Part III
9
Janet McIntosh
James Comey, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation until Trump fired him in May 2017, delivered a fascinating dollop of amateur language theory in his scathing May 2019 op-ed in the New York Times (Comey 2019). The op-ed focused on why the Trump-friendly Attorney General Bill Barr had downplayed the implications of the Mueller report about Russian interference in the 2016 general election. Barr’s characterization was so misleading that even the usually taciturn Mueller publicly objected. Comey wonders whether Barr might have been mirroring Comey’s own experience while in the White House: that of being caught in Trump’s “web of alternative reality.” Comey writes:
Proximity to an amoral leader reveals something depressing … It starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence. In meetings with him, his assertions about what “everyone thinks” and what is “obviously true” wash over you, unchallenged … Speaking rapid-fire with no spot for others to jump into the conversation, Mr. Trump makes everyone a co-conspirator to his preferred set of facts, or delusions. I have felt it – this president building with his words a web of alternative reality and busily wrapping it around all of us in the room … From the private circle of assent, it moves to public displays of personal fealty at places like cabinet meetings. While the entire world is watching, you do what everyone else around the table does – you talk about how amazing the leader is and what an honor it is to be associated with him.
Comey furnishes a powerful testimonial to the way humans sometimes go along with others’ words (particularly those of the powerful), fail to break the verbal spell being woven, and ultimately cooperate in jointly constructing a model of reality through their own utterances. His description of the displays of personal fealty Trump manages to elicit around a conference table, in fact, are observed in breathtaking detail in van Over’s chapter in this section. “Mr. Trump,” Comey concludes, “eats your soul in small bites.”
Scholars of language have referred to dynamics like these as “collusion” (McDermott and Tylbor 1995). They don’t mean “collusion” in the sense of a presidential campaign deliberately coordinating with the Russians to interfere in an election. Rather, “collusion” in language studies concerns the often-unwitting ways in which people coordinate and synchronize aspects of what they are up to in a speech event, playing into one another’s script while achieving a loose consensus about what is going on (ibid.: 218–19; see also Mannheim and Tedlock 1995). Conversational participants often don’t even realize they’re doing this; the dynamic emerges from organic qualities of our species, cooperativeness and impressionability, and it also preys on such impressionability to enlist people in social arrangements and hierarchies not directly of their own making and not necessarily in their interest. Who knows if Trump colluded with the Russians, but it seems clear that those in his circle collude with him verbally.
One implication of linguistic collusion is this: We like to imagine ourselves as free agents, especially in individualistic societies focused on personal choice, but the fact is that we operate within – and help to build – constraining social structures as we interact with others. By “structures” I mean not only clearly regimented institutional arrangements and forces, but also patterned behaviors loosely shared by groups of social actors, such as gendered roles and routines or habitual responses to individuals with power, as well as those invisible webs that interlocutors weave together on the fly in their embodied verbal minutiae (see Mannheim, this volume). A student goes to meet with a patronizing professor in office hours and, within a few minutes of conversation, finds himself acting like a subordinate. A woman meeting a courtly man finds herself adopting an unfamiliarly self-effacing role. An audience member ends up applauding a politician’s forceful statement, even if they aren’t quite sure what they think of it.
Collusion isn’t quite the same thing as consent (McDermott and Tylbor 1995). It’s hard to resist the role that is imposed upon or expected of you, particularly when the power dynamics aren’t in your favor: when your interlocutor can hold sway over your career future; when the pressure to conform to gender roles tilts your contribution one way or another; or when your interlocutor speaks with the backing of a venerable institution – even if it is, as in the case of the presidency, besmirched. And as McDermott and Tylbor (1995: 232) argue, through collusion, much is swept under the rug. Deception and silence structure not only institutional life but also banal conversation. In Trump’s world, there are countless “constraints on people telling the truth” (ibid.), and the chapters in this section explore how some of those constraints work, in speech events ranging from the formal to the casual.
9.1Politicians, the Press, and Collusion
One of the many remarkable linguistic dimensions of Trump’s rise is how he has ruptured traditional interactions with most journalists. Trump doesn’t like the questions most media outlets ask of him, since they so often call him out on his falsehoods or confront him with the human rights implications of his tweets and policy efforts. He thus refuses to collude in the notion that such journalists are neutral, charging them with “liberal bias” and “fake news” even when they are speaking truth, and taking their questions as if they are personal criticisms. Many journalists, in turn, have grown more pointed and overtly aggressive in confronting him. To some extent, they seem to be realizing that although good journalism should be grounded in facts (as well as humans can know facts, anyway, with all our epistemological limitations) rather than Trumpian falsehoods, the question of how those facts are foregrounded or wielded has never been a matter of actual “neutrality.”
