Acknowledgments
I’m grateful to Brandeis University for the Norman Award research funds that assisted in the production of this book, and for Brandeis’ funding of my participation in the 2017 American Anthropological Association meetings where we first staged a panel on this subject. Thanks to the AAA attendees who encouraged us to expand the panel into a teachable book, and to the contributors for bearing with us through a complex process so that their wonderful work could be part of this volume. I am exceedingly grateful to Sasha Martin for being the deus ex machina who descended to take care of a thousand fiddly editorial details, making astute suggestions and supportive notes to each author along the way. Particular thanks to Isabel Collins of Cambridge University Press for her responses to so many questions, to Andrew Winnard, and to the external reader who offered such supportive comments. To my older son Tobias, many thanks for the cover design concept!
To the veterans and service members who have helped shed light on the politics of military language (see my “Crybabies and Snowflakes” chapter within): Thank you for being willing to speak with this anthropologist. Ben Schrader offered insights from a most valued perspective. Heartfelt gratitude to the brilliant members of the Cambridge Writer’s Circle who offered feedback in the context of long-standing friendship: Manduhai Buyandelger, Elizabeth Ferry, Smita Lahiri, Ann Marie Leshkowich, Heather Paxson, and Chris Walley. Jen Roth-Gordon, you are the most prompt and thorough reader I can imagine, making tough but immensely helpful suggestions; thank you so much for your help. And special gratitude to my parents, Ken and Peggy McIntosh, for their everlasting solidarity, and to Tom, Tobias, and Theo for supporting me with love while I worked on this project during an already impossibly busy time. We dedicate this book to the memory of Jennifer Jackson, who would have been anguished by the Trump era but would have tucked right into analyzing it with the compassion, humor, and insight of someone who understood disparate corners of America. She was my good friend and remains an example to me, in head and heart.
Janet McIntosh
I would like to pay homage to the linguistics/anthropology scholars who have passed away and who inspired us to write this book. They include Jennifer Jackson (1975–2015), Jane Hill (1939–2018), Chuck Goodwin (1944–2018), Barney Bate (1961–2016), Joshua Fishman (1926–2015), and Ivan Sag (1949–2013). All of them have written insightful political-linguistic-anthropological pieces and are constantly in mind as “shadow subjects,” as interlocutors in interiority, and as we write and think about these issues. Our field and our world are lesser in their absence.
Audiences at the American Anthropological Association, UCLA’s Discourse Lab and Co-operative Action Lab, Berkeley Linguistics Department, the Linguistic Society of America’s Linguistics Institute in Kentucky, and Duke University have given feedback on various portions of this work. Nomi Stoltzenberg with the Center for Law, History, and Culture at University of Southern California invited me to their West Coast Literature and Law conference “Trump Reads! Literature and Law in the Age of the Donald.” The interaction in this venue with writers and legal scholars was extremely important in the development of my ideas.
Thanks to Andrew Winnard at Cambridge University Press and to Isabel Collins, whose editorial flair and support have been invaluable. Extra gratitude to Sasha Martin, who good-humoredly helped with so many details for this book to come together.
Other friends and colleagues who have been sounding boards for various aspects of this work include Aomar Boum, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, Ozlem Ayduk, Galey Modan, Rudi Gaudio, Jeff Maskovsky, Erin Debenport, Bambi Schieffelin, Samy Alim, Candy Goodwin, Sandro Duranti, Ellie Ochs, Julio Serrano, Kit Woolard, Sherry Ortner, Tim Taylor, Perry Gilmore, Sonya Pritzker, Can Aciksoz, Zeynep Korkman, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Frederick Zimmerman, Keith Walters, Penny Eckert, John Rickford, Susan Slyomovics, Nadjib Berber, Miriam Meyerhoff, David Myers, Daria Roithmyer, Amy Wilentz, Susan Gal, Greg Thompson, Benjamin Smith, Dennis and Carol Preston, Jemima Pierre, Peter Hudson, Jack Sidnell, Otto Santa Ana, Luis Manuel Olguín, Brackette Williams, Jonathan Rosa, Hannah Appel, Jessica Cattelino, Noah Zatz, and Susan Ettner.
Tyanna Slobe deserves special thanks as an indispensable research assistant. Molly Bloom, Courtney Ryan, Ashley Stinnett, Tania Rhodes, Colleen Cotter, Tad and Claire Park, Stefanie Jannedy and Bettina, Justus, Jacob, and Karsten von Eitzen, Abdeslam Ait Tastift, Nezha Garimi, and all the Boums from Marrakech to Foum Zguid have kept me sane with talk and friendship.
And ultimately, this book is inspired by and dedicated to the thinkers of the future, the thunderbolts of inspiration and whirlwinds of action who are Teo and Kai Mendoza-Ayduk, Ryan Ait Tastift, and most especially Maggie Boum-Mendoza, who loves great ideas!
Norma Mendoza-Denton
Note on Transcription Conventions
Unless otherwise specified by an author, we use a variation on the transcription system developed by Gail Jefferson for the analysis of conversation (Harvey Sacks, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Language 50: 696–735, at 731–33). Transcription conventions used throughout include the use of CAPITALS to indicate talk spoken with special emphasis. Colons after a vowel indicate an elongated vowel sound. A left bracket ([) marks the onset, and a right bracket (]) marks the offset of overlapping talk. Numbers in parentheses – for example, (1.2) – note the length of silences in seconds, while a single period in parentheses (.) indicates a micropause of less than 0.1 seconds. A dash (-) marks the cut-off of the current sound. An equals sign (=) indicates “latching,” where talk starts up in especially close temporal proximity to the end of the previous talk. Transcribers’ comments and non-verbal action descriptors are italicized in double parentheses ((like this)); single parentheses, (like this), around talk indicate a problematic hearing. Punctuation symbols are used to mark intonation changes rather than as grammatical symbols: a period indicates a falling contour; a question mark, a rising contour; and a comma, a falling-rising contour, as might be found in the midst of a list. Each line of text (without a hard return) indicates talk spoken within a single breath group.
Occasionally some of the authors in this volume have transcribed the same conversation differently, paying attention to different details of interaction, tone, or gesture. We have retained the authors’ intended transcriptions insofar as possible, since these are not inconsistencies but theoretically motivated by different “noticings.”
When the transcribed talk is a monologue, authors have transcribed for content, using standard punctuation rather than the above transcription conventions, occasionally adding their own emphasis (which they have marked as such).
Grammatical solecisms, spelling and punctuation errors, and other infelicities in Trump’s tweets have been left unedited.
Note on Ethnonyms and Phenotypic Descriptors
We have opted to capitalize both “Black” and “White” (while recognizing there is no uniform identity within these groups), when, taken in context, the terms indicate a racialized identity. In the context of Trump’s politics, racial identity has been foregrounded for many, and White identity is increasingly self-conscious, particularly in hostile juxtaposition to its racial others. In a few instances, we use lower case when these terms foreground phenotype over identity (as in, “black and brown women”).
Janet McIntosh
This is the creation story of Donald Trump becoming president of the United States. His whole brand is: I will say things that the other guys won’t.
Ben Rhodes, former speechwriter for President Obama1
Early in his campaign, Donald Trump boasted: “I know words. I have the best words” (Trump 2015). And yet, one of the enduring paradoxes of Trump’s presidency has been the upsetting and contradictory nature of his language. Our popular understanding of language leads us to expect words to pin down meaning, but language in the current political moment equivocates, collapses, gives us false starts and electric shocks. From the Trump administration’s earliest pronouncements of the “largest ever” inaugural crowd size, to his tweeted insistence in March 2020 that the White House’s chaotic response to the COVID-19 outbreak was “perfectly coordinated” (Trump 2020a), language in the era of Donald Trump seems less about describing reality than about thick-fingered manipulation: We have said it, and thus have made it so.2 Precedent and previous use matter less than the reality-generating properties and the bluster of words.
The Trump era feels like a political emergency to many, but it also feels like a linguistic one. Language has been repeatedly enlisted to produce and fortify Trump’s reality, and it has scandalized liberal Americans as it inaugurated the tone of Trump’s presidency – from “Make America Great Again,” which critics felt suggested a racist, nativist atavism, to the T-shirts at conservative rallies reading “Trump 2016: Fuck Your Feelings.” The controlled, subtle oratory of Obama; the reassuring paternalism of Reagan; the elegant inspiration of JFK – such verbal artistry would be behind us. In his crude terms, Trump would tap into and exacerbate global currents of right-wing populism, complete with White victimhood, xenophobic fear mongering, and resurging patriarchy (van Dijk 2005; Wodak 2015). He would bring demagoguery to the surface of American politics, with all its appeal to popular prejudices (Hodges 2019a, Steudeman 2018, Young 2018), while he and his appointees would attack “the experts” in just about every domain while fomenting paranoid conspiracy theories (Warzel 2019). Critics would charge that his followers, some of them evangelicals convinced Trump’s presidency was ordained by God, were in cult-like thrall. And with Trump, the nation would enter not only a new political era, but also a new linguistic one, in which language would be weaponized in vindictive fashion, forging a new kind of presidential power.
As a result of their political and linguistic differences, left and right are now so polarized it’s as if we are living in different realities. By late 2019, Trump’s critics saw a president deserving of impeachment on multiple grounds, while his supporters saw a leader saving the country, not destroying it. To capture these extremes, some on the far right (sometimes known as the alt-right) have used an image from the classic sci-fi film The Matrix, in which the heroic Neo is offered a choice between a “red pill,” which represents brutal truths, or a “blue pill” that would let him bask in illusion. Alt-righters say that, like Neo, they opt for the “red pill,” confronting an underlying reality leftists are in denial about: namely, that America is being smothered by big government; that men are oppressed and imperiled by feminism; that White people are victims of reverse racism; and that immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ+ individuals, and other minorities are destroying the fabric of the nation (cf. Kakutani 2018: 86).
There’s a link between this red pill/blue pill logic and language, for one of the most striking things about this era is that the very same speech events and verbal stylings that buoy Trump’s supporters leave his detractors aghast. Different readings of reality have been linked to different readings of the same utterances and the same linguistic style. But, far from understanding Trump as a guy who “tells it like it is” or as a dementia victim whose spelling errors alone should disqualify him from presidency (the extreme poles of these oppositional readings of language), we have to understand these very framings as ideological products, backlashes, and accretions of not only racially inflected political priorities but also class-based sentiment.
What Can a Language Studies Approach Contribute?
At the heart of this book is an encouragement to think about how language both “means” things and “makes” society. Obviously, language communicates content through word meaning and the way we combine words into sentences. But as Jennifer Jackson (2013) has explained, linguistic anthropology encourages us to explore fleeting or seemingly minute verbal moments and their interpretation in context to understand the tricks behind the magic. Donald Trump is somehow using language – from word choice to less obvious interactional oscillations – to enlist members of the public in his distortions, breeding new social dynamics and a species of presidential authority many Americans have hardly recognized. How is he pulling this off? How, to paraphrase Jackson, can we examine language and its contexts to understand how the rabbit got put in the hat in the first place?
