibly complex and systemic problems with one-line solutions. Especially in contrast with the often pedantic and overly nuanced Obama, Trump’s proclamations are stripped of qualifying clauses and complicating phrases (Swaim, 2015). Twitter, however, is “structurally ill equipped to handle complex content” which “undermines our capacity to discuss and, subsequently, to think about issues and events in more complex ways” (Ott, 2017, p. 61). Trump’s use of Twitter and parataxis makes single-sentence policy pronouncements the norm (Shafer, 2015).
The question of whether Trump seriously means some of his comments is up for debate (Parnass, 2016). For example, Trump has repeatedly accused Barack Obama of founding ISIS: “He’s the founder of ISIS. He’s the founder of ISIS. He’s the founder. He founded ISIS. I would say that the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton” (Thompson, 2016, para. 16). When people across the political spectrum were outraged at this unsubstantiated charge, he claimed that he was joking (Owen, 2016). Trump frequently utters an extremely controversial (or verifiably false) statement and then waits for the reaction before revealing whether he was sincere or joking. This has become so common that it even has a name—”Schrodinger’s douchebag”—drawn from the concept in quantum mechanics in which a cat should be considered both alive and dead at the same time until one verifies the end result (Thompson, 2016). Trump has claimed that he was joking after receiving criticism so often that an NBC reporter asked the White House press secretary Sean Spicer during a briefing whether “Americans ‘can trust it to be real’ when the president comments on something.” Spicer’s response was, “If he’s not joking, of course. Every time that he speaks authoritatively, he’s speaking as president of the United States” (Master, 2017, para. 3). Because Trump does not reveal whether a particular comment should be taken as a joke until he sees the fallout from the comment, members of the public are frequently left to decide for themselves whether Trump is “joking” or “speaking authoritatively.”
In its comprehensive review of every one of Trump’s utterances over the course of a week (95,000 words), The New York Times found that the “most striking hallmark was Mr. Trump’s constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery that American presidents rarely use” (Healy & Haberman, 2015, para. 7). In comparison with other candidates and past presidents, Trump’s language was notable for its focus on the division between insiders and outsiders, frequently placing subsets of people into the larger categories of Us and Them (Healy & Haberman, 2015). Another interesting difference between the content of Trump’s rhetoric and others is that rather than criticizing people’s ideas, he places his critiques squarely on the people themselves. As The Times noted, he called his opponents “‘stupid’ (at least 30 times), ‘horrible’ (14 times), ‘weak’ (13 times) and other names” (Healy & Haberman, 2015, para. 12). It is difficult to imagine President Obama calling one of his foes a “total loser,” “idiot,” or “dummy,” as President Trump does so often (Shafer, 2015, para. 4).
Trump’s insults are often delivered on Twitter, a format he used differently than other candidates. In addition to his use of insults, there was the perception that Trump was the actual author of his tweets. In their examination of Trump’s use of Twitter during the 2016 campaign, Haenschen, Horning, and Kuypers (2018) observe that, “Unlike the other 2016 presidential candidates, who send quotes from press releases or hire campaign staff to craft their tweets, Trump’s tweets are personal—and he writes a substantial portion of them himself” (p. 56). Though there is evidence that some of his tweets were written by staffers, this is presented as the exception rather than the rule. That is in contrast to Hillary Clinton, who would initial the tweets she actually wrote, creating the assumption that the vast majority of her tweets came from staffers. Gunn Enli (2017) concludes that “the 2016 Clinton campaign’s social media activity confirms theories regarding the professionalisation of elections in Western liberal democracies, while the 2016 Trump campaign has a more amateurish yet authentic style in social media” (p. 54). Enli (2017) further notes that Trump was much more likely to retweet ordinary users than was the Clinton campaign.
Trump’s offensive, amateurish tweets garnered a good deal of media coverage for his campaign. Though one could marvel at the amount of “free advertising” or “earned media” he received, Haenschen et al. (2018) conclude that the content of his tweets was more significant.
… it is not so much how Trump or the news media used his tweets as statements from a candidate that was unique; rather, it was how Trump broke the rules about what a candidate should or should not say, and in so doing used a deeply personal and authentic style of communication on Twitter to attract tremendous media and public attention, garnering tremendous numbers of retweets and favorites. (p. 70)
Not only did Trump defy the norms, but he also made breaking the rules the cornerstone of his campaign. This was evident in his propensity to unleash the sort of insults that would have been considered gaffes if uttered by a normal politician.