However, when the Trump-friendly Fox News interviews him, everyone gets along. Not only that, but Fox News anchors somehow have to retain the journalistic illusion that they aren’t merely a state TV outlet. Trump, too, is invested in the illusion that Fox, with all its flattery of him, is the only “objective” network. Consider the following exchange between Tucker Carlson and Trump in July 2019 (Schwartz 2019). The context was Trump’s escalation of tensions with Iran since his 2018 abandonment of the 2015 nuclear deal, and his having come close to instigating another major Middle Eastern war (video excerpt starts at 1:53).1
Carlson:you came very close to sending the US military to strike Iran you pulled back at the last moment you were criticized by neo-cons in Washington for doing that- they wanted you to strike Ira:n why do you think they wanted [that]
Trump: [A:ND] I was given a lot of credit by most people lotta people gave me a lotta credit=
Carlson: =the public was on your side. for sure=
Trump: =lotta people said that was a great presidential moment which was you know rather shocking to hear
Carlson here confronts Trump with someone’s criticism, a ploy that just might allow Fox News to retain its narrative of being hard-hitting and objective (cf. Clayman 1992). Trump never answers Carlson’s question, instead launching his self-defense with the word “and,” as if he is completing a thought that Carlson began. Trump’s focus? How much approval his act of restraint garnered (an act that sounds all the more heroic since Carlson has reminded viewers that neo-cons wanted Trump to follow through). Carlson quickly overlaps with him to say, in a bright, supportive-sounding tone, “The public was on your side. For sure.” This sets up Trump for a moment of braggadocio; he was “shocked” to hear a “lotta people” deem it a “great presidential moment.” (A sense of victimhood may underpin this remark, for Trump likes to complain that talking heads in the media undervalue him.)
In this exchange, Trump and Carlson share a world. Fox is hard-hitting because it confronts Trump with criticism, and Trump’s calling-off of the strike was supposedly a triumphal moment. Throughout the interview, Carlson fixes Trump with a serious looking gaze, one that mirrors Trump’s own, and sagely nods here and there. The body language alone signals a kind of acquiescence (see Mannheim and Tedlock 1995: 9), as collaborative agendas get weaved into each other turn by turn. Carlson retains the façade of journalism, and Trump retains the façade of greatness on the channel most favored by his supporters.
9.2Coaching the Performance of Solidarity
A theme that recurs in the chapters that follow is how Trump sometimes guides and instructs his interlocutors to play along with him. We see this dynamic in van Over’s discussion of how Trump coaches the participants in a Black History Month “listening session” to play into his hands as “evaluator in chief.” We also see it in Cameron’s and Mannheim’s respective chapters about how Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” conversation draws on long-standing, ritualistic routines of heteronormative male in-group talk, routines in which male interlocutors slot into pre-fabricated roles and collude to affirm a pernicious patriarchal solidarity. In several chapters, including that by Sierra and Shrikant, we see that laughter is vital to constructing the myth of widespread approval.
Indeed, collusive laughter, especially when in a widely televised event, can create the appearance of a popular president, even when those in the laughing group later report their own ambivalence. Consider Trump’s infamous speech at Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters in Langley, Virginia, his first delivered after his inauguration (CNN 2017). Standing before TV cameras and an audience of about 400 self-selected CIA agents, employees, and cabinet members, Trump engaged in a rambling, self-centered speech. His words and sometimes-jocular affect flattered his audience and cued them to laugh about “out groups” (cf. Carty and Musharbash 2008: 214) – in this case, the mass media and anyone who didn’t vote for him – as well as to applaud to affirm their mutual solidarity.
After being introduced, for instance, Trump said:
Well, I want to thank everybody. Very, very special people. And it is true, this is my first stop. Officially. We’re not talking about the (inaugural) balls, or we’re not talking about even the speeches – although they did treat me nicely on that speech yesterday. ((laughter from crowd)) I always call ’em the dishonest media, but they treated me nicely. ((louder laughter from crowd)) But I want to say that there is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump. ((applause begins)) There’s nobody. ((continued applause, whooping))
[Starting at 02:00] Probably almost everybody in this room voted for me, but I will not ask you to raise your hands if you did. ((laughter from crowd)) But I would guarantee a big portion, because we’re all on the same wavelength, folks. ((applause begins)) We’re all on the same wavelength, right? ((continuing applause))
(CNN 2017)
Audience members clapped, laughed, and ratified Trump at all the right moments, sounding perfectly entrained, in the sense of being interactively drawn in and carried along in synchrony. Later, those present gave mixed reviews, and some reported having found Trump’s speech disrespectful, even appalling (Ignatius 2017). But like the “boys on the bus” described by Cameron and Mannheim, like the participants in the “listening session” described by van Over and Sierra and Shrikant, like all those members of the administration described by James Comey, those present allowed themselves to be swept along as the event unfolded. As McDermott and Tylbor (1995: 220) summarize it, collusion sometimes “amounts to a well-orchestrated lie that offers a world [participants] do not have to produce but can pretend to live by, a world everyone knows to be, at the same time, unrealizable, but momentarily useful as stated.”