Linguistic anthropologists, sociolinguists, and other language scholars have developed a suite of concepts that will aid us in understanding language in Trump’s time. Some of this work draws on tools from “rhetoric” as it was traditionally understood; namely, the verbal arts of “persuasion” (for more on Trump’s rhetorical persuasion, see Hodges 2019a, Lockhart 2018, Skinnell 2018b). But in recent decades some have construed rhetoric more broadly, merging it with other approaches in language studies and nesting the study of utterances within broad social dynamics. Speech can provide ways of identifying in-groups and out-groups, ways of signifying personalities and feelings, and ways of signaling competence, authenticity, or allegiance. We see that language often does something beyond just referring or describing; it sets up storylines that aim to constitute reality, breathes life into identities constructed on the fly through interaction, establishes hierarchies, and enlists people into patterned rituals of social life. In the current political moment, it has also made large portions of the population feel decidedly outraged and unsafe.
To understand how Trump’s language works and why it terrifies, to grasp as fully as possible the capacious significance of any given speech event, requires an expansive sense of context. It requires understanding the backdrop of ideas about power, and it sometimes requires understanding how any given speech act reaches backward and forward in time to articulate with other, related speech acts – treating language, in other words, not as a matter of narrowly construed “persuasion,” but as a matter of anthropology. Anthropologists understand the meanings of events and utterances by looking to broader contexts. In some cases, this means exploring how meaning is made interactively, attending, for instance, to the way speakers unwittingly collude to construct a jointly shared linguistic activity and to crystallize the relationship between them as they go. In others, it means broadening farther outward to examine the significance of a speech event in ideological, historical, national, even international context. And it can include exploring objections and resistance to any given linguistic construction of reality.
As we address these dynamics in the Trump era, we bring tools from linguistic anthropology and language studies to a wider audience, defining them carefully for the public and using them to address questions such as these:
In this Introduction, I review select, recurrent linguistic dynamics of Trump’s presidency (“select,” because the later chapters address many additional vital topics; “recurrent,” to set the stage). If Trump’s rise has felt to some like a linguistic emergency, this can only be understood by exploring competing American “language ideologies”; that is, collective beliefs linking ideas about language to ideas about the way the social world is or should be. I start by historicizing some changes in American ideologies of (and expectations for) presidential communication, changes that have happened in tandem with mass mediation. I then engage with the widespread language-ideological disagreements about “political correctness” (or PC), disagreements that have fed a situation of verbal “mutual minorityhood” I explain below. This leads me into the disagreements about how to locate meaning in Trump’s linguistic style – that is, the form, rather than the semantic content, of what he says. While the right’s embrace of Trump’s supposedly “authentic” style often overlooks the dismaying inhumanity of his policies, I suggest the left’s fixation on Trump’s verbal errors also brings a risk: namely, playing on class prejudices at the expense of analyzing more consequential world-shaping aspects of language and, indeed, policy in the Trump era. In the final sections, I discuss the prevarication, gaslighting, and word policing Trump and his administration have used to bend political and social reality, reasons for the rapid rise in profanity across the political spectrum, and the spread of hateful speech. These changes, felt by many as verbal scandals and crises, furnish the backdrop for the focused chapters that follow.
Presidential Language: A Brief Comparative History
Presidential appeal and credibility hinge on what political insiders call “message,” or “the politician’s publicly imaginable ‘character’” (Lempert and Silverstein 2012: 1–2). Message isn’t so much about what politicians literally state about the issues, but rather what they convey about their “identity and personal values” by way of “all manner of signs that creatively gesture toward this persona without explicitly describing it.” Presidential language, then, helps to create the political figure’s holistic message or brand.
Historically, American presidential candidates have worked within fairly predictable constraints of language ideology to convey their message, particularly the expectation that they show seriousness, erudition, and “statesmanlike” qualities through composed, polished language. Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, for instance, achieved its fame partly through his “priestly, Eucharistic” style that connected the public with the sacred (Silverstein 2003: 57). For a long while, it was conventional for presidents to preserve formality by addressing the public as if reading from a written document or (starting in the 1950s) a teleprompter – with perhaps a bit of ad lib for humor or immediacy – when giving a planned speech. The American public has also tended to value direct displays of conviction and intention in presidential speech.
In recent decades, expectations for presidential language have shifted along with mass media technology. Franklin D. Roosevelt took advantage of the radio age with his weekly “Fireside Chats” – the first time in history that a large segment of the public could listen simultaneously to their president in their homes. Although Roosevelt deliberately chose common words to create more intimacy than the elite formalisms he used elsewhere, the addresses were still painstakingly drafted, and sounded more like oratory than informal “chatting” (cf. Lim 2003). Still, the era merged at least the promise of an accessible touch with high presidential formality.
With the television era, visual polish became crucial to success. The first televised presidential debate in 1960 broadcast a tanned, unflappable JFK next to a pallid, sweating Richard Nixon (a contrast visible even on a black-and-white TV screen). Kennedy’s chiseled confidence enhanced his delivery throughout his presidency, as did his inspirational oratory, with poetic style that connected him to a transcendent sense of purpose. His inauguration speech marked him as the charismatic steward of a new America: “Let the word go forth from this time and place … that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.” Ronald Reagan, a seasoned Hollywood actor, brilliantly exploited the medium of television by coordinating with camera operators to visually “illustrate” his words. In his inaugural speech, for instance, the cameras panned over the great monuments in Washington, DC, as Reagan gained reflected glory from the monuments’ “visual majesty” (Jamieson 1998). He was also a master storyteller, invoking deeds from heroic Americans, dipping into choice quotations from poetry and scripture, and managing to make Americans feel as if they all were bettered by the reflected glory of great men (and I do mean men). Though Reagan’s critics gleefully compiled examples of his grammatical solecisms (Green and MacColl 1983), some of which may have been early signs of the Alzheimer’s that would take his life, his addresses to the public were often models of craftsmanship.
After Reagan, the Bush dynasty that came before and after Bill Clinton marked something of a verbal come-down. George H. W. Bush’s Vice President, Dan Quayle, was ridiculed for years for a 1992 incident in which, at an elementary school in Trenton, New Jersey, he amended a student’s (already correct) spelling of “potato” by adding an “e” to the end of the word. The event presaged the post-Clintonian verbal errors of George W. Bush (or “Dubya”), which earned their own term: “Bushisms.” His grammatical perversions were legendary (“You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test”), as were his neologisms such as “misunderestimated” and “the internets.” While some, including Noam Chomsky, suggested his mispronunciations may have been faked to appeal to a working-class base (Polychroniou 2016), his blunders suggested to others that he might be easily controlled by the keener manipulative minds in his cabinet. Yet his style also held what anthropologist Michael Silverstein (2003: 70–71, 124) calls a “posture of earnestness that has got to make our hearts go out to the guy”; a sincere message that implied something like, “Hey, I’m not perfect, but I’m really trying!” All in all, linguist John McWhorter (2017) suggests that the Dubya era presaged Trump’s “semi-articulate” language: Evidently, “being well spoken was a much lower priority for Americans in choosing a president than it once was.” The next step toward an inarticulate head of state was the selection of Sarah Palin, “blithely unconcerned with her swivel-tongued syntax and yet revered by millions” (ibid.), as a Republican vice-presidential nominee.
But before America arrived at Trump, there were two preconditions in the 2000s: an African American president whose election stoked a White supremacist backlash, and a sea change in the mass mediation of communication between politicians and the populace. Obama’s grassroots campaign team used Facebook, Twitter (founded only in 2006, but rapidly relevant to political campaigning), and other forms of social media. These mechanisms reached voters at their laptops and cell phones, sometimes striving to appeal to young people – a prime example being Obama’s uplifting “Yes We Can” slogan and its celebrity-laced music video. Before a podium, Obama also managed to “remix” the inspirational structures of both White and Black jeremiadic traditions (Alim and Smitherman 2012: 87). Educated liberals swooned over his erudition and verbal dexterity. Depending on the moment, too, he could toggle between a Black discursive style and a “white Mainstream way of speaking,” sounding “Black, but not too Black” and “White, but not too White” (ibid. 20–22), while endearing himself to many, including younger generations, with his verbal indicators of “cool.” Such versatility gave him broad demographic appeal, and was particularly important since American verbal culture, if there’s any one such thing, had become more casual and informal; less rigid about old grammatical rules and more enthusiastic about “relatability” in authority figures.
Any remaining expectations of presidential language have been shattered by Trump’s ascendancy, which was partly propelled by yet more rapid change in the mass mediation of communication. In the decade leading up to Trump’s campaign, the Internet and other digital technologies upended the way professional media handled their reporting and deadlines (Cotter 2015), while social media created millions of new channels for the public to generate and transmit political sentiment. One result has been that people’s existing political opinions are more likely to be stoked than challenged. Social network algorithms are designed to feed consumers the very news stories they are likely to click on based on their browsing history. Trump’s campaign received a boost from professional “trolls” hired by Russia, who promulgated supportive memes and often falsified stories by way of Facebook, 4chan, and Reddit (Davlashyan and Titova 2018). And the rocketing popularity of Twitter furnished Trump with a platform in many respects perfectly suited to his style.
Trump thrives on Twitter’s character limit (140 words before 2017, now 280 words) for his compulsive provocations and claims, many of which he seems unable to elaborate on anyway. Twitter’s cursory form is perfect for the man seeking what linguistic anthropologists call a “zero-evidential” speech style; that is, a mode in which the speaker furnishes no grounds for their claims. Tweets scroll away as new ones come in, easily drowned by public responses, giving them an ephemeral quality that facilitates Trump’s ability to escape long-term consequences of his words (Stolee and Caton 2018: 160). And he can pipe his conspiracy theories, insults, and threats to tens of millions of followers while lying in bed with his cell phone.
Though his tweets have been characterized as “official” presidential statements, Trump has used Twitter to issue erratic and contradictory policy promises, gestures of alarming international (un)diplomacy, and hateful, disruptive pronouncements. Many are ungrammatical and peppered with spelling errors and exclamation points – though aides sometimes correct his errors later in a kind of verbal mop-up. Critics fulminate while diplomats and policy makers scramble to understand the implications of and the level of commitment behind any given tweet. Though some Trump voters chose him in spite of his style, others enjoy the experience of someone so unmediated by conventional political packaging, as though it gives him “authenticity” (Stolee and Caton 2018: 157). Meanwhile, supporters have the option of issuing their own (anonymous, and therefore disinhibited) cheers for Trump and snide rejoinders to his detractors.
With the easy replication social media offers, Trump can guarantee that his attention-getting phrases will be widely disseminated. Spam accounts and automated internet “bots” have also created the simulacrum of larger masses of Twitter users than actually exist, including thousands, potentially millions, of Trump’s “supporters” (Fishkin 2018; see also Kakutani 2018). By seeming to echo one another and establishing solidarity, a community that might have once seemed fringe picks up steam and adherents (cf. Jaworska and Sogomonian 2019). In this new digital era, the work of journalism has been jarred as conventional news media struggle to compete and keep up with social media. The news media’s former function as a sort of “jury” to politicians (van Hout and Burger 2017: 471) seems to have little purchase on the opinions of Trump’s base.
