The 2016 presidential campaign was unique. Pitting a self-styled businessman against the first female major party nominee for president, the 2016 campaign generated unprecedented negative news coverage, our first taste of “fake news” on social media, and an outcome that surprised public opinion polling and, purportedly, the eventual winner himself. In Trump and Us, Roderick P. Hart applies his expertise in text analysis to trying to understand—or at least describe—another confounding variable in that fateful election: the rhetoric of Donald J. Trump.
Focusing predominantly on candidate Trump, while mixing in comparisons with previous presidential candidates and Trump’s opponent in the 2016 election, Professor Hart offers a detailed examination of Trump’s unique brand of rhetoric. Using the DICTION program and data from the Campaign Mapping Project, Hart analyzes the simplicity (chap. 2), populism (chap. 3), passion (chap. 4), and novelty (chap. 8) of Trump’s rhetoric. This quantitative text analysis is supplemented by a litany of qualitative examples, American National Election Survey results, and anecdotes from journalists, campaign staff, and supporters. Together, Hart paints a comprehensive picture of Trump’s 2016 campaign rhetoric.
Among the book’s many revelations, several stand out. First, as evidenced by his significant use of interpersonal language—specifically by referencing people and relational terms, such as brother or aunt, in his speeches—Trump is a populist and one of the most populist presidential candidates since 1948. Second, Trump was angry, something that Hart makes entirely clear. Third, Trump told stories on the campaign trail, and he ranked in the top five among presidential candidates in narrative style. Fourth, Trump’s novelty produced a good deal of ambivalence among voters, ambivalence that supporters resolved by relying on their perception of Trump as a person. One Trump supporter commented, for example, “He says what he thinks which is not always a good thing but he says what he thinks” (p. 186). That the campaign was more about personality than policy (Senator Clinton’s forte) underscores one important variable in the 2016 election outcome.
The relationship between Trump and the news media is aptly described in several chapters. Along with decidedly negative coverage, Trump received voluminous news coverage, more than both his primary and general election opponents (p. 144). Trump’s coverage surpassed the amount of news coverage Clinton enjoyed on all cataloged specific and general dimensions, such as the horse race, moral values, immigration, and global threats (p. 85). Moving beyond simply describing Trump’s response to media as negative, Hart analyzes the paranoid elements—isolation, affliction, and indignation—of Trump’s criticism of the press, showing that candidate Trump evoked these themes more often than other presidential election winners (p. 131). He also increased his attacks on several media outlets as the campaign progressed (p. 156), moving from “gentle teasing” to “in your face” press engagement. It is no surprise that Trump referenced himself more often than other candidates had in press interviews (p. 152). What is unique to Hart’s analysis is his summary of news coverage of Trump’s supporters. The press covered Trump’s supporters more than twice as often as Clinton’s supporters, describing them in mostly negative terms; for example, as provincial, gullible, and morally degenerate (p. 150).
Trump’s rhetorical spontaneity, the focus of chapter 9, brings us to Twitter. Table 9.1 best encapsulates the press’s characterization of candidate Trump’s tweets; the press was fixated on descriptors like angry, stupid, and crazy. The chapter also reinforces a finding that we have heard was true: even voters (but more Democrat than Republican) objected to the way Trump tweeted, calling his tweets “inappropriate” and indicative of “bad manners” (p. 205). Yet although Trump tweeted in ways that even his supporters found objectionable, they continued to support his campaign, finding myriad ways to justify his words and actions (p. 186). The findings of chapters 7–9 taken together reveal an interplay between Trump, news coverage, and supporters. As candidate—and later as president—Trump antagonized the media, calling them out and differentiating their rhetoric from his own, while simultaneously reinforcing his supporters’ approval of his campaign and their own disillusionment with the news media.
Perhaps the most interesting data in the book center not on Donald Trump but on Hilary Clinton, his opponent in the 2016 presidential election. On the one hand, chapter 8 reveals that the press, reinforced in citizens’ letters to the editors, was more apt to refer to Donald Trump and other presidential candidates by their last names. But Senator Clinton was called “Hillary,” and her first name was used more often than that of any other presidential candidate (p. 177) since 1948; in addition, media referenced her marital status more frequently than her title of “Secretary of State” (p. 144). Both practices served to reinforce gender stereotypes and exemplify the difficulty faced by the first female presidential candidate of a major political party. On the other hand, even though Clinton was much less likely to exaggerate than Trump, she was also much less insistent in her own rhetoric (p. 106). Instead, she jumped from issue to issue and did not underscore the same clarity of message that her opponent did. Indeed, it is these data that make me wonder whether the 2016 presidential election campaign was less about Trump’s rhetoric (however interesting it was) and more about the role that gender played—and the campaign oversights made by candidate Clinton—in shaping its outcome.
Trump and Us is rich with description, and the comparative tables help place Trump’s rhetoric in context with that of other candidates. At times, however, compelling comparisons are absent; for example, why not compare Trump’s exaggerations with Gore, another purported exaggerator? And, elsewhere, assertions— for example, that Trump connects with voters on a deeply personal level—remain underdeveloped. Moreover, because the book lacks a strong theoretical frame, we simply do not know why voters may have been responsive to Trump because of his manner of speaking. We have often speculated that there is something about Trump’s rhetoric that is different, and indeed, this book supports this contention. But it remains unclear as to the impact Trump’s rhetoric had in motivating 43% of the electorate to support him in 2016 and maintain that support for him as president. Fortunately for the author, this leaves open the possibility for still more research on this topic, perhaps by crafting a study on President Trump’s rhetoric.
Setting this minor criticism aside, Trump and Us makes a valuable contribution to our fuller understanding of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign rhetoric. Whereas we may have always thought so, Professor Hart now provides us with clear quantitative evidence that Trump was a populist who spoke simplistically and with anger in a paranoid style. Hart writes extremely well, and his work is accessible to a wide range of students of presidential rhetoric, campaigns, and elections. This book is rich with descriptive data, and its argument and findings should be incorporated into virtually all scholarship on rhetoric in presidential campaigns.