Since Trump announced his candidacy for president, he has managed to insult, as of this writing, 487 different things, places, and people on Twitter, as catalogued by The New York Times (Lee & Quealy, 2018). According to Trump, Glenn Beck is a “failing, crying, lost soul,” Mitt Romney “was one of the dumbest and worst candidates in the history of Republican politics,” and the writer Harry Hurt is a “dummy dope” (Stuart, 2016, para. 34). The most surprising thing is that Trump is a rare example of someone who is not more insulting on Twitter than he is face to face. Brian L. Ott (2017) argues that “Trump’s natural style of speaking and Twitter’s underlying logic are wholly homologous” (p. 63). Though it is true that many people behave more terribly via Twitter because of the online disinhibition effect (Suler, 2004), Trump is just as likely to call someone a “fat pig” in person (Donaldson-Evans & Starr, 2006, para. 1). Trump is remarkably consistent (regardless of whether he is tweeting, giving a campaign speech, being interviewed on the radio or cable TV, or participating in a debate) in his direct, critical, divisive, repetitive, and paratactic style of speaking. Unlike traditional politicians, who visibly and obviously adapt to their audiences, Trump’s persona is nearly always the same. We argue that this consistency is one of the key components to the perception that Trump was an authentic candidate.
The Perception of Authenticity
During the campaign, the form and content of Trump’s rhetoric functioned in a way that helped him appear authentic to wide swaths of the voting public. As linguist Jennifer Sclafani described, Trump’s “conversational style contributes to his overall image as a political outsider and as an ‘authentic’ candidate, which is an important quality to American voters” (Liberatore, 2016, para. 6). Indeed, both before and during his presidency, Trump has frequently insulted many areas of government in a way that only a true outsider could, including the Republican National Committee (“weak”), the American delegate system (“totally rigged”), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (“Her mind is shot!”), the State of the Union Address (“really boring, slow, lethargic”), presidential debates (“really dumb”), and the United States of America (“a dumping ground for the world”; Lee & Quealy, 2018). Again, we see Trump pulling no punches as he makes statements that would previously be unthinkable for a presidential candidate. His willingness to tear down people and institutions using aggressive and insulting language, rather than the typical equivocating style of traditional politicians, affirms his outsider status to voters who also feel like outsiders.
Most of Trump’s utterances are devoid of the couching terms that permeate public political discourse because he “makes no effort to hedge his statements or phrase them in such a way that they are at least defensible” (Swaim, 2015, para. 22). The end result is that he sounds like a person “who has rejected the conventions of electoral politics altogether—someone who’s opted out of the whole charade” (Swaim, 2015, para. 22). To those voters who are overwhelmed by the overly complex but also vague language used by many politicians, Trump appears to be cutting through the rhetoric (Swaim, 2015). In particular, his complete rejection of political correctness marks him as “authentic in certain corners and advances his cred as a plainspoken guardian of the American way” (Shafer, 2015, para. 5).
In contrast, in the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton struggled with accusations that she was inauthentic, particularly compared to Donald Trump. As Anderson (2016, p. 123) notes, Shawn J. Parry-Giles describes political authenticity as “a negotiated and contested process wherein politicians attempt to authenticate their image, opponents attempt to discredit it, and the news media act as ‘self-appointed arbiters’ of the struggle.” She argues that though Clinton was viewed as politically authentic, her personal identity was inauthentic, because she was perceived as a “dubious and opportunistic celebrity politician” (Parry-Giles, 2014, p. 179). Trump, on the other hand, used strategies that “cultivated the impression of bare-knuckle authenticity—’a blue-collar billionaire’—that communication scholars have long argued is lacking in modern politics, and appeals to disaffected voters” (Wells et al., 2016, p. 670). In the 2016 primary, Trump quickly emerged, to the shock and chagrin of those on the other side of the aisle, as the “authenticity candidate.” In a December 2015 New York Times/CBS poll, 76% of Republican primary voters said that Trump “says what he believes” instead of “what people want to hear” (Sargent, 2015, para. 3).
Trump’s focus on political correctness allowed him to create unity between his personal and political personae. Of course, politicians have long sought to be viewed as “outsiders” who will disrupt Washington. Claiming “I am not a politician” is not a new rhetorical move. What Trump did as a candidate, and continues to do as president, is provide evidence that he is not becoming a politician. His consistent political incorrectness demonstrates that he will not morph into one of the careful politicians the public knows so well. Trump’s authenticity depends on the belief that he will continue to be politically incorrect.