Social media, in combination with Trump’s exceedingly tight relationship with the conservative Fox News channel, has created a rhetorical feedback loop between Trump and his cheerleaders, who sometimes mutually amplify catchy political phrases. A few Trump supporters, for instance, were the first to promote the image of left-wing protesters as irrational, unhinged “mobs” on Twitter around October 11, 2018. They soon juxtaposed these baying mobs with the job growth Trump has taken credit for, coining the phrase “jobs, not mobs!” Prominent supporters endorsed the slogan on Twitter and Reddit, stating their strategy: “The brain interprets rhymes as persuasive” (Collins and Roose 2018). The catchy meme, which condensed a political worldview in three syllables (a popular pattern among Trump supporters), was soon chanted at Trump rallies and widespread on the web. On October 18, 2018, Trump himself tweeted “#Jobsnotmobs!” for the first of several times, and the meme became a nationwide device of persuasion in the run-up to the midterm elections (ibid.).
Twitter’s casual immediacy has a stylistic resemblance to the very political architecture Trump promised. Rather than electing an image-mongering traditional politician, America would get a self-proclaimed “transparent” populist leader who would overturn the old political ways and bring an expeditious toughness to the White House. Rather than appealing to urban “coastal elites” with their polished oration and long words, the president would appeal to the guts, the heartland, and the South, as well as some in suburbia. I return below to the matter of Trump’s verbal style and its disparate reception by the political right and left, but to pave the way, I also provide more context about a pre-eminent language ideology in his campaign and presidency.
On “Political Correctness” and Mutual Minorityhood
The resurgence of the right wing’s “anti-politically correct language” stance helped to bring Trump into office. Over the course of a couple of decades, the USA had seen a rapid rise in progressive norms of linguistic sensitivity around historically marginalized groups. The ideology driving this shift holds that language is a kind of social action, and word choice can wound, marginalize, perniciously stereotype, and outright oppress (Cameron 1995). Many have reached for new and more careful terminology, eschewing language deemed racist or sexist while opting for phrases like “differently abled” rather than “disabled” to avoid an implicit judgment about worth, or phrases such as “enslaved people” rather than “slaves” to underscore the humanity of those locked into structural violence. In recent years, too, many academics and college students have put a fine point on “microaggressions,” those passing verbal and non-verbal slights, often unwitting, that may communicate hostile or offensive assumptions to marginalized group members.
But those who scorn what they call politically correct (or PC) language ideology refuse the notion that word choice creates problems, arguing instead that linguistic care stokes oversensitivity, or that it evades harsh realities that harsh language merely describes. The anti-PC stance sometimes seems informed by the ideology that speakers’ intentions should determine what they “really” mean when they say something, which is sometimes called the “personalist” theory of meaning in the study of language ideology (Duranti 1993). In this perspective, the PC police are unfair in holding speakers accountable for unintended effects of what they say, such as offending the hearer. To be clear, this issue has attracted concern from some on the left as well. It is undoubtedly the case, as Mikhail Bakhtin (1983) emphasized, that words carry some “taste” of the socially charged contexts in which they have already lived, but at their most extreme, PC defenders might not make much moral distinction between using and mentioning someone else’s use of a slur, or might call the police on an eleven-year-old boy for “sexually harassing” when using a term he doesn’t fathom the meaning of (an actual instance I heard about from an anthropologist colleague in the Boston area). Anti-PC crusaders, meanwhile, may let the most powerful man in the nation off the hook when he talks about “grabbing women by their pussies.”
Both the political left and right have complained of being besieged by language in what has sometimes felt like a hothouse of mutual recrimination. Anthropologist Elise Kramer (2012) offers a salient framework for such moments by defining “mutual minorityhood” as a social context in which “each side of a debate perceives itself as a victimized minority and its opponent as a hegemonic majority.” During the Obama years in particular, conservatives seethed that the PC shift had gone too far, propelled by “liberal elites,” academics, and other coastal urban culture-makers.
The scorn for PC language is driven in part by a reluctance to cede power to formerly marginalized groups, but in some cases, too, it’s driven by the fact that PC speech politics have sometimes come across as classist. Those with access to higher education, including some members of the “professional-managerial class” who play a key role in cultural production (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1977), are more likely to scold others for insensitive language. It is often through discussions on university campuses or at other institutions, for instance, that one is likely to learn new conventions for talking about enslaved peoples, gender-neutral pronouns (using “they” as a singular pronoun, for instance), or vigilance for microaggressions. Learning these new linguistic prescriptions can feel as peculiar to the uninitiated as trying to master a prescriptive grammar rule, such as not splitting an infinitive. In some cases, those who scold them suffer from what I call “structural oblivion” (McIntosh 2016); that is, a failure to recognize the reasons for the resentment of those with relatively less power. Those who don’t know the new lingo and haven’t cultivated exquisite verbal sensitivity are sometimes judged as prejudiced by (hyper-)educated liberals, an assumption that in some contexts may impose what Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb (1972) call a “class injury.”
Anti-PC ideology may be even more intimately linked to class politics than this. Those on the receiving end of accusations of bigotry have sometimes felt their economic grievances or fears of losing upward mobility are being sidelined by overly precious identity politics. Although a demographic range of voters supported Trump (including successful entrepreneurs from many ethnic groups), and while plenty of working-class Americans would never dream of voting for him (see Walley 2017 for a discussion of other class complexities in Trump’s election), Trump had vital support from White Americans without college degrees, many of whom feel disenfranchised by global free trade and the loss of blue-collar jobs in the USA (Tyson and Maniam 2016).3 Many expressed frustration at the fact that their wage insecurity and egregious working and housing conditions did not seem to be on the radar of liberal politicians like Hillary Clinton. And for those who worry their jobs may be imperiled by immigrants, PC language has come across as if defending or cosseting the very groups who supposedly threaten the nation’s economy. After all, some jobs are given to undocumented immigrants who can be paid below minimum wage, and, as many Trump supporters see it, tax money is being squandered to “undeserving” people – often, minorities – supposedly mooching off various welfare programs. From these voters’ point of view, liberals were ignoring the way the (White) working class was being starved of economic opportunity, while putting them down for using the “wrong words.”
For a while, it looked as if conservatives were losing the “culture war” (Kakutani 2018: 49), including navigating the PC language issue. But Trump has swung language around him like a medieval mace, delivering satisfaction to constituents who feel he is rescuing their pride or preserving their power. In fact, Trump frames PC language politics as not only silly, but also dangerous. During the August 6, 2015 GOP debate, he said: “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” (Kilgore 2018). Selecting a word only takes milliseconds, but Trump’s implication seems to be that PC energy is in a zero-sum game with other political urgencies, however ill-defined in this statement; perhaps its considerations detract from a certain expediency, a Nietzschean will-to-power. Or maybe, Trump’s use of “time” really means “empathy,” and all its implications for care and liberal compassion in policy formulation. In his 2017 Commencement Address at Notre Dame, Vice President Mike Pence focused on a different danger, arguing that politically correct “tone policing” on college campuses constitutes an attack on free speech (Stack 2017). Some have framed the PC peril as threatening an entire (conventional, Christian) way of life, as seen when Fox News claimed that under the Obama administration, saying the word “Christmas” was considered “politically incorrect” (Starnes 2017) and when a pro-Trump “super PAC” thanked President Trump in a commercial for “letting us say ‘Merry Christmas’ [as opposed to ‘Happy Holidays’] again” (Butler Bass 2018).
Occasionally, supporters have even portrayed PC ideology as a mortal threat of sorts, such as the woman from Woodstock, Georgia who told CNN that before Trump’s election, “the country was going on a near-death experience collision. Political correctness was about to strangle us all” (Enda 2017). In her phrasing, sensitive and inclusive language becomes a kind of vise, constraining speakers to the point where they cannot breathe. A software developer from Windham, New Hampshire framed the issue in terms of a dangerously weak foreign policy: “The Obama administration was preoccupied with not offending people, [and] some nations that normally would not try some things are seeing how much they can get away with … Sometimes, you have to smack them across the jaw” (ibid.). In such rhetoric, PC language is positioned as if in denial of harsh realities, with its opposite having a vital, near-physical force important even to national security. In spite of his prevarications, then, Trump’s hostility to political correctness has been taken as a sign of his realism as well as his strength.
But beyond all this, some feel Trump’s anti-PC language ideology – and its valorization by his election – has allowed his supporters to emerge from the moral doghouse. True, some Trump voters profess embarrassment or disapproval when Trump comes across as racist or sexist, but many have gloried that their leader has brought their true feelings in front of the curtain. Consider Clint Eastwood’s words to Esquire in August 2016: “Secretly everybody’s getting tired of political correctness, kissing up … When I grew up, those things weren’t called racist” (Hainey 2016). To Eastwood, Trump is “just saying what’s on his mind,” and claiming one’s verbal freedom – no matter who feels offended or oppressed by it – is framed as a traditional American value, beyond reproach. Jerry Falwell Jr. connects Trump’s direct speech almost tenderly to his supposed emotional earnestness: “One of the reasons I support him is because he doesn’t say what’s politically correct. He says what’s in his heart” (Zink 2017). Steve Tobak (2016) of FoxBusiness.com adds financial and legal alarmism to the arguments against PC language: “People are sick and tired of having to filter everything they say and do because they’re afraid of being labeled a racist or a sexist and being sued or losing their jobs. In the minds of many Americans, political correctness is a real threat to ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’” The core value of the Trump movement, he adds, is to “live our lives without fear of prosecution again” (Tobak 2016).
Mutual minorityhood comes into clear focus, here. Historically marginalized people wish for greater consideration in language, and feel their own “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” may be imperiled by verbal denigration. But opponents of PC language claim they feel oppressed themselves, making Trump’s anti-PC language practices feel, to them, like justice.
Anxieties about Style: Classist Judgments or Cognitive Incompetence?
The importance of speech style to voters’ perceptions can be heard in the words of Carolyn Sharp, who works as a cashier at a restaurant in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. “I feel like maybe somebody who has a little more power and has a big mouth can actually get some words across,” she says of Trump (Inskeep 2017). But Trump’s big mouth, so well received by many of his fans, has been one reason his detractors have felt in crisis. In this section and the next, I focus on the form rather than the content of what Trump says, exploring why responses to his style have been so polarized. Here, I suggest aspects of Trump’s style offer grounds for reasonable critiques of his intellect and character, but some of the attacks on his style are blighted by classism of the sort that indirectly helped to propel him into office. There isn’t always a clear line to be drawn between mocking Trump’s linguistic style because it lacks polish, and sounding the alarm when it suggests a genuine danger to the nation, but it’s worth being aware of the potential distinction.
For Trump’s detractors, his speech style exudes the “unpresidential” qualities they deride as inappropriate to his station. He has given relatively few formal addresses or press conferences, and his most extensive public utterances have been at rallies and on Twitter, where he routinely adorns his tweets with exclamation points, randomly capitalized words, and all caps lettering. His steady ping of spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors began with one of his first Presidential tweets, on Jan 21, 2017: “I am honered to serve you” (Smilowitz 2017). Under Trump’s tweeting thumbs, “heal” becomes “heel” (Wootson 2017); “whether” is “wether” (Nakamura 2018); the “Marine Corps” becomes “Marine Core” (Thomsen 2018); the “Prince of Wales,” the “Prince of Whales” (Dallison 2019). His staff, too, has been implicated: “Air Force Once”; a “lasting peach” in the Middle East; the “State of the Uniom” address (BBC News 2018). Even Trump’s official inauguration poster included a common spelling error over a beaming image of the new President: “No dream is too big, no challenge is to great” (Calfas 2017). A close-up photo of Trump’s notes for a May 2019 press conference revealed new goofs in his own handwriting: “achomlishments” and “intentially” (Cummings 2019). When Trump issued a nonsensical typo late one night on Twitter – “Despite the constant negative press covfefe” – Trump’s verbal incompetence seemed to have frolicked into absurdity. Sean Spicer, the then-press secretary, told a gathering of journalists with a straight face: “The president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant” (Nelson 2017), but those present snickered audibly at the attempt to save face. Trump’s critics immediately generated memes, mugs, and T-shirts overflowing with mirth and dismay.
