Part I
1
Norma Mendoza-Denton
What does it mean to have a breakdown of the body politic; of the bonds that unite us? Donald Trump’s commemorative presidential challenge coin (customarily given to military service members) overturns tradition by replacing the official motto of the United States, E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One), with his own image, and no fewer than three engravings of his name, alongside his official Republican campaign committee slogan, “Make America Great Again.” Although many have attributed this numismatic self-aggrandizement to Trump’s obsession with quasi-military paraphernalia (tanks, parades, medals, etc.), this change parallels the large and small verbal actions of the Trump presidency in which the unity of the whole is lost to a carver’s knife, resulting in social rupture and the re-parceling of groups along strategically decided fault lines.
Slotta’s contribution in this section offers one example of this fragmentation. Slotta suggests that what looks like incoherence in Trump’s referents in speech is actually strategically restricted communication (“dog whistles”) understandable to specific parts of his audience; namely, those who are familiar with right-wing websites and television media such as Fox News. As we take in Slotta’s account of the need for mainstream journalism to decipher and explain Trump’s tweets and statements, we are reminded that the public sphere is more divided than ever.
1.1Using “The” to Marginalize
But how can a powerful figure slowly create division among subgroups, and what are we to make of the mechanisms through which this happens? One of the principal ways divisiveness is managed is through language, in even the smallest of features. Linguistic anthropologists argue that we create and perform our personae and our politics through the accretion of small speech acts. Take, for example, the determiner the as it may be used before a noun. Acton (2014, 2019) has investigated Trump’s usage before nouns denoting subgroups such as blacks, gays, and women. Consider the following examples:
“Ask the gays what they think …”
“I will be phenomenal to the women.”
“You look at what the women are looking for – they want to have security.”
“I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.”
This feature of Trump’s speech has been frequently noticed in the media and by linguists (Liberman 2016, Parker 2016). Acton argues that it not only delineates the groups in question, but also pigeonholes them, with the determiner serving both to homogenize the group and to distance the speaker from the referent, making members of the group into an undifferentiated “other.” Now, it’s true that some decades ago just about everyone tended to use the word “the” in this fashion, so maybe one could argue Trump is just an older speaker for whom this type of determiner + noun construction is more acceptable. Certainly laypeople have noted it as an anachronism, such as Twitter user Catherine Rampell, who observed, “Why does putting ‘the’ in front of demog group often sound so dated (or bigoted)? The blacks, the Jews, the gays, etc.” (Rampell on Twitter, June 15, 2016). Still, an additional linguistic fact emerges which argues for this construction as a pejorative or put-down: Acton (2019) also investigated determiner + noun usage among present-day Democrats and Republicans, and found that when referring to their own party, members of Congress by and large used the noun without determiner, whereas in referring to the other party, they used the determiner. In other words, for Republicans, the other party is “THE DEMOCRATS,” while for Democrats, more often than not, the other side of the aisle is designated as “THE REPUBLICANS.” There’s a certain amount of “othering” that seems built into the way American politicians are using this construction. But it’s not just the other side of the aisle that Trump designates with a determiner. It’s “the blacks,” “the gays,” “the Hispanics,” “the women,” and in a famous Trumpian turn of phrase, “I love the poorly educated!” (Gambino 2016). In sum, usage of even small bits of language makes a difference in how we think of ourselves and other groups, whether we embrace them as part of the body politic or hold them at a distance.
In Slotta’s contribution, the strategic calling forth of specific “publics” – fragmentary but internally unified portions of the general public – recalls what has been a strong focus for linguistic anthropologists. To understand the background of this work, we refer to Habermas’ ([1962]1991) book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, widely influential in contemporary understandings of the development of Western-style democracy. An idealized public sphere is characterized by principles derived directly from the European Enlightenment: A rational individual freely participates with others in discussions of common problems, and in these discussions the best way to settle an argument is not with force but through the use of reason. In Habermas’ idealization of communication in the public sphere, people from all walks of life and all demographics at least share reason and a common language so that they can communicate and understand each other. But Slotta’s material suggests that in the Trump era, there’s so much silo-ing of information that we can’t even understand each other’s references. It’s almost as if different political groups are using different language. And as a result, America doesn’t even feel like it has a shared “public sphere.”
Many linguistic anthropologists would argue that even the original idealization of a public sphere was a failed project in the first place, since it deliberately excluded women (who were thought to lack reason) and oppressed groups (they lacked the standing to be heard in public). More often than not, in fact, the putative “public sphere” created counterpublics (i.e. a parade of pink pussy-hats: self-aware subordinated groups responding to the ideologies of the larger publics, as per Warner 2002). If this is the case, we can argue that Trump has cleaved his knife along already pre-existing sinews in the body politic, hailing new publics as well as exacerbating the divisions between existing publics and counterpublics.