Though being politically incorrect does not automatically give a rhetor the perception of authenticity, it seems much easier for a rhetor to appear authentically politically incorrect than to appear authentically politically correct. Anyone who maintains a commitment to certain values that are typically deemed politically correct (e.g., combatting sexist or racist language) must demonstrate that she truly lives those values. The more committed one is to a certain set of values, the more vulnerable they are to charges of inauthenticity based on an offhand remark. Consider when Barack Obama, while campaigning in 2008, referred to a reporter as “sweetie.” There was a perception that this remark was sexist, which was surprising coming from a progressive candidate. Indeed, Obama quickly issued an apology where he labeled his use of the term a “bad habit” (Schor, 2008, para. 8). The public needed to be convinced that this statement did not prove that Obama was something other than what he had claimed to be.
Hence, Clinton may have done Trump a favor when she stated, “There is no other Donald Trump. What you see is what you get” (Gearan, 2016, para. 4). This comment was a refutation of the argument that after the election Trump would become more of a conventional Republican officeholder, with the accompanying cautious rhetoric. It was also an affirmation, unintentionally, that Trump was authentic in his political incorrectness. As it relates to the perception of authenticity, it would have been much worse if Trump’s political incorrectness had been revealed to simply be a routine that he was using to garner votes.
Trump’s tendency to engage in politically incorrect rhetoric is just one way that he proves his authenticity by violating political norms. Trump is often hammered by the press and left-wing politicians and pundits for his apparent inability to engage in public discourse without including one or more inaccuracies or, in some cases, blatant lies (“Donald Trump’s File,” n.d.). However, we argue that for those who are exasperated by political correctness, Trump getting caught in the occasional fabrication or exaggeration helps prove his authenticity. Many Americans embellish details when they tell a story in order to create a more significant effect in their audience. Seeing Trump do the same thing—and do it unapologetically—on the campaign trail and via Twitter worked to increase Trump’s relatability and authenticity with his voters.
As Shafer (2015, para. 5) notes, “By not conforming to the standard oratorical style, he distinguishes himself from the pompous politician. Less is more when you’re speaking Trumpspeak.” For example, at a photo opportunity at the White House in March 2017, Trump met with a group of representatives and leaders from the trucking industry. As the group gathered around the table, Trump pulled a prepared statement in front of him and started to read some rather moving prose about the beauty of the American landscape and how truckers have a unique vantage point to see it all. After a few sentences, Trump abruptly stopped and asked the group, “You think I wrote that? It’s not bad. Save that! I want to save that paragraph for a book.” His surprised audience laughed for a few moments before he continued reading the statement (“President Trump Meets,” 2017). It is in moments like these when his rejection of traditional presidential rhetoric makes him appear more authentic. It is quite novel for a president to acknowledge that the notion that he authored his own speech is laughable. This acknowledgement of speechwriters gives Trump the appearance of being a reluctant politician who would much rather speak his own words.
One way that Trump constantly proves his authenticity is through his personal Twitter account, which he has tweeted from more than 38,500 times since opening it in 2009. Using Twitter allows him to instantly share his opinions, excitement, and outrage with the American public. His occasional typos and inelegant phrasing help build his authenticity even more. It is clear to all that Trump is the author of his tweets. They have certainly not been written, or even vetted, by public relations professionals. Compared to Hillary Clinton’s more professional social media use, Trump’s Twitter offered an unprofessional and even amateurish style that allowed him to appear more authentic. A closer examination of Trump’s tweets found that “more than one-third of the tweets included ‘authenticity markers’, in the sense that they expressed impoliteness and political incorrectness, often using capital letters (Enli, 2017, p. 58). As Enli notes, “By not even attempting the guise of professionalism using digital media staffers or communication experts … Donald Trump made a statement regarding his positioning as a genuine outsider” (Enli, 2017, p. 56). His use of Twitter, as well as campaign and presidential rallies, allows him to circumvent the media. His ability and eagerness to speak directly to the people, without the polishing of public relations people and without the fact-checking and skepticism of the media, help build his authenticity.