A stylistic companion to Trump’s spelling difficulties has been his limited vocabulary. Linguists have concluded that most of Trump’s favorite words are monosyllabic (Atkin 2015), and that, compared to the past fifteen presidents, his vocabulary and other linguistic metrics rank the lowest (Frischling 2018). He sprinkles his language with empty intensifiers (“very, very”) and puffery, as when he dictated his own bill of clean health to his doctor, reporting “astonishingly excellent” laboratory results (McCarthy 2018). Things he likes, such as the wall he aspires to build between the US and Mexico, or various letters he received from Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, are “beautiful” (Reichmann 2019). His (ultimately impeachment-worthy) phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “perfect” (Diamond 2019). People and things Trump doesn’t favor get a single, hyperbolic predicate: “crooked,” “stupid,” “sad,” “weak,” “pathetic,” or “dumb” (Hodges 2019a, Stuart 2016). And Trump’s grammatical errors are so legion that if one tried to compile a book of them the way Reagan’s critics did, there would be little to exclude.4
Then, there is the word-salad effect of how Trump concatenates his phrases and non sequiturs. Teddy Wayne of the New York Times characterizes his speech stream as “bob-and-weave,” with “the appearance of continued communication being more important than what’s actually being said” (Wayne 2017). International translators have wrung their hands over the embarrassing challenges of representing Trump’s words; if they are to be true to his tone and style, the translators themselves come across as inarticulate (Viennot 2016), yet if they try to present his most “disjointed and meandering” statements as if intelligible, they may be doing a political disservice by masking his incoherence (Taylor 2019). Charles Blow (2017) suggests Trump’s “gibberish … stitched together with arrogance and ignorance” is downright damaging, not only to Trump, but “to language itself.” To millions of Americans accustomed to more presidential polish, it has seemed as if Trump can barely hold his words together with Scotch tape.5
For Trump’s detractors, small linguistic cues have served as indexes of – semiotic pointers to – all kinds of deficits: lack of education, lack of intelligence, lack of care, lack of competence, lack of civility, lack of fitness for office, and a generally untrammeled president without common sense or staff to corral him. Here is where the linguistic anthropologist, looking on at these judgments, has a tricky task. Across societies and history, fairly or not, the form of a person’s speech (their accent, the musical lilt of their speech, the structure of their sentences, and so forth) or writing (e.g. spelling or handwriting) tends to be perceived as an index of deeper qualities of the speaker. In fact, it is a truism for those who study language ideology that judgments about linguistic styles are commonly proxies for judgments about speakers themselves. Often, linguistic anthropologists find these judgments take the form of “iconization,” a semiotic dynamic where qualities of language, such as the minutiae of speech style, are assumed to mirror or resemble supposed inner attributes of the speaker themselves (Irvine and Gal 2000).
Sometimes this extrapolation from form is justifiable and correct. Sometimes, for instance, rapid speech is an indicator of rapid thought and brilliance (just think of the late actor and comedian Robin Williams). Sometimes, though, such judgments are downright unfair, driven by bias. When southerners in the US speak more slowly than northerners or Native Americans speak more slowly than native New Yorkers, it’s prejudicial to imagine this slow speech is an index of stupidity. When Americans hear the consonants in German language as reflections of a harsh or domineering national character, they are projecting the sins of mid-twentieth-century German political regimes onto millions of contemporary German citizens. Nevertheless, our snap linguistic judgments tend to resonate in our very bones, as if we have located the essence of the speaker.
There’s little question that Trump neither speaks nor thinks in sophisticated paragraphs, but it’s not always easy to know how much to extrapolate from the form of his language. At least some of the disdain shown toward Trump’s style has been bound up with the notion among the highly educated that (for instance) poor spelling is a direct mirror of poor thinking, yet consider the brilliant, accomplished colleague of mine at a world-class university who confessed to me (sotto voce) that he “saw himself” in Trump’s spelling difficulties. In some cases, problems with verbal form reflect specific deficits such as dyslexia, rather than poor overall intellect. More persuasive evidence of Trump’s intellectual limits can be found in places like Trump’s relationship to briefing memos. By his request, apparently, they include about a quarter of the amount of information of those of Obama’s, while excluding both nuance and dissenting views (Dejean 2017). Michael Wolff (2018: 97) further describes Trump refusing to read even the shortest pieces of writing. Even if dyslexia or some other domain-specific processing issue is a culprit, here, this pattern means the Commander-in-Chief is perfectly happy to suffer a critical information deficit.
As for Trump’s attenuated words and disorganized speech, their implications for his fitness for office are hotly contested. It’s hard for this critic not to feel that the chaos in his linguistic form mirrors a contradictory and stunted thought process. Some hear a deeper derangement in his style. Psychiatrists such as John Gartner, David Reiss, and Steven Buser (the latter being a member of the “Duty to Warn” group of mental health practitioners who believe Trump may have a dangerous mental illness) have argued that Trump’s declining vocabulary, repetitions, and difficulties “reading, listening, and comprehending” might point to pre-dementia (Gartner et al. 2018). Before impeachment was on the table in 2019, the ultimate fantasy of Trump’s critics was that he might be ousted for mental incompetence based on the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which allows for the removal of a President “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Yet Fox News and other conservative backers deem Trump “stone cold sane” (Ablow 2017), while Trump famously characterizes himself as a “very stable genius.” Using one of Trump’s favorite deflections, “I know you are but what am I,” his defenders have argued that liberals and Democrat politicians such as Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden (an admittedly easy target) are the ones who are “incoherent,” “unhinged,” or “losing their minds” (Harwell 2019), suffering from what the right jokingly calls “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Yet even some Trump critics see the possibility of his dementia as a red herring. Former FBI Director James Comey has tried to reframe the issue by saying that rather than seeing cognitive impairment, “I think he is morally unfit to be president” (Shear 2018; emphasis added). Some have suggested Trump may use sloppy speech by design, to appeal to his base. And one of the most vocal critics of the dementia theory has been the linguist John McWhorter. McWhorter (2018a) closely reads Trump’s speech style in excerpts such as the following, from 2015: “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.” According to McWhorter, Trump’s sentence fragments, repetition, and tendency to string simple clauses together (formally called “parataxis”) are characteristic of rapid, spontaneous talk; in other words, examples of “casual speech as it has always existed.” Although it’s true that Trump’s language has grown less polished over the years, perhaps Trump is now simply taking “the path of least resistance”; after all, he’s “learned that he can just show up and run his mouth, and he’ll be adored regardless” (ibid.). When people suspect Trump of being linguistically abnormal, in McWhorter’s argument, they are drawing on an older language ideology that politicians should use formal, high prestige speech, and forgetting how sloppy ordinary talk can be. With his White masculine privilege, he adds, Trump doesn’t have to try as hard as others do to polish his self-presentation. (Obama would have been judged on racial grounds – probably as less intelligent or educated – for such careless speech, while Hillary Clinton would have risked being seen as “trivial.”)
It is possible Trump will ultimately be diagnosed with dementia, and the very fact that the nation has had a protracted debate over it signals how deeply Trump has plunged us into uncertainty. But some of the hype surrounding Trump’s sentence fragments and misspellings suggests that bourgeois verbal propriety and conventional notions of professionalism may sometimes divert the focus from a deeper understanding of what Trump has been up to, both verbally and politically.
Abrasive “Authenticity”
To be sure, some Trump voters have admitted they find his tweets and his style petty and rash (Enda 2017). Yet many fans see in his verbal style grounds for optimism that America is in the hands of a great leader. How can Trump’s supporters have such a different reading of his style from his critics? What linguistic elements are Trump supporters picking up on, and what language ideologies inform their conclusions? If Trump’s detractors are placing too much inferential burden on his spelling and sloppiness, I contend his supporters are extrapolating too much about the man’s supposed merits from his abrasive and direct style. And while I don’t underestimate the racial animus that motivates at least some of Trump’s supporters, nor dismiss the fact that plenty of well-to-do Whites voted for him, I again suggest class-related experiences of economic precarity and frustration with politics-as-usual have inflected some of these judgments about his style.
Sclafani (2018) has examined Trump’s stylistic appeal to his supporters through a close reading of the debates leading up to the 2016 election. Trump’s opening salvos as he responds to debate questions, for example, are telling. Politicians typically launch their responses with what linguists call “discourse markers”; ostensibly extra words like “well,” “now,” and “so,” that can buy a little time, orient a listener, and perhaps refocus the politician’s answer away from the question asked so they can land a point favorable to them. Trump instead tended to start his answers with “I.” While his blunt openings could be disorienting to those seeking more rhetorical elegance or careful consideration of the questions, Sclafani suggests that putting his opinions front and center may have implied a decisive style of governance. Meanwhile, his catchphrase “believe me” – which often preceded factually dubious claims – suggested an authoritative voice of “direct experience,” building Trump’s image as a man who knows better (George Lakoff, quoted in Sclafani 2018: 37). Trump’s open-palmed gestures may have suggested to some an appealingly “big” personality, in contrast to Obama with his intellectual “precision grip” (Lempert 2011), potentially alienating to blue-collar voters. All in all, Sclafani suggests Trump’s rhetorical style conveys attitude more than content, but this is true to the politician’s requirement that their “message” be constituted in part by what Lempert and Silverstein (2012) call a “biographical aura.”
And the aura in question, nourished in Trump’s campaign rallies and tweets, tacked wildly away from conventional political speak. After all, one of Trump’s campaign promises was to “drain the swamp” – a chantable three-word rallying cry (another one, about Hillary Clinton, being “Lock her up!”), suggesting Trump would rid Washington of the supposedly insincere, inefficient beltway insiders. Within his stylistic forms, Trump’s supporters saw clues to, even diagrams of, the new political order they hoped for. And because their ideological starting points were so different from those on the left, so too were their interpretations of his verbal style. If Trump’s talk was structurally disorganized or fragmented, this was not a sign of a cognitive deficit, but of his hostility to conventionally scripted (and thus manipulative) performances of ordinary politicians. If his clauses and word choices were simple and repetitive, these did not reflect a dearth of education or intelligence, but a mirror of his inner clarity of purpose and an antidote to the slick, alienating jargon wielded by academics and corporate elites. If he flouted politeness with profanity, this did not stand for a mean or emotionally unreconstructed soul, but a satisfying symbolic revenge against liberal niceties (a theme to which I return below). After the primaries, the uptake was clear: Trump scored particularly well on measures of “authenticity” (Sclafani 2018: 5; see also Jamieson and Taussig 2017: 620).
