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How Trump's speaking style drives home his message

Linguists who have parsed President Trump's speeches find him long on fear and light on freedom.

He declares. He barks. He tries to intimidate opponents. He uses short Anglo-Saxon words (sadwinweak) and simple verb phrases, and repeats himself to drive his points home (very, very).

With 24/7 media, President Trump's voice seems to be everywhere, all the time. On Tuesday, news channels will spend all day chewing over his first formal address to Congress before showing the speech live at 9 p.m. What will he say, and how will he say it?

Some linguists and cognitive scientists who have systematically parsed the thousands of words Trump has spoken on the campaign trail and in office have concluded that he uses democratic rhetoric far less than his predecessors. Indeed, the president most often uses the language of crisis and decay.

"Trump displays two different characteristics of many authoritarians," said David Beaver, a professor of linguistics and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. "He's playing for an emotional reaction rather than making a rational appeal. The use of negative words emphasizes that our country is in danger, threatened by enemies, declining economically and morally—and also the need for control and for a strong leader to save us."

In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last summer, Trump said: "I have visited the laid-off factory workers and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country, and they are forgotten, but they will not be forgotten long. These are people who work hard but no longer have a voice. I am your voice."

Beaver, along with Yale University's Jason Stanley, analyzed transcripts of 62 Trump speeches — his inaugural address and campaign speeches going back to 2015. With that database of about 75,000 words, they compared Trump's language with the nation's first 57 inaugural addresses, when a new president typically tries to summon the nation's highest ideals.

Among the most common inaugural words  are freedomlibertyrights, and public. In the country's first 57 inaugural addresses, each of those four words occurred on average about once in every 72 words, the analysis found.

Trump used freedoms once in his 1,433-word inaugural, in the service of national unity: "We all enjoy the same glorious freedoms and salute the same great American flag." He made no reference to individual rights in the speech.

In the entire database of Trump speeches, he uses the four democracy-themed words at about 20 percent of the rate other presidents invoke them in inaugural addresses, the study showed. Only  public made the list of the 1,000 words Trump most frequently uses, coming in at 938, according to the database.

Trump was the 10th most common word in the speeches studied, excluding what linguists call filler or stop words, such as the or and.

The researchers found several fear-tinged words among the most common Trump has used in the speeches studied, such as mentions of China, Mexico, and Iran as dangerous enemies of the U.S. Others include: border(s), military, hell, tough, disaster, horrible, worst, strong, ISIS and immigration.

Many have noted that Trump often takes an "us vs. them" stance in his speeches and other pronouncements. He sets himself up as the hero who can save Americans from a variety of enemies and maladies: illegal immigrants; foreign trade agreements that have sent millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs overseas; Islamic terrorism; and the specter of street violence, though the violent crime rate has trended down.

"We are going to keep radical Islamic terrorists the hell out of our country," Trump said Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering outside Washington. "We will not be deterred from this course. In a matter of days, we will be taking brand-new action to protect our people and keep America safe."

George Lakoff, an expert in political speech and imagery, argues that Trump achieves rhetorical power by exploiting people's unconscious thought with tactics such as repetition, framing ("Crooked Hillary"), and citing  well-known examples of terror-related attacks such as the San Bernardino and Orlando Pulse shootings.

Lakoff, who is director of the Center for the Neural Mind and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, says political orientations are deeply embedded for most people from their experience with family life — the strict-father model (conservative) or the nurturing parent (liberal).

Trump's language evokes the strict father. "The basic idea is that authority is justified by morality … and that, in a well-ordered world, there should be (and traditionally has been) a moral hierarchy in which those who have traditionally dominated should dominate," Lakoff wrote in an essay last year. "The hierarchy is: God above Man, Man above Nature, The Disciplined (Strong) above the Undisciplined (Weak), The Rich above the Poor, Employers above Employees, Adults above Children, Western culture above other cultures, America above other countries."

Trump provides reassurance to people buffeted by the economic changes of globalization and social changes, said Beaver, the University of Texas researcher. "People who are scared are looking for control in their lives — and safety," he said. Trump is forceful, promising he will defeat ISIS and bring back jobs in manufacturing and coal mining, for instance.

What Trump does is much more than doublespeak, according to the scholar who literally wrote the book on that subject, William Lutz, professor emeritus of English at Rutgers-Camden. Doublespeak is spin or euphemism, he said, such as President Ronald Reagan speaking of revenue enhancements instead of tax increases or the military's use of collateral damage to describe civilian casualties.

Often, Trump will simply assert what he sees as a reality and does not back down when corrected, Lutz said. For instance, in a recent news conference, the president falsely claimed he had won the biggest electoral vote victory in 40 years. Earlier this month, Trump lashed out at polls showing that voters disapproved of his performance and were not supportive of his proposed border wall and a policy restricting immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries.

The practice has even inspired a classic example of doublespeak, courtesy of presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway: "alternative facts."

"How do you talk to Trump? There's no basis for an argument or a discussion," Lutz said, likening it to propaganda. "It's a one-way conversation straight out of Orwell's 1984. You could only believe what the party tells you, not the evidence of your own eyes."

It's an effective technique for Trump in many ways — "you pound, pound, pound your message" — Lutz said, but could threaten the nation's health in the long run.

"In a sense it undermines the democratic process, which rests on discussion, an exchange of ideas," Lutz said.