Part II
5
Norma Mendoza-Denton
5.1A Super Stable Genius
“Super Genius Stuff!” is the way that Donald J. Trump has described his natural intellect and his ability to get into “the hardest school in the world,” Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. An in-depth article in the Washington Post (Kranish 2019) investigates both of these claims. Was Wharton the hardest school in the world? Not exactly. What is today a 7.4 percent acceptance rate hovered above 40 percent in 1980, and was likely even more generous when Trump attended school in the mid-sixties. Was Trump a (super) genius? Not according to his classmates, nor according to James Nolan, the only University of Pennsylvania admissions officer to have interviewed him before acceptance. Even though Trump has since 1973 claimed (or allowed it to be claimed) that he graduated at the top of his class, his name was nowhere to be found in his graduating class’ honorees, nor in the top fifty (Dean’s list) of the nearly 400 students who graduated with him that year. But Trump himself is evasive about the veracity of the claim, occasionally implying that it’s someone else’s assertion that he is merely letting stand (ibid.). It is precisely his couldn’t-care-less attitude toward facts and the willingness to use these may-or-may-not-be-facts to manipulate impressions that makes Trump a Frankfurtian bullshitter (in the technical sense of Frankfurt 1986), as Jacquemet points out in his chapter, “45 as a Bullshit Artist” (in this section).
Language scholars in this section of the book elucidate aspects of Trump’s behavior that verge on or cross into falsehood, including innuendo, gaslighting, and plausible deniability. Much has been observed about Trump’s ever-increasingly tenuous relationship to truth, with commentary from both scholarly and popular writers. In her book The Death of Truth, Michiko Kakutani (2018) makes a careful comparison between the linguistic and symbolic practices of Nazi Germany and Trump’s administration. She quotes Viktor Klemperer in observing that the “splendor of the banners, the parades, garlands, fanfares, and choruses” was an advertisement for the Führer and served to conflate him with the majesty of his imagined state (Klemperer, quoted in Kakutani 2018: 92). This over-the-top quality also extended to language, where superlatives and hyperbole were so exaggerated that they took on, according to Klemperer, a “fairy tale quality,” with Nazis lying about the number of enemies killed, prisoners taken, attendance at rallies, and even how cold the weather was on the fighting field, where Hitler claimed to have outdone Napoleon in Russia by fighting not in minus twenty-five but in minus fifty-two degrees centigrade (ibid.: 93).
5.2Why Use Hyperbole?
Trump’s penchant for hyperbole is strategic and self-aware. In his (ghostwritten) book The Art of the Deal, he states:
The … key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration – and a very effective form of promotion.
(Trump 1987: 36)
The classical definition of hyperbole, as advanced by Aristotle ([350 bce] 2018), has as its domain political speech and is predicated not only on the form but on the content of the speech. Aristotle identified three modes of rhetorical persuasion: ethos (credibility established by the good character of the speaker as evidenced in their words and manner), pathos (the arousal of emotions in the hearer), and logos (the logical construction of proofs by means of argument; Claridge 2010: 217). Although hyperbole is technically possible in all the modes, it is most common in pathos (at a cost to both ethos and logos); Aristotle thought hyperbole juvenile and most likely to be used by angry people. Bringing our consideration of this rhetorical device up to the present time, linguist Claudia Claridge conducted an extensive study of hyperbole in English using corpora – large collections of texts, speeches, and conversations (Claridge 2010). She found that hyperbolic expressions can be used to influence people’s opinions, and this is well borne out in the psycholinguistic literature. For instance, in a famous study from the 1970s, it was shown that having an accident described as “one car smashed into another” versus “one car hit another” causes experimental subjects to estimate the speed at which the accident happened as being much greater (Loftus and Palmer 1974), a result that bears tremendous importance in the courtroom and beyond.