Trump’s style was also taken as an indication of his supposed class affiliations. Although stylistic fragmentation cuts across class divisions, and Trump himself comes from wealth as well as an “academy” education, his language has sometimes been interpreted as a sign that he has a communicative pipeline to the working class. In fact, when Trump’s staff tweet in his name, some have deliberately imitated his choppy ideation, malapropisms, and random capital letters, “relish[ing] the scoldings Trump gets from elites shocked by the Trumpian language they strive to imitate,” while “believing that debates over presidential typos fortify the belief within his base that he has the common touch” (Linskey 2018). One might add that if linguistic style tends to be selected to accommodate one’s audience, as argued by sociolinguist Allan Bell (1984), Trump and his team’s style may equally be selected as a deliberate means to aggravate his more hypereducated and smug detractors.
As the political left has nitpicked Trump’s language, many Trump supporters have relished the occasion to contrast his masculine brand of clarity with the left’s feminized elitists and “snowflakes” (see McIntosh, “Crybabies and Snowflakes,” this volume). While Obama’s multi-clausal hedging, for instance, may have been read as a sign of sophistication to his fans, Trump and other detractors framed it as indicative of an egghead’s political paralysis and diplomatic weakness. And with a threat to patriarchy, Hillary Clinton, as his ultimate opponent, Trump could only stand to gain by invoking what Robin Lakoff (2005, quoted in Sclafani 2018: 8) called a “No More Mister Nice Guy” persona. Even his mob-like verbal stylings – so-and-so’s a “rat,” a lawyer might “flip,” etc., possibly picked up from his father’s associates – distance him from the appearance of class snobbery while fortifying his tough image (Landler 2018). Trump’s very rudeness thus comes across to some like a sign of masculine vigor in a world where conventional politicians (their critics say) so often fail to “get things done.”
Between his promises to help the working-class victims of globalization and the minutiae of his rhetoric, Trump secured the loyalty of a critical base and inspired former Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci to title his 2018 encomium Trump: The Blue-Collar President. Trump’s supporters are viscerally convinced that his simple formulations make him a “man of the people.” Never mind the tax cut that overwhelmingly favors the wealthy, continued threats to healthcare for all, tariffs that have caused financial chaos for farmers, and many more policies that imperil the working class. In spite of his millions, the man with golden toilets came to be framed as speaking truth to power.
Both the right and the left have thus turned to Trump’s verbal style to seek evidence for their deeper beliefs about who he is, but style is always interpreted through the lens of ideology, rather than being a reliable index of deeper essences. Trump’s lousy spelling doesn’t in itself make him a bad leader, any more than his simple language suggests he’s an honest man.6 While some of Trump’s stylistic fragmentation does seem to merge messy form with confused content, an abiding question is just how much one can legitimately extrapolate from Trump’s linguistic style without overextending what it can tell us. In some of the chapters within, the authors imply that we might do well to focus on more complex and impactful ways in which Trump’s language has created real emergencies, from collective delusions to violent divisions.
What can be said, however, is that Trump’s raw and harsh language has turned out to be an accurate mirror of harsh policies that bring the hammer down upon those he frames as social threats – immigrants, Muslims, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and more – while also (ironically) imperiling even many of his supporters in the working class through conservative measures on healthcare, labor legislation, and beyond. What is also clear is that the Trump administration has changed some of the deepest expectations about presidential language, not just when it comes to style, but also the relationship between words and reality.
Lies and Language Control
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
George Orwell, 1984
A major element of the Trumpian linguistic emergency has been the unprecedented depth and breadth of his prevarication. Kakutani (2018: 79) notes that this political trend picked up speed around the time that Lee Atwater, consultant to George Bush senior, declared that “perception is reality” in 1988. But Trump has lied and bullshitted his way across the political landscape with new velocity, repeatedly “dismissing discernable reality” (Jamieson and Taussig 2017: 632; see also Skinnell 2018a, Jacquemet this volume). By mid-October 2019, the Washington Post had documented more than 13,000 lies or misleading statements (Kessler et al. 2019). Trump has lied about matters both trivial (e.g. claiming it didn’t rain during his inaugural address [Dale 2017]) and profound (e.g. claiming the United States has the world’s cleanest air and water [Meyer 2019], or tweeting, in late February 2020, that “the Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA”; Trump 2020b). When confronted by a threat, such as Robert Mueller’s report about the Russia investigation, Trump responds with a new flurry of patent falsehoods.7 When accused, during the late 2019 impeachment proceedings, of pressuring the President of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden before receiving further military aid, Trump calls the proceedings a “hoax” and a “witchhunt” while feigning ignorance of the communicative norms that clearly locate bribery in his implied meaning (Hodges 2019b, Pinker 2019). When news outlets call Trump out, he repeatedly discredits them as “fake news” backed by Democrats, a smear that has sown mistrust of journalists while being enthusiastically taken up by fascists across the world (Davis and Sinnreich 2018, Jamieson and Taussig 2017, Kakutani 2018: 101). Spokespeople such as Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders have enhanced the confusion with verbal fog and artful dodges; fans on social media and Fox News spin information in his favor; and his detractors follow entirely different sources of information, all of which widens the divide between the nation’s communicative “silos” or “bubbles” (see Slotta, this volume).
Trump’s perverse relationship with truth has done a huge amount of political and social work. Many of the chapters in this volume discuss how Trump’s distorted claims stoke fear and hatred. But even setting aside its content, Trump’s prevarication sometimes follows a reliable structure that controls the political narrative, while enthralling, even entertaining, swathes of the public. Amanda Carpenter (2018), a former Ted Cruz campaign advisor and Republican CNN commentator, has described the patterned stages of one such technique. First, Trump stakes out shocking political territory by advancing a fringe claim, such as the birtherist notion that Obama was not born in the US. Next, he uses a strategy that Carpenter calls “advance and deny,” in which Trump states something like, “I’m not saying it [e.g. that Obama was born outside the US], but other people are.” This move prompts the media to debate the fabricated issue on his terms. Trump may opt to hold attention through a suspenseful announcement about an imminent lawsuit, revelation, or leaked tape (e.g. Obama’s grandmother says on tape he was born in Kenya! [Farley 2011]), none of which ever materialize. Sometimes he’ll choose a detractor to scapegoat, projecting the identity of “liar” onto them. Finally, he may hold a press conference to proclaim victory over the issue, as in his much-hyped 2016 statement to the press that the birther controversy was started by Hillary Clinton, and Trump had heroically “finished it” (Obama was born in the USA after all, he said; Haberman and Rappeport 2016).
The media ecosystem and public attention alike have been repeatedly co-opted by this pattern, which has kept Trump front and center while discombobulating his detractors. Some onlookers feel “gaslit” by the shenanigans; made to question evidence that feels obvious, and feeling a little crazy for it. For his supporters, though, the veracity of Trump’s statements often seems beside the point, being eclipsed by the moments that feel true to them. One of Trump’s biggest champions, Tucker Carlson of Fox News, concedes that Trump is a “full-blown BS artist,” but that the “reality-avoiding” left really hates Trump when he tells the “truth,” as in his scathing assessments of the condition of inner cities and sub-Saharan African nations (Folley 2019a). And beyond his racist aversions, Trump’s glistening, confident, employee-firing biographical aura – the man who declares himself the “winner” no matter what – is a bigger player than his lies.
Indeed, Trump’s appeal may be enhanced by the fact that the “experts,” including beltway politicians, educated elites, scientists, journalists, and other members of the professional-managerial class, so often challenge what he says. If the political establishment has a crisis of legitimacy and coastal intellectuals have patronized blue-collar America for too long, outrageous statements that flout their verbal norms may have an enticing, even an empowering quality. (Not incidentally, anti-intellectual, anti-fact frameworks are also widespread among right-wing populist politicians across Europe, a dynamic Ruth Wodak [2015: 2] calls the “arrogance of ignorance.”) Rebellion against dominant narratives may have special appeal when Trump’s “alternative facts” are framed as if they are “common sense” prevailing over oppressive snobbery, or when they tender the goal of uplifting those Americans who have felt lost in a globalized economy and threatened by accusatory identity politics (see Hahl et al. 2018). As an added bonus, Trump’s lies repeatedly piss off the left, and after years of leftists seemingly winning the “culture wars,” his statements may have a pleasurable element of “trolling” and schadenfreude (pleasure in others’ misfortune).
Precisely how much Trump’s base believes of what he claims is an open question, and there’s surely internal diversity among his voters on this score. That said, the sheer repetition of Trump’s lies might give him a certain cognitive sway over those who listen faithfully. Linguist George Lakoff, with Gil Duran (2018), notes that the repetition of language activates and reinforces the brain structures called “frame-circuits” used to understand experience. In this model, Trump’s repetition of lies, or even mocking aliases (“Crooked Hillary” being an old favorite), circulated continuously on social media and some press outlets, can literally change how his followers view the social world (Lakoff and Duran 2018).
George Orwell predicted that authoritarian lies can stick for a different reason: They simply wear you down. As Adam Gopnik phrases Orwell’s conclusions, after a while, “fighting the lie becomes not simply more dangerous but more exhausting than repeating it” (Gopnik 2017; see also Snyder 2017, Kakutani 2018: 143). The sheer volume of lies can help the cause. The news media can hardly keep up with fact-checking, the newsworthy implications of any one lie are rapidly eclipsed by the next one, and important lies are concealed in swarms of trivial ones. For individuals trying to keep pace, there’s simply too much cognitive load to track it all. Based on the prescient theory of historian Daniel Boorstin (1962), we might say that Trump’s lies constitute one extended “pseudo-event,” fabricated precisely for the purpose of being reported, and all part of the Trump spectacle that diverts attention from actual changes to policy and the judiciary, many of which have dismal implications for human rights, international relations, and climate change. After one week’s worth of particularly rambling public appearances in 2019 – during which Trump claimed that his father was born in Germany (he was not), argued that noise from wind turbines causes cancer (it does not), and then backed off from his threat to close the southern border – CNN political analyst Julian Zelizer neatly summed up his impression: “Chaos is the strategy” (Zelizer 2019).
One aspect of the confusion for onlookers is simply interpretive. Many citizens recognize that presidents engage in a degree of verbal theater to burnish their personal brand (see Hill 2000), but there’s also been an expectation that high-stakes presidential claims about the world will map onto empirical reality in some fashion. Political comedian John Oliver described the new disorientation: “This is what makes covering Donald Trump so difficult. What does he mean when he says words?” (Prakash 2017). Some, like Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, suggest that the mainstream media has erred when it takes Trump “literally,” given that (Lewandowski claims) his supporters don’t (Kakutani 2018: 60). Similarly, spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway tells us we should judge him on “what’s in his heart” – the content of which appears to be up for anyone’s projection – rather than “what’s come out of his mouth” (Benen 2017). It’s an ingenious way of deflecting the power of a lie.