1.2The Making of a Battle Cry
Another way in which Trump uses language to interpellate or call forth portions of the public is through interactional routines. Sidnell’s chapter, centered around the refrain Get them out! traces the emergence of one such routine: a gradual evolution in Trump’s way of calling out disruptive protesters. The development of this call-out as a Trumpian slogan and battle cry arose both through (1) intertextuality with the second-person exhortation You’re fired! (intertextuality is a recognizable reference to a prior discourse; in this case, from Trump’s appearance on the show The Apprentice [NBC 2004–2015]), and (2) Trump’s reaction to Bernie Sanders’ handling of his own protesters. By overtly drawing a contrast with Sanders (who was portrayed as having had his microphone taken away by “two young girls,” see Sidnell’s chapter), Trump tried to make himself seem tougher and more masculine, and perhaps at first unwittingly, but then very much purposefully, imbued his utterance with violent overtones and encouraged his followers to rough up protesters. Once the pattern of the imperative use in his rallies was established, Trump solidified it through occasioned repetition and slight variation, rendering it recognizable as slogan, catchphrase and formula, partially because it was uttered in the same context (as the apex of a crescendo to get rid of undesirables), and partially because it was uttered with the same intonational contour.
As a slogan, the exhortation-turned-chant “Get Them Out!” emerged more or less contemporaneously with “Lock Her Up” (Parton 2019), which has the same tripartite structure observed by Sidnell. It is issued by Trump, the militaristic, tough-guy disciplinarian (in the subject position); it’s directed at his followers, his army of sorts (in the indirect object position), and talks about the target of the possibly violent action (in the direct object position). Crucially, there’s the possibility of ambiguous attribution in these distributed, multi-authored chanted repetitions. Suddenly, in the process of repeating Trump’s directives, the indirect object becomes the subject, the army cadet becomes the general, and the private becomes public (Gal 2002). The person uttering the chant “Lock Her Up,” or “Get Her Out,” has been fully incorporated and momentarily realized into Trump himself; they now inhabit the heady position of being the one giving orders to those around them. In this way, as Sidnell writes, “supporters [both] embody and enact the political project that Trump advocated.”
1.3Sanctioned Insensitivity
If the army cadet has become the general, and Trump gives full rein to our self-aggrandizing impulses in the “Get Them Out” discourse described above, the “Crybaby” discourse hurled at liberals and described by McIntosh is the other side of the same Trump-inscribed coin. Hurling insults at “snowflakes,” advocating for the toughening up of buttercups, and proclaiming not to care about coddled liberal feelings places the speaker in the gendered role of the military Drill Instructor, the layered interdiscursivity of which McIntosh has excavated through her ethnographic work on Marine Corps Drill Instructors. In this case, interdiscursivity means that as the Drill Instructors use discourses of sanctioned insensitivity, so are they paralleled by Trump supporters. The structure of the armed services condones this type of language for the purpose of breaking down recruits, while Trump (“No more Mr. Nice Guy” [Robin Lakoff 2005]) himself sanctions his followers’ efforts to use the same language to break down opponents. As noted by McIntosh, this discursive stance is consistent with a dynamic noted by George Lakoff (1996) where the Republican party fashions itself as the party of the stern father figure, while the Democrats are more akin to a protective and indulgent mother. By verbally nudging his supporters in the direction of pre-established discursive divisions in society, and by creating new patterns through which the groups can attack each other, Trump works publics and counterpublics to his advantage.
References
Acton, Eric. 2014. “Pragmatics and the Social Meaning of Determiners.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University. https://stanford.io/2m1BNhu.
Acton, Eric2019. “Pragmatics and the Social Life of the English Definite Article.” Language 95, no. 1: 37–65.
Gal, Susan. 2002. “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13, no. 1: 77–95.
Gambino, Lauren. 2016. “‘I Love the Poorly Educated’: Why White College Graduates Are Deserting Trump.” The Guardian, October 16, 2016. https://bit.ly/35krqqF.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. MIT Press.
Lakoff, George. 1996. Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t. University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, Robin T. 2005. “The Politics of Nice.” Journal of Politeness Research 1, no. 2: 173–91.
Liberman, Mark. 2016. “The NOUNs.” Language Log, September 5, 2016. https://bit.ly/2m3bfwt.
National Broadcasting Corporation. 2004–2015. The Apprentice. Television show.
Parker, Kathleen. 2016. “Donald Trump and ‘The Blacks.’” The Chicago Tribune, August 31, 2016. https://bit.ly/2kt2US7.
Parton, Heather Digby. 2019. “The Trump Administration Drained the Swamp – Into the White House.” Truthout, June 24, 2019. https://bit.ly/2ziSgkT.
Rampell, Catherine (@crampell). 2016. “Why does putting ‘the’ in front of demog group often sound so dated (or bigoted)? The blacks, the Jews, the gays, etc.” Twitter, June 15, 2016. https://bit.ly/2ktJ7lH.
Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. Zone Books.