Claims that something is the fastest, biggest, best, the most superlative in all of history are the kinds of exaggerations to which President Trump is prone. But why is it important for us to know this? It is because through these exaggerations and turns of phrase, vociferously asserted, Trump manipulates the truth. In his chapter for this volume, Jacquemet contends that Trump does not actually care whether most statements that he makes are technically true or not, as long as they serve his image-building, performative purposes. For the sake of creating an impression in the mind of the public, he can time and again claim that his father was born in Germany (though a birth certificate shows him to have been born in the Bronx [Smokinggun.com 2019]), or he can insistently assert that he had the biggest inauguration crowds, despite both of these claims being debunked every single time they are issued.
Public image is also addressed in the other two chapters in this section. Trump’s interactional routines, as Goldstein, Hall, and Ingram remind us, unfold beyond the domain of spoken language. Even in the previous section, we saw how Trump’s supporters have a chance at embodying him through the “Get Them Out” and crybaby and snowflake discourses (see McIntosh’s “Crybabies and Snowflakes” and Sidnell’s “‘Get ’Em Out!’” chapters, this volume). By pantomiming and caricaturing his opponents, Trump creates spectacles, embodying his opponents in a way that is laughable, inviting viewers to mock said opponents with him. These spectacles are squarely in the domain of hyperbole, this time gestural as well as linguistic. These hyperbolic gestural moves share an element with Trump’s use of nicknames. By functioning as bodily metonyms (in which some small aspect of the person comes to represent the whole of them), the Food-Shoveling Governor and the Choking Presidential Candidate (Goldstein et al., this volume) share a semiotic space with Little Marco Rubio and Low-Energy Jeb. Through this strategic use of hyperbole, bodily metonyms, and actual nicknames, Trump whips up humor, passion, and the allegiance of his base, structuring both truth and feeling.
5.3Reactive Reversal
How do people react to Trump’s hyperbole? Do they always suspend disbelief and buy what he is selling? How long can he get away with it? Here I identify a discourse sequence that I term “reactive reversal,” which hinges on the plausible deniability discussed by Hodges (this volume; see also Carpenter’s 2018 description of Trump’s “gaslighting” techniques), and which played out in Trump’s impeachment proceedings in late 2019. If Trump leaves himself enough room that deniability is plausible, Trump is able to pull back and reverse himself on his claims. Reactive reversal occurs upon public negative reaction or fallout after Trump stakes a hyperbolic claim, which he often follows up by logical extensions, each one staking further territory. Consider the following sequence:
(1)Trump stakes a (hyperbolic) claim, optionally followed up by logical extensions.
(2)A public outcry follows, growing enough to become problematic for administration.
(3)Trump uses plausible deniability and reacts by reversing his claim, pleading total innocence and optionally blaming others or even the listener for the inference.
(4)Trump may triumphantly declare victory over whoever “really” claimed/did what he originally claimed.
This is one of Trump’s ways of gauging reaction from the public. Will they go with his claims? If the statement is allowed to stand (perhaps because the news narrative is cacophonous and attention cycles so short), then the statement enters into Trump’s stock of agreed-upon assertions. If the first statement gets a strong counter-reaction, then he’ll reverse himself and deny the implications of the statement, and sometimes the denial goes so far as to question that the statement was even uttered in the first place. Either way, Trump has gained important information about how far the public is willing to go in supporting his assertions. Reactive reversals are a classic part of Trump’s arsenal, and they can be further seen in Hodges’ chapter on plausible deniability.
A recent example occurred in an interview between Donald Trump and Fox News, where he stated, of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un: “He’s the head of the country. And I mean he’s the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention, I want my people to do the same.” Trump then chuckled and made reference to how Kim had fired three of his generals, adding, “Fired may be a nice word” (Stracqualursi and Liptak 2018). Here, Trump is alluding to the fact that Kim Jong-un doesn’t merely dismiss his staff, but also reportedly has them executed. Later on, Trump and his press secretary claimed that he was joking (ibid.). George Lakoff calls the first part of this routine sending out a “trial balloon” (Lakoff on Twitter, January 3, 2018). In the press, the disclaimer is sometimes called a “joking-not-joking routine,” and is widely thought to be a hallmark of Trumpian humor. Walking back assertions such as these, branding his own press conferences “fake news,” or blaming the interpretation of “blood coming out of her wherever” (CNN 2015) on the listening public are all examples of reactive reversals. The idea is to risk, to go out on a limb to see how much one might get away with, and when there is a revelation of a response, to retreat into plausible deniability, rank ignorance, or “just joking.”