But many of Trump’s supporters do have concern for truth, or some version of it. Partly, the matter baffles because people locate their political truths in different places, or focus on truth at different scales. Some of Trump’s supporters seem to read him as engaged in what could be called truthful hyperbole; as rhetorician Ryan Skinnell puts it, “Hyperbole brings an underlying truth to the surface that factual truth can’t quite describe” (Skinnell 2018a: 80). The same might be said about metaphor in the Trump era. Consider the back-and-forthing among commentators concerning the question of whether Trump’s much-vaunted “wall” between the US and Mexico should be taken literally, or as a metaphor. There is ongoing enthusiasm for a physical wall; in anthropological parlance, it seems to be a concept that’s been good to think with for many of his supporters. Trump even staged a government shutdown in early 2019 in (vain) hopes of securing more funding for it. Yet some of Trump’s backers have told journalists the wall may not literally take shape but stands for his commitment to blocking immigrants from the South. When “build that wall” slides the speaker and hearer effortlessly between a visual image of a barrier and a feeling that one’s hostility toward immigrants will be satisfied one way or another, perhaps the wall-as-metaphor still feels “literal” in some sense, because it emerges from and is addressing what feels like an underlying truth.
Much of that underlying truth may be connected to what sociologist Arlie Hochschild (2018) calls the “deep story” of the American right. Hochschild conducted fieldwork among right-wing Louisianans in the years just before Trump emerged on the political scene, and found she could understand their political choices with reference to their “deep story,” that is, an account that’s not necessarily literally true but it “feels-as-if” it’s true. One deep story for at least some of Trump’s base is that the White working class has been marginalized globally (by economic forces) and nationally (by coastal elites and Democrats who are coddling underrepresented groups and helping them to cut in line for handouts). Hyperbole might be recognized as hyperbolic and metaphor as not strictly accurate in every detail, but they gesture at this deeper emotional truth. The details of Trump’s claims and stated plans may not be factual, but the big picture he paints may feel real. (Anecdotally, some years ago when I sent an evangelical acquaintance a dozen links debunking the many falsified news articles she had sent me about Obama bringing sharia law to the US, she replied with, “Some of these claims may be exaggerated, but I still find them very convincing.” This confounded me at the time.) And if facts can’t really be used to loosen the power of hyperbole or metaphor, no wonder conservatives have been charged with “epistemic closure”: operating in a contained universe of assumptions, where challenging information is considered false a priori.
Finally, one might argue at least some of Trump’s lies function to breathe life into their own ideas, a gambit that flips conventional ideas about the relationship between representation and reality in political speech (though it is more common in talk than we realize). As Patricia Williams (2017) writes in The Nation, phrases such as “immigration must be controlled” create a kind of “grammatical neediness”: a sense of a challenge to be met that creates its own sense of urgency. In a related vein, Carole McGranahan (2017: 244), following Hannah Arendt (1972), has noted that some of Trump’s lies have “aspiration,” like “calls to action” that create “new realities for which contradictory facts need to be eliminated.” If Trump falsely claims, as he did in November 2015, that “thousands and thousands of people were cheering” (Fang 2018) as they watched the devastation of 9/11, he emboldens a community whose hostility toward Muslims might feed into a cycle of mutual bad feeling. Some claims may be lies when they’re made, but they have a self-fulfilling potency. In linguistic anthropology, we sometimes talk about the distinction between “constative” language, which describes a true or false state of affairs, and “performative” language, which does something and brings states of affairs into being. Perhaps many of Trump’s lies are performatives concealed as constatives. All of this tilts toward Russian-American journalist Massa Gessen’s (2016) observation: Trump’s lies are designed, like those of Vladimir Putin, “to assert power over truth itself.” Whether Trump is attempting to steer action, to impress (cf. Jacquemet this volume), or to invert the conventionally understood relationship between signifier and signified, he asserts supreme authority over world-making.
Indeed, beyond contradicting the facts with their statements, Trump and his administration have tinkered with word meanings and word use. This goes beyond the opposite-day goofiness of Trump saying, for instance, “nobody knows” something, when just about everybody does (e.g. what a community college is, or that healthcare could be so complicated), or that “everybody knows” something, when in fact that something is profoundly controversial (e.g. that we need his wall, or that he didn’t obstruct justice) (Bump 2019, Liptak 2017, Wong 2018). Trump’s administration has dipped into the Orwellian maneuvers Victor Klemperer (1957: 56) described in the language of the Third Reich, where the term “special treatment” substituted for “murder,” and the word “fanatical” was twisted into an accolade rather than a slur. Every time Trump has used phrases like “the enemy of the people” to characterize the mass media, “fake news” to ding a report he doesn’t like, or “suppression polls” to suggest poll results unfavorable to him have been tampered with to discourage his voters, he twists the meaning of the words (Kakutani 2018: 80). Similarities to the Third Reich became eerily plain when Steve Bannon, former top advisor to President Trump, issued the following directive in his March 2018 speech to a group of hard-right National Front Party members in France: “Let them call you racists, let them call you xenophobes … Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor” (Stanley 2018a).
Beyond such inversions of moral terminology, the Trump administration has systematically gone after the verbal building blocks of science. Starting in December 2017, the CDC, among other federal agencies, was instructed that certain words should be “avoided” in their 2018 budget documents: “diversity,” “fetus,” “transgender,” “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “science-based,” and “evidence-based.” While the guidance was not framed as a strict “word ban,” it was pitched as a crucial means of avoiding the conservative political biases of those sitting in the White House and Congress, and thus had the force of a directive (Cohen 2018). At the US Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, several allusions to “climate change” have been removed from their website. What seems to be happening under the Trump administration, as its draconian conservatism meets its anti-Enlightenment hostility to science, is what might be called “word discouragement.”
Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services has also been working toward a redefinition of “gender” in the language associated with Title IX, the law enforced by the US Department of Education’s office of civil rights that ensures no Americans will be discriminated against in terms of their sex. The proposed redefinition would assign male or female identity based on one’s genitals at birth, defining gender in terms of something biological and immutable. Not only does this maneuver conflate biological sex and gender identity, in ignorance of decades of gender studies; it also stands in contradiction to current biological science, which recognizes a much more complex spectrum of intersex possibilities than the male/female binary opposition recognizes (see Fausto-Sterling 2000). And the proposed redefinition attempts to deny the reality of transgender identity, with breathtaking implications for the rights of transgender people.
And then there’s the Trump administration’s fascistic verbal obfuscation of brutal policy. In March 2019, for instance, then-Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen was questioned about the detention facilities along the Mexican border, where thousands of children, deliberately separated from their parents as a supposed deterrent to undocumented immigration, have been kept in enclosed chain-link rectangles on concrete floors. “Are we still putting children in cages?” Mississippi representative Bennie Thompson asked Nielsen, continuing, “I’ve seen the cages; I just want you to admit that they exist” (Edwards 2019). Nielsen replied, “Sir, they’re not cages. They are areas of the border facility that are carved out for the safety and protection of those who remain there while they’re being processed” (ibid.). Anderson Cooper called the evasion as he saw it: “It’s Orwellian” (Cooper 2019).8
How ironic that even as the right wing attacks the “PC” left for using careful, decorous words, here Nielsen appears to paper something over verbally herself. The motives, however, are vastly different. The left polices language in hopes of diminishing the pain inflicted by bigotry. The right has begun to police language, it seems, in hopes of covering up the pain its bigoted policies inflict or contribute toward.
The Loosening of Tongues: Profanity and Hate Speech
It’s hard to imagine any time in the past when a serious book on presidential language would have such words as “bullshit” and “shithole” in the chapter titles, but Trump has upended presidential convention with regard to profanity. During the campaign, Americans overheard Trump use the word “pussy” while bragging on a bus to other men (see Cameron, Mannheim, this volume), but more norm-shattering has been his public word choice, as when he boasted that he’d “beat the shit out of” Republican rivals in 2016, nicknamed Democratic Congressman and Chair of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff “Adam Shitt,” or said, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired’” (Baker 2019, Gleeson 2018). Supporters at his rallies have joined the party of bravado, wearing “Donald Fuckin’ Trump” t-shirts (ibid.). The man who served as his Communications Director for ten profane days, Anthony Scaramucci, infamously told a reporter from the New Yorker that he wanted to “fucking kill all the leakers” (Lizza 2017). When former Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski was called to answer questions before Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee in April 2018, he repeatedly swore that he wasn’t going to answer their “fucking” questions (Herb and Raju 2018). By the time the impeachment hearings arrived in late 2019, few viewers could have been shocked to hear of EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland telling Trump that “[Ukraine President] Zelensky loves your ass” and was therefore likely to comply with Trump’s hoped-for investigation of rival Joe Biden (Wade 2019).
Trump’s detractors have joined the profanity game, too. Media outlets tabulate the abundant uptick in the use of the f-word by politicians, many of them outraged Democrats (Hughes 2017). When in October 2017, Trump fallaciously claimed that Obama had failed to call the families of service members killed in action, former Obama staffer Alyssa Mastromonaco tweeted: “That’s a fucking lie … he’s a deranged animal” (Mastromonaco on Twitter, October 16, 2017). After Trump called again for a travel ban on those from Muslim nations, CNN host Reza Aslan called him a “piece of shit … an embarrassment to humankind” (Olson 2017). A 2018 Mother Jones headline read: “Our President is an Asshole” (Drum 2018), while a distinguished writer for The Root deemed Trump the “fucktard-in-chief” (Harriot 2017). The May 11, 2018 issue of Germany’s respected Der Spiegel published an op-ed about Trump’s capricious foreign policy, featuring a cover image of a bright orange hand flipping the bird, the middle finger dressed to look like Trump (Brinkbäumer 2018). Evidently, the semiotic gloves are off.
The New York Times reporter Frank Bruni lamented the trend, chalking our “coarser” language up to the mass and social mediated hubbub of political opinions: “To be seen in a thicket of hashtags and heard above the din, people screech. Passion and provocation blur” (Bruni 2017). Bruni frets that such verbal patterns are “a path away from high-minded engagement.” But while Bruni’s explanation surely captures part of the dynamic, profanity in the Trump era seems to do a lot more social, political, and psychological work than mere “screeching” or attention-getting.
Profane and obscene words take “offstage” topics – usually to do with sex, excretion, and oral, anal, and genital functions – and bring them onstage through speech. Unlike the insulting language that PC ideology objects to – racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, and so forth – profanity speaks to deep and common elements of the human embodied experience. Many Americans subscribe to the language ideology that profanity is more deeply connected to feeling than other language, being almost pre-verbal or pre-cognitive, and there may be an element of truth to this; when people stub their toe, for instance, they may automatically utter an obscenity, suggesting these words help externalize pain or excess emotion. There is no question that intense emotion is at stake with Trump’s rise, from the fury and fear some Trump supporters evince toward (for instance) “illegal immigrants” and “Muslim terrorists,” to the laments among Trump detractors at the suffering and anxiety his policies and words have wrought.
But even if profanity can be unwitting or emotional, it can have a vital strategic or performance element, adopting a stance that does social work for the speaker, such as indexing alignment, antagonism, enthusiasm, and more. So, for instance, Trump’s infamous “grab ’em by the pussy” remark became another reason for many on the left to dismiss him as a sexist vulgarian, but did not deter millions of voters – in fact, Cameron and Mannheim (both in this volume) suggest it may have helped him align with his male interlocutors and, ultimately, with his base. At least some profanity from Trump’s camp has seemed to advertise his manic political boundary-pushing; during Trump’s attacks against Robert Mueller’s investigation in February 2018, for instance, a “Trump friend” reported his mood to journalists as “fucking excited and jubilant … He was like, everything’s great and these fuckers in the media are beside themselves” (Sherman 2018). If Trump said “fuckers,” here, and didn’t mind if the public heard it through his “friend,” he may have been stoking his supporters’ thrill at one-upping the mass media and the Mueller investigation. Profanity is an index of Trump’s willingness to flout politics-as-usual. And, the documentarian Errol Morris has argued, for voters sick of being talked down to by smug liberals, sick of hearing that White men are the problem, sick of being asked to empathize with people they don’t even know, Trump became the “fuck you” president (Wilkinson 2019).