If “authenticity is Mr. Trump’s brand,” as The New York Times has argued (Barbaro & Healy, 2016, para. 21), one factor that cannot be ignored is that he has performed as a celebrity brand for decades. Before his current term as a celebrity politician, he was a celebrity CEO and a celebrity television personality. According to Ilicic and Webster (2016), the spectacle and continuing saga of a celebrity’s life keep the audience in suspense and focused on the celebrity. During his 40-plus years as a celebrity, the Trump spectacle has never failed to deliver headlines and media mentions due to multiple marriages, beauty pageant scandals, allegations of sexual assault, mafia ties, the failure of Trump University, corporate bankruptcies, alleged marital rape, and antitrust violations (Graham, 2017). His many appearances on television shows like WWE helped him develop his boisterous, over-the-top political style (Wolfgang, 2016) and gave him a “platform to promote his brand” and “hands-on lessons in how to captivate an audience” (Wolfgang, 2016, para. 5). Trump’s instincts “were honed not in the bush leagues of a political party, but by decades in the public eye, meticulously drawing media attention from tabloid journalism and reality television” (Wells et al., 2016, p. 669). The result was that he was able to transform “notoriety, a brand name, and pop-culture persona into a populist hero” (Wells et al., 2016, p. 669).
Trump’s decades of experience in reality TV certainly helped him hone his ability to appear authentic. In particular, Trump uses two of the main tropes of reality TV authenticity. First, people on reality TV who “behave in ways that suggest they forgot about the cameras, or who are so overcome with emotion that they cannot contain themselves despite the cameras, are articulated as authentic, no matter how unlikeable” (Dubrofsky, 2016, p. 664). Second, when reality TV personalities display consistent behavior across contexts, even if it is hateful behavior, their authenticity is established (Dubrofsky, 2016). Before and after his election, Trump often behaved in a way that made mainstream audiences wonder whether he forgot that the cameras were rolling or that his Twitter account was visible to the public.
This online and offline work to maintain authenticity also explains why Trump does not apologize, even for his most outrageous insults and politically incorrect statements. Apologizing or admitting any sort of wrongdoing would decrease his perceived authenticity, which is perhaps his most valuable characteristic. In his world, it is far better to let left-of-center people continue to be outraged about whatever politically incorrect statement he made—and poke fun at those people’s outrage—than to publicly undermine himself by admitting a mistake.
In reality TV, self-promotion is key. To succeed in self-promotion, one must “craft a notable persona, say whatever will set you apart and garner attention, break the rules of the game wherever possible, choose your message, and repeat it clearly and often” (Hearn, 2016, p. 657). For his entire career in the public eye, Trump has worked to support his image as a successful winner. Trump certainly used the knowledge that he had gained in his decades as a celebrity to dominate the news coverage during the 2016 election. In fact, during the Republican primary, Trump received 34% of the election media coverage (the next highest-ranking candidate was Jeb Bush, with 18% of the coverage) and the vast majority of the coverage was neutral or positive (Chideya, 2016). Trump strategically gained attention from the public and the media by tweeting “controversial and unexpected” original thoughts and retweets (Enli, 2017, p. 56). Trump successfully promoted himself as an authentic and straight-talking winner.
Conclusion
What is to become of public political discourse in the United States? Brian Ott argues that the use of the microblogging site Twitter to discuss “issues of social, cultural, and political import” as President Trump is so fond of doing “destroys dialog and deliberation, fosters farce and fanaticism, and contributes to callousness and contempt” (Ott, 2017, p. 60). He warns that “Trump’s election marks the beginning, not the end, of the Age of Twitter” in which “we will see more dangerous demagogues rise to prominence” (Ott, 2017, p. 66). It is our hope that instead of becoming the new normal, Trump’s rhetorical style will serve as an impetus for returning to a more civilized dominant political style. If the polling data regarding Trump’s Twitter use are any indication of whether Americans as a group are supportive of his rhetorical style—only one quarter of Americans believe that Trump’s use of Twitter is appropriate (Concha, 2017)—then the question becomes whether 4 years is enough time to establish a new and lower bar for presidential political communication.