9.3Colluding in Gendered Lies
The presidency furnishes a powerful social force field, but arguably, the sociocultural force of gender expectations is just as powerful, perhaps more so because so often invisible. In conforming to gender roles, speakers collude in overarching models of and myths about the world, with powerful implications not only for male dominance, but also collective agreements about what even counts as real or important.
As Cameron and Mannheim emphasize in their chapters about Trump’s Access Hollywood bus banter, the dynamics of gendered conversational routines produce a sense of what is normal and what is abnormal, with masculine routines tending to stigmatize femininity. Of course these patterns of speech pre-date Trump; one could argue, in fact, that not only did his interlocutors collude with him, but that he, in a broader sense, was colluding with these ambient ideas about gender.
Related to this, in Carol Cohn’s chapter on the patterned speech of American national security professionals, we see them and commanders-in-chief collude in broad ideological frameworks that mark some stances as desirably “masculine” and others as undesirably “feminine,” with war talk clearly steered in a masculine direction. Metaphors used in the defense industry – metaphors that sexualize weaponry, or that conceptually delete the human suffering of war – affirm the masculine status of speakers, while entraining them into patterns of talk and thought. As Cohn puts it, certain “ways of speaking and topics of conversation are … pre-marked as masculine/legitimate or feminine/illegitimate,” thus “short-circuiting” certain kinds of thinking and foreclosing certain kinds of conversation. Talking about empathy for casualties of war is off the table, or heavily policed if it makes an appearance. With his tweets turning nuclear arsenals into virtual pissing contests, Trump is caught in a web bigger than he is, and with his discourse he perpetuates this particular way of shaping “reality.” These collusive patterns of speech influence those who make the biggest decisions about international violence.
Yet, as Comey’s op-ed implies, not everyone has to collude with Trump. Sometimes his detractors boldly disrupt the conversational rhythm or violate protocol – as when Nancy Pelosi firmly cut into Trump’s conversational tactics in the Oval Office to say “Please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting” (Stolberg and Karni 2018), or when a bicyclist refused the typical show of deference and famously gave Trump’s motorcade the finger, later paying the price by being fired from her job (though she went on to win a county supervisor seat in Virginia; Schwartzman 2019). Yet interactive collusion is often the easier path, being both unconscious and socially rewarded. And as Trump has demonstrated, not only can an entire administration be enlisted in collusion, but so too can nearly half a nation.
Note
1.Transcription conventions most relevant to the analysis in this chapter 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. A dash (-) marks the cut-off of the current sound. An equal 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.
References
Carty, John, and Yasmine Musharbash. 2008. “You’ve Got to Be Joking: Asserting the Analytical Value of Humour and Laughter in Contemporary Anthropology.” Anthropological Forum 18 no. 3: 209–17.
Clayman, Stephen. 1992. “Footing in the Achievement of Neutrality: The Case of News Interview Discourse.” In Talk at Work, edited by Paul Drew and John Heritage, pp. 163–98. Cambridge University Press.
CNN. 2017. “Donald Trump’s Entire CIA Speech.” CNN video, January 21, 2017. https://bit.ly/2rI2yuk.
Comey, James. 2019. “James Comey: How Trump Co-opts Leaders Like Bill Barr.” The New York Times, May 1, 2019. https://nyti.ms/2vuVwYp.
Ignatius, David. 2017. “CIA Officers Give Mixed Reviews of Trump’s Strange Visit.” The Washington Post video, January 22, 2017. https://wapo.st/2Dy3ZOn.
McDermott, R. P., and Henry Tylbor. 1995. “On the Necessity of Collusion in Conversation.” In The Dialogic Emergence of Culture, edited by Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim, pp. 218–36. University of Illinois Press.
Mannheim, Bruce, and Dennis Tedlock. 1995. “Introduction.” In The Dialogic Emergence of Culture, edited by Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim, pp. 1–32. University of Illinois Press.
Schwartz, Ian. 2019. “Full Trump Interview with Tucker Carlson: Not Striking Iran, Facebook, and Twitter, China, Afghanistan.” RealClear Politics video, 01:53, July 1, 2019. https://bit.ly/2RavsOq.
Schwartzman, Paul. 2019. “Cyclist Who Flipped Off Trump Wins County Supervisor Seat Representing His Golf Club.” The Washington Post, November 5, 2019. https://wapo.st/2P8FZXQ.
Stolberg, Sheryl Gay, and Annie Karni. 2018. “Pelosi vs. Trump: ‘Don’t Characterize the Strength That I Bring,’ She Says.” The New York Times, December 11, 2018. https://nyti.ms/2qblq4v.