Class is surely at stake, as part of this. Of the many American social divides exacerbated by Trump, one is between those who feel his use of profanity denigrates political life and national principles of civility, and those who feel it’s a healthy reaction against bourgeois masks of good taste, adding a much-needed dose of affective sincerity and grit. Trump’s foul mouth may be perceived as a conduit of earthy “truth” lying beneath the surface of all the fancy verbal niceties of the Obama administration and cultural elites. Who knows; maybe some Democrats have switched registers into a new profanity habit partly because Hillary Clinton’s measured, educated tones – and her seemingly oblivious amplification of professional-managerial class values at the expense of understanding blue-collar concerns – attracted more antipathy than they’d expected.
Profanity has historically been associated with men more than women, and Trump may benefit from this. Its shocking, “indecent,” and insolent qualities may bring with them a certain covert masculine prestige, while women have been expected to maintain polite, face-saving behavior. Linguistic anthropologists might locate iconization in this aspect of profanity; hard language supposedly reflects a hardened speaker able to deal with harsh realities, as when Trump blasts that he’s going to “knock the shit out of ISIS” (Gonyea 2016). Our head of state is comfortable with the shocking social edgework of profanity; this in itself is an enactment of masculinized power.
Finally, profanity mirrors depth of conviction. It’s a way of indicating that ordinary semantics won’t do the job; the speaker has almost run out of words, and to express their extreme enthusiasm or dismay they need to do a verbal end-run. Bruni’s (2017) appeal for “high-minded engagement” thus may sound like a chat around teacups when people feel that livelihoods or lives are at stake. Consider how inadequate the ordinary semiotics of presidential opinion polls feel at the moment; while they deliver approval rating by percentages, profanity bespeaks the depth of voters’ conviction (“hell yes” or “fuck no”). Profanity also signals what the speaker might be willing to put on the line in the future to defend the strength of this conviction. If some see the nation as being dragged into the gutter with the profanity, another way to look at it is as an indicator of how high the political stakes feel to many, and how deep the conflict. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that language looks like this – profane, enraged – among soldiers in combat.
The Trump rise has emboldened another kind of formerly taboo language: aggressive and hateful speech. Trump has indulged in unprecedented levels of name-calling and snark to incite the disdain, anger, and fear that galvanize some in his base. When the New York Times gathered a corpus from Trump’s Twitter feed, it found about one in every eight tweets was an insult (Hodges 2017), and with public and press exhaustion, many of these now go by with barely a ripple. (It took about a day, in October 2018, for the nation to forget that Trump referred to his alleged former lover Stormy Daniels as “horseface.”) In Trump’s rhetoric, Mexican immigrants are “not people,” but “animals” (see Santa Ana et al., this volume), while “Black people,” Trump informed his personal lawyer, “are too stupid to vote for me” (Fox 2018; see Hall et al., Alim and Smitherman, Santa Ana et al., Mendoza-Denton, Williams, Boum this volume for more on Trump’s insults and distortions of fact about immigrants, Muslims, Mexicans, African nations, and beyond).
The divided body politic in America seems to have vastly different language ideologies when it comes to the question of whether hate speech is fitting to the presidency. Chants of “Lock her up!” (Samuels 2018), whether referring to Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Diane Feinstein in 2018, apparently strike Republican crowds as fair retribution for transgressive Democratic women, while to Democrats these chants feel like atavistic baying, striking a fear of violence. Some fear there’s been a disintegration of verbal “shame”; of shared and communally enforced ethics of what can and can’t, should and shouldn’t be said. More importantly, according to Yale philosopher Jason Stanley (2018b), Trump’s hateful speech parallels the propaganda of some of the most reviled twentieth- and twenty-first-century fascists, expressing nostalgia for a mythic past of White male hegemony destroyed by liberals, feminists, and immigrants (see also Steudeman 2018). Indeed, Trump’s rhetoric has striking similarity to that documented by Ruth Wodak (2015) among European right-wing populists, especially the tendency to stoke fear and scapegoat, pushing rhetorics of exclusion and nativist notions of citizenship.
There’s little question Trump’s discourse has inspired mimicry among some of his supporters. At Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders’ rallies in early 2020, some protesters waved Trump flags and flashed the White nationalist “OK” sign with their hands, while another unfurled a swastika banner (Neiwert 2020). (Sanders, whose extended family from Poland was killed in the Holocaust, later told Jake Tapper of CNN, “I got to tell you, I never expected in my life, as an American, to see a swastika at a major political rally. It’s horrible” [Cole 2020].) Organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center have documented a spike in hate speech corresponding with Trump’s rise, some of it in schools and universities, including anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican sidewalk chalking, swastikas, n-word graffiti, homophobic language, and chants of “build the wall” or “go home” to students of color (Pollock 2017). Many of us can attest to witnessing the changes ourselves; in 2017, for instance, I overheard a middle-aged White man telling a group of Hispanic parking attendants that they’d “better speak English or Trump would send them back.” This enabling effect has surely been shaped by the psychology of norm-shifting: People tend to extrapolate the views of other people from the views expressed by authority figures, and when authority figures express things once unexpressible, the masses feel they have social license to follow suit (Konnikova 2017). And while hate speech in schools has been reported as traumatic for countless children (Pollock 2017), his defenders will guard it in the name of freedom of speech.
There have been hot debates about whether Trump’s rhetoric can be considered a causal force in violence such as the mass shootings in Black churches, mosques, and synagogues, or in the case of the “MAGA bomber” who, in October 2018, sent (nonviable) bombs to CNN offices and numerous prominent Democrats (Derysh 2019). The MAGA bomber’s van and social media accounts were plastered with Trump ads and hostility against Trump’s enemies. But few of Trump’s supporters are inclined to see Trump’s language as dangerous. After the MAGA bomber was apprehended, Geraldo Rivera argued that “crazy people can do crazy things; they don’t need the president’s words … [we can’t] start blaming the speech rather than the perpetrator” (Moye 2018). This ideology, common among Trump’s supporters, treats hateful speech a bit like gun culture; the rise of each in the environment may correspond with the rise in murderous crimes, but rather than seeing a cultural shift that facilitates vicious behavior, the conservative model puts the onus on individual responsibility alone. Another way of seeing the situation, though, is that the language endorsed by those in power helps create the force field within which people learn their behavioral parameters.9
In late 2018, an argument that Trump’s speech translated into violence emerged from unexpected parties: the defense lawyers of three Kansas militia group members convicted for taking part in a conspiracy to kill Muslim refugees just before the 2016 election. The lawyers used Trump’s words and tweets as evidence, asking for leniency on grounds that Trump’s stoking of Islamophobia through “rough-and-tumble verbal pummeling” (Orr 2018) had made some feel justified in committing violence against supposed enemies. They bolstered their argument with the fact that anti-Muslim violence had been on the rise since his election (ibid.). Perhaps in the future there will be other such cases brought before the courts. What remains unknown is whether a critical mass of the American public will come to share the language ideology that repeated aggressive speech about other groups can increase the risk of violence against them.
Still, at least some right-wing groups are aware that they’re playing with fire in their use of language. American fascists sometimes strategically claim that their dangerous speech is not intended to be taken seriously. After infamously ending a speech by shouting “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory” into an of Nazi salutes, the White supremacist Richard Spencer contended he had done so in a “spirit of irony and exuberance” (Barajas 2016). Some Neo-Nazi websites urge those who are posting comments to use a light tone so that the “unindoctrinated” reader can’t tell whether they’re joking (Kakutani 2018: 158–59). These techniques use a similar strategy to the president himself when he engages in “plausible deniability” (as explored by Hodges in this volume) to wiggle away from his own controversial words. But even if there is peril in extremist rhetoric, it hasn’t turned away all the prospective voters who might dislike Trump’s language. Some Trump supporters say they find his language distasteful, but they overlook it in order to secure what they consider more important prizes, such as tax relief for corporations or conservative Supreme Court justices.
One can learn a lot about the antagonism Trump has fomented by noticing the use of his own name, which has come to condense so much that he stands for. For his supporters, merely chanting his name has become one means of intimidating the vulnerable. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports some children use the single word “Trump” as a taunt while ganging up on members of the social groups Trump has attacked (Costello n.d.). Around the time of the 2016 election, there were reports that White men would sometimes approach a person of color on the street, utter the word “Trump,” and then walk away in a supremely condensed semiotic act of intimidation (Mazzarella n.d.).
No wonder Trump’s critics have been so tempted to take the stuffing out of his name. Some have decided to treat it orthographically as a profanity, spelling it “Tr*mp.” (I have heard it said that some authors offer a substitute such as “45” so that Trump’s name does not appear as often in searches, especially in conjunction with their own.) The fluorescence of Trump nicknames also provides playful delight for his detractors in a dark time: Orange Hitler, Adolf Twitler, Hair Fuhrer, Mango Mussolini, the Short-Fingered Vulgarian, Mrs. Putin, Fake President, President Spanky McLiarface, Impotus, Cadet Bone Spurs, Dolt 45, Agent Orango, Chancellor Cheeto, Tweeto, the Orange Ringmaster, the Angry Creamsicle, Cheeto Jesus, Barbequed Brutus, Vanilla Isis, Creep Throat. After Trump mistakenly tweeted that Scotland had voted to leave the European Union, the Scots joined in the fun with an even freer hand: Utter Cockwomble, Rug Wearing Thunder Nugget, Mangled Apricot Hellbeast, Witless Fucking Cocksplat, Rotten Orange Fucknut, Degenerate Corned Beef Face Syrup Wearing Wankstain, and Gerbil-headed Woodstained Haunted Spunktrumpet (Mitchell 2016).
If you don’t like Trump, these are fun. But the verbal processes discussed in this chapter remind us of how serious the times are, for they collectively feed a sense of chaos and growing polarization in the US and beyond. We have seen messages of hatred and anger; the rise of combative profanity; aggressive disagreements about truth; dissent about what kinds of language are acceptable; Orwellian re-working of meaning; a disregard for conventional spelling and grammar (amusing to some, outrageous to others); and a sense that social media has staged an upheaval of our political structure. All of these are set to the backdrop of conflicting red-vs-blue language ideologies among the public, with the result yielding the current mass confusion about circulating meanings. Is Trump in the early stages of dementia, or an evil genius, able to manipulate and calibrate his speech to exactly the minimal education level some believe he imputes to his core base? Is he a man of the people, who will make Americans into winners, or a bigot whose deeds will disadvantage not only the vulnerable, but also, ultimately, his own voters?