Perhaps it should not be surprising that in our current culture—one that is obsessed with social media and celebrities—the most potent presidential candidate is a celebrity obsessed with social media. In fact, in the age of Trump, our “first reality TV president” (Ouellette, 2016, p. 649), one wonders whether the American public can and should continue to be viewed as citizens. We do not pose this question as simply an exercise in nostalgia for a democratic utopia that never actually existed (Schudson, 1998). It is arguable that long before the rise of Trump, the public had already begun to view themselves as consumers rather than citizens (Bennett, 2003; Scammell, 2003). Even if neoliberalism had already encouraged this viewpoint, how presidents constitute the public still plays a fundamental role in our democracy (Beasley, 2004). A recent example is illustrative. Though George W. Bush encouraged the consumption of real estate in his presidential rhetoric, his arguments were based on a free market philosophy (Asen, 2010). In doing this, Bush constituted the public as owners rather than renters. Though anyone who experienced the housing crash might argue with the wisdom of this rhetoric, it was a rhetoric that viewed consumerism as a means toward a greater end. This is in contrast to Trump’s empty rhetoric, where the public is simply encouraged to consume spectacles (e.g., Twitter wars) that are sometimes only tenuously connected to concrete policy proposals.
Since Trump’s election, a few other candidates have attempted to demonstrate not only their political incorrectness but also that they share Trump’s belief that political correctness negatively impacts the United States. While announcing a 2018 senate run, Rep. Marsha Blackburn called the Senate “totally dysfunctional” and bragged about being “politically incorrect and proud of it.” In the same announcement video, Blackburn offered a quote from “a great Tennessean who wasn’t so politically correct” (Marsha Blackburn for Senate, 2017), presumably Andrew Jackson, though there is controversy over whether Jackson actually said these words (Feller, 2007). Though not a perfect facsimile, Blackburn has employed some elements of straight talk.
But it is also worth considering whether Trump’s rise signals the entelechial endpoint of the war on political correctness. As Shafer (2017) observed, Trump has claimed that political correctness is a waste of time and that doing away with it will make it possible for many problems to be addressed. By doing this, Trump took a stock argument against political correctness and elevated it from annoyance to the major exigence facing the country. Burke (1969) has discussed how in addition to origin stories, “there is also an ultimate of endings, whereby the essence of a thing can be defined narratively in terms of its fulfillment or fruition” (p. 13). It is difficult to imagine a politician who is closer to being the fulfillment of the war on political correctness than Trump. So if political correctness is truly what is holding back the country, it would seem that having such a politically incorrect president should pay dividends for Americans. The administration has kept big promises, such as imposing tariffs, withdrawing from the Trans Pacific Partnership, and renegotiating NAFTA (“Trump Promise Tracker,” 2018). At the time of writing, Politifact shows that he has kept 10.8% of his campaign promises and reached a compromise on another 6.9% (“Trump-O-Meter,” n.d.). Yet he has still done little to improve health care costs, a problem that greatly worries the country and that he cannot fix without Congress. Despite growing optimism in early 2018 about the overall economy, the public said that health care costs had the biggest impact on their personal finances (“Positive Views of the Economy,” 2018). One poll released at the end of 2017 found that “no issue is viewed as more important than reducing health care costs. Close to half (46%) of the public say this should be the highest priority for America’s political leaders” (Vandermaas-Peeler, Cox, Fisch-Friedman, & Jones, 2017, para. 35). Trump voters may have hoped that his straight talk was a sign that he would disrupt the gridlock in Washington and deliver on promises like replacing the Affordable Care Act (i.e., Obamacare) with “something terrific” (Sanger-Katz, 2017, para. 1). Though Trump has claimed to have repealed Obamacare by repealing the individual mandate, he and congressional Republicans have not actually replaced it with anything. And repealing the individual mandate could lead to healthy people dropping coverage, which will increase, rather than decrease, health insurance premiums (Greenberg, 2017).
If Trump, as the entelechial endpoint of political incorrectness, cannot address the major problems facing the country, then perhaps political correctness is not the key exigence facing the country. Just as important, perhaps the public will come to realize that Trump, like everyone who communicates, uses rhetoric. The sort of rhetoric he uses may not be what the public and pundits typically identify as rhetoric, so it is up to rhetoric scholars to explain how Trump effectively utilizes lesser-known strategies like parataxis and metonymy and how these strategies can affect public discourse.
Mark Thompson, the CEO of The New York Times, argues that unless direct steps are taken, we will remain mired in our current “crisis of public language” (Thompson, 2016, para. 4). He argues that politicians must trust the public with a transparent view of the give-and-take that any policy position entails and that the media need to do more investigative journalism. As for the general public, he argues: “Let’s teach our children rhetoric. Teach them how words and images are used, and abused, to sell packaged goods, political parties and wars, holy or otherwise” (Thompson, 2016, para. 31). As rhetoric scholars, we can certainly agree that our one best hope to confront this type of demagoguery is to teach rhetoric to the next (and current) generation.