The path leading to reactive reversal has not been Trump’s alone, though. In the spring of 2010, Sarah Palin’s PAC television spot put rifle sights on a number of Democrats whose districts Republicans were hoping to overturn. While on the campaign trail, Palin followed up these ads with sayings such as, “Don’t retreat, reload!” (CBS 2010). Gabrielle Giffords, whose Arizona district she had pinpointed, had the following to say in a prescient MSNBC March 2010 interview: “[W]e’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun-sight over our district, and when people do that, they’ve gotta realize there are consequences to that action” (MSNBC, The Daily Rundown, March 25, 2010).
In January 2011, Giffords was shot in the head by a disgruntled constituent at a meet-your-congressperson event at a grocery store in Tucson, AZ. While Palin’s advertisements were widely blamed for stoking the rage of the gunman, both her campaign and supporters replied that the symbols were not crosshairs but a surveyor’s symbol, and in any case the gunman’s problem was mental illness and not politics (The Atlantic 2011). Even before the appearance of Trump as political candidate, aspects of the Trump playbook began to take shape.
As political actors, we the public must remain vigilant when we identify routines such as reactive reversals, the crybaby and snowflake discourse (McIntosh, preceding section), the plausible denials, and the comedic gestures. They represent the typology of public manipulation.
References
Aristotle. [350 bce]2018. Aristotle: Rhetoric. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Hackett Publishing Company.
The Atlantic. 2011. “Tragedy in Arizona: The Shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.” January 8, 2011. https://bit.ly/2EgwL6H.
Carpenter, Amanda. 2018. Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us. Broadside Books.
CBS. 2010. “Palin: Don’t Retreat! Reload!” April 9, 2010. https://bit.ly/2RPgeP9.
Claridge, Claudia. 2010. Hyperbole in English: A Corpus-Based Study of Exaggeration. Cambridge University Press.
CNN. 2015. “Donald Trump on Megyn Kelly: ‘There was Blood Coming out of Her Wherever.’” August 7, 2015. https://bit.ly/2rLCyhN
Frankfurt, Harry. 1986. “On Bullshit.” Raritan 6, no. 2: 81–100.
Kakutani, Michiko. 2018. The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. Tim Duggan Books.
Kranish, Michael. 2019. “Trump Has Referred to His Wharton Degree As ‘Super Genius Stuff.’ An Admissions Officer Recalls it Differently.” The Washington Post, July 8, 2019. https://wapo.st/2JosRfn.
Lakoff, George (@GeorgeLakoff). 2018. “Trump Uses Social Media as a Weapon to Control the News Cycle.” Twitter, January 3, 2018. https://bit.ly/2PNIUoS.
Loftus, E. F., and J. C. Palmer. 1974. “Reconstruction of Auto-Mobile Destruction: An Example of the Interaction between Language and Memory.” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13: 585–89.
MSNBC. 2010. “Dangerous Backlash.” The Daily Rundown, March 25, 2010.
Smokinggun.com 2019. “Why Has Donald Trump Been Saying That His Father Was Born in Germany?” April 2, 2019. https://bit.ly/38Giltf.
Stracqualursi, Veronica, and Kevin Liptak. 2018. “Trump Says He Wants ‘My People’ to Sit Up ‘At Attention’ Like the North Koreans, Later Says He’s ‘Just Kidding.’” CNN, June 15, 2018. https://cnn.it/35jckSl.
Trump, Donald. 1987. The Art of the Deal. Ballantine.