Summary of Chapters, Possible Futures
Many of the early chapters in this volume engage in a close, novel reading of Trump’s language and that of his supporters to understand the role language has played in his rise. Part I examines the ways in which Trump and his supporters have divided public constituencies with language. Slotta, for instance, examines how Trump’s seeming inscrutability is, in fact, perfectly intelligible for some Americans, partly through coded “dog whistles” (provocations that are superficially not about race, but still communicate negative messages about non-Whites; Haney López 2014), and also because some of his words and phrases are “abbreviations for stories and other forms of cultural knowledge” that circulate among his right-wing followers. This verbal pattern enlists the rest of the public and the media to scramble to decipher him, while reinforcing the sense that the nation is divided into communicative bubbles. Sidnell describes how Trump used his repeated call of “Get ’em out!” at campaign rallies to enlist his followers’ aggression toward those symbolically framed as interlopers – whether protesters at the rallies or foreigners at the level of the nation. And in my chapter, “Crybabies and Snowflakes,” I examine why those insults were hurled en masse at Trump protesters after his election and inauguration, and argue that they have surprising resonance with the ritualistic language used by Drill Instructors in the military to toughen up recruits, who must dull their semiotic sensitivities for the sake of national security. This verbal stance carved out thus shuts down conversation, while suggesting the American left needs to “grow up” by abandoning its empathic ways and hypersensitive language ideology.
In Part II, authors explore themes of Trump as a dramatist and Trump’s falsehoods. Goldstein, Hall, and Ingram examine Trump’s mocking gestural imitations of vulnerable groups, and how through these gestures he indirectly performs part of his intended political message for his base. Jacquemet explores the thesis that at least some of Trump’s prevarication should count not as “lying,” in which a speaker knows the truth but tries to conceal it from his audience, but rather as “bullshit,” in which the speaker has no particular commitment to what’s true or not. For Trump, bullshit is highly functional, just one of many verbal tools he uses to create spectacle, self-aggrandize, and otherwise manage impressions. Finally, Hodges explores Trump’s recurrent ability to “plausibly deny” some of his most outrageous statements. Since many people presume that words in and of themselves convey all of the meaning in an interaction. Trump exploits this language ideology by focusing on the literal or contextually narrow meaning of what he’s said, and pretending that the implied elements of his statements simply don’t exist. It’s an ingenious way to evade his critics while holding his base.
Part III focuses on how Trump manages to construct and uphold hierarchy, including gender hierarchy, through interactional routines and dynamics. Cameron’s and Mannheim’s chapters respectively focus on Trump’s infamous “grab ’em by the pussy” remark to explore how Trump reproduces fratriarchal male dominance through a conversational routine he waves away as mere “banter.” Cohn argues that in representing the prospect of nuclear war as a kind of phallic competition, Trump engages in a classic genre of militaristic language that delights in nuclear power by distracting from the prospect of actual human suffering. Van Over examines how Trump can enlist those around a conference table into a kind of routine, constructing his identity as “boss” in part by coaxing his conversational interlocutors into obsequious verbal roles while seizing the role of “evaluator” for himself. Sierra and Shrikant examine how Trump uses deft frame shifts to create a veneer of agreement with African Americans by way of a putatively common enemy, “fake news.”
Part IV includes five chapters discussing the verbal dynamics surrounding Trump’s racism and ethnonationalism, as well as some international responses to him. Alim and Smitherman examine an incident in which Trump praises the “perfect English” of a Latinx Border Patrol Agent, exceptionalizing one individual, and in doing so, reinforcing a negative stereotype of his ethnic group. Santa Ana et al. discuss the many speech acts in which Trump portrays the nation as a fortress that is being overrun and invaded by “criminals” from the South, constructing a powerful metaphor to justify his and his supporters’ fixation on his “wall” concept. Mendoza-Denton explores how Trump’s insulting stances toward Latin America have begotten a series of narrative strategies of compensatory masculinity on the part of Latin American leaders. Williams explores how Trump draws on age-old metaphors of pollution to besmirch sub-Saharan Africa, as well as classic verbal strategies of denial and deflection of his own racism. Southern African political leaders and culture-makers have called him out in strategically parodic or dignified tones. And, finally, Boum explores how Trump neatly cuts the Arab world into two segments with his verbal stance-taking: those who are wealthy (and thus worthwhile) “friends,” and those who are more-or-less dismissible terrorists.
Reading such chapters about the pernicious verbal ideologies and mechanisms underpinning Trump’s ascendancy and tenure, the reader who is a Trump critic would be forgiven for feeling dispirited. His formulaic “Lock her up” and “Build that wall” chants still have legs at his rallies as I write this chapter. Of course, his detractors continually speak back, but persuading a critical mass of Trump supporters to vote otherwise has proven a substantial challenge. While some of the problem lies in the Democratic candidates’ difficulty addressing the grievances of Trump supporters, voters are also perpetually digitally looped back to websites, memes, tweets, and the like that reaffirm the allegiances they already had. Trump’s political opponents have also not been savvy about their verbal appeal; in late 2017 Republican strategist Evan Siegfried aptly noted that “The problem with the argument that Democrats are making … is that [it] takes longer than a bumper-sticker slogan to make” (Peters 2017). And while one might have imagined that Trump would crack his own enamel by continuing to editorialize on Twitter outside the official controls of party politics, so far, his fans and many in the GOP have been forgiving of a multitude of contradictions. Former Republican Representative Charlie Dent told news outlets during the impeachment inquiry of late 2019 that GOP lawmakers were “absolutely disgusted and exhausted” by the President’s behavior, but kept their disdain private to cater to their base (Folley 2019b).
However the Trump era winds down, however voters come to their disenchantment (if they do), it doesn’t appear that it will happen in the same way that anthropologist Alexei Yurchak (2005) describes the end of the former Soviet state. A critical semiotic theorist, Yurchak argues the rapid collapse of the Soviet system was simultaneously unthinkable yet not altogether surprising, and that a close look at how state discourse was used and then dismantled furnishes one key. Under Stalin’s thumb, communist discourse such as ideological slogans were to be rigidly copied and their semantics taken literally. Over the decades, however, many citizens became more invested in copying the forms to engage in a kind of social performance than in subscribing to their content. This decoupling of form from meaning, Yurchak argues, resulted in a destabilization of the system, destabilization that was largely invisible until the political system abruptly imploded and the citizenry adjusted to its fall with startling speed. But “state discourse” under Trump isn’t nearly as monolithic or tightly controlled as it was under the Soviet system, and, as described above, it has never been taken altogether literally. The very bagginess of Trumpian meaning – Is his claim truly true in the details? Or just emotionally resonant? – means it can accommodate an awful lot of counterargument before it pops.
If nobody can count on Trump’s supporters to question their emotional truths, another domain to examine is the approach of his detractors. While the American left shouldn’t be held responsible for Trump, it is also the case that – as discussed above – some leftist language ideologies and verbal practices have been more alienating than they may have realized. Perhaps greater lay understanding of the linguistic dynamics underpinning mutual minorityhood could be helpful, including, at least, recognition of the feeling that liberal language crusaders can sometimes come across as patronizing, sanctimonious, even disdainful, as well as ignorant about the economic hardships of some of the very people they are accusing of being verbally oppressive. If one wants language to respect the humanity of others, then this consideration may need to expand to some liberals checking their classism as they promote empathy.
And perhaps overcoming Trumpism is going to require a transnational lens as well as a domestic one, for sadly, the problem extends far beyond the United States. Recent years have seen the global rise of leaders with violent, fascistic leanings, driving for ethnic, racial, religious, and/or heteronormative nationalism with a brutal, emotionally volatile verbal style. These include Duterte in the Philippines, the re-elected Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and politicians across Latin America. Numerous European nations, too, have been rocked by hard-right, White nationalist movements in recent years, a situation aggravated by the influx of refugees fleeing unrest and hunger in the global South and Middle East. And plenty of these right-wing leaders seem to be feeding on Trump’s discourse. What was once unspeakable has become speakable, and detractors across the world are aghast. Our worst fears cast our minds back to the ugly fascistic genocides and wars of the past, and to Mark Twain’s reputed statement that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” One can only hope that closer attention to the role of language in recent political developments can help shed light on them and ultimately, in some fashion beyond the scope of this volume, be used to counteract them.
Notes
1.David A. Graham, Adrienne Green, Cullen Murphy, and Parker Richards. 2019. “An Oral History of Trump’s Bigotry.” The Atlantic, June 2019. https://bit.ly/2WRRSY1.
2.Trump sent that tweet on March 8, 2020, when there were roughly 500 diagnosed cases of COVID-19 in the US. As this book goes to press on March 17, that number has grown to well over 5,000, entire cities and states are shutting down, and the economy is in a nosedive as we face months of tragedy and uncertainty. America’s low rate of COVID-19 testing has drawn worldwide criticism. Trump has nonsensically blamed Obama. www.cnbc.com/2020/03/13/coronavirus-trump-says-i-dont-take-responsibility-at-all-for-lack-of-tests.html.
3.It is worth noting that 60 percent of “working-class” Trump voters were located in the top half of the national income distribution (Carnes and Lupu 2017). This figure emerges from the fact that “class” here is defined in terms of a four-year education; many middle-class small business owners (for example) don’t have a four-year degree.
4.Some suspected her husband’s clunky influence in First Lady Melania Trump’s “Be Best” slogan, which not only smacks of one-upmanship but also “plainly doesn’t hold up to the laws of English grammar” (see, for instance, Hill 2018).
5.Trump has been capable of more conventional presidential dignity, as during his 2017 Joint Address to Congress when he gravely read from a teleprompter to commend a Navy Seal – William “Ryan” Owens – killed in a risky raid Trump had approved in Yemen. (“Ryan died as he lived: a warrior and a hero, battling against terrorism and securing our nation … Ryan’s legacy is etched into eternity.”) Following Reagan’s playbook, the camera focused on Owens’ weeping widow looking heavenward as Trump spoke, and lengthy applause affirmed Trump’s effort to orchestrate reverential patriotic affect. Van Jones of CNN, who until then had been a staunch Trump critic, said in his post-address commentary, “This was the moment Trump became president” (Kurtz 2017). Jones thought he glimpsed a leader of inspiring solemnity, but Trump was soon back to his fractured and informal tweeting. It had been a fleeting mirage.
6.As an analogy, consider the analyses of Trump’s handwriting that look more like soothsaying than political analysis. Graphologists have said Trump’s signature shows signs of arrogance and megalomania (Edevane 2018) and a ruthless lack of empathy (Gomes 2017). But can’t we extrapolate these simply from his political maneuvers?
7.In the latter case, such falsehoods included exaggerating the cost of Mueller’s investigation, alleging conflicts of interest, claiming Mueller would have brought charges if he had evidence against Trump, and wishfully stating Russian meddling had “disappeared” from national debate (Cohen 2019).
8.Some administration officials, such as Jeff Sessions and John Kelly, admitted that the separation policy was implemented to “deter” immigration. When asked if it was intended thus, however, Nielsen retorted that the question was offensive (Cooper 2019).
9.To skirt the difficulties of defining “hate speech” while clarifying that speech can encourage harmful acts, Benesch et al. (2018) have developed a category they call “Dangerous Speech.” They define dangerous speech as “Any form of expression (e.g. speech, text, or images) that can increase the risk that its audience will condone or commit violence against members of another group. Importantly, the definition refers to increasing the risk of violence, not causing it. We generally cannot know that speech caused violence … To say that speech is dangerous, then, is to make an educated guess about the effect that the speech is likely to have on other people” (Benesch et al. 2018).
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