President Trump may not have had the rhetorical brilliance of other presidential nominees during the past century, but a new analysis of his speeches reveals a deep understanding of emotion and one of the heaviest uses of storytelling techniques in American history.
Trump will deliver one of the major set-piece speeches of his presidency on Thursday evening as he accepts the Republican nomination and makes the case for another four-year term.
Computer analysis of 6,500 campaign speeches since 1948 by a scholar of presidential rhetoric found that Trump used more anger words in 2016 than any other candidate, an increase that reflected the public mood and helped him win.
The question now is whether his speaking style can hit the same bullseye as four years ago, according to professor Roderick Hart, author of Trump and Us: What He Says and Why People Listen.
He said his study was motivated by a desire to get past media coverage that portrayed Trump supporters as white supremacists or conspiracy theorists and understand how a candidate who, in his view, has a limited vocabulary and lacks depth, could persuade 62 million people to vote for him.
“The question is how could a guy who is so — he’s smart, he knows his finance — but how could a guy that shallow enlist so much support and continue to do so,” he said.
“And I think it is because he has an ear for the ordinary person.”
The first systematic linguistic analysis of Trump’s 2016 campaign and early presidency concludes that he won not through partisanship but by how he made people feel.
Hart, professor of government at the University of Texas, Austin, first assembled dictionaries of angry terms — words such as bad, bitter, disgusting — hurt terms, fear terms, and joy terms that were plugged into his text-analysis computer software DICTION to analyze decades of political speeches.
He found that Trump used anger 4 times as much as Hillary Clinton and more than any other presidential nominee in history but was only 21st out of 26 on fear.
It brought a clear advantage. The 2016 election coincided with rising levels of anger in the broader public discourse, according to Hart. Analysis of readers’ letters published in newspapers across the country shows anger scores hitting record levels.
“They kind of confirmed Trump’s sensitivity,” said Hart. “He has an ear for emotion, both input and output.”
Further analysis of storytelling terms — use of people, motion, place, time, and embellishment — put Trump in the same orbit as some of the office’s great orators. It was perhaps no surprise that he ranked top for “embellishment” but also fifth for “narrative style” (Michael Dukakis was first) and ninth for “insistence” (a category topped by John Kerry), reflecting his characteristic use of repetition.
“He’s not a very good storyteller in the sense of epic stories, in the Barack Obama sense or in the Ronald Reagan sense of being able to weave a narrative with intricacy or emotional depth,” said Hart.
“Trump’s stories are short. But he has them.”
He cites a 2016 speech in Charleston, South Carolina, where he talked about how a friend who buys excavating equipment had been forced to buy Chinese-made gear because of Beijing’s devalued currency.
“Caterpillars are better, but this is good enough,” says his friend in the tale, before Trump ties it all together with a short, sharp conclusion: “Caterpillar is happening to all of us.”
Hart said the use of emotion and anger, in particular, was suited to both the mood of the moment, and he had the luck of an opponent in Clinton, who was viewed as distant and unknowable. In contrast, voters felt like they knew Trump.
That strategy may not work with Joe Biden.
“There’s an emotional accessibility to Biden,” he continued. “And there’s an emotional accessibility to Trump. You can quickly know what they are feeling.”
“Contrast that with a Mitt Romney, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. For different reasons, they don’t give you the whole story.”
In addition, 2020 has been a year of fear and uncertainty, as the coronavirus killed about 180,000 people and brought the economy to a halt. Anger may be a less effective weapon than four years ago, said Hart.
“He pushes and bluffs his way through it, but he’s worried that if he acknowledges that, he is afraid it will make them more fearful,” he said.
“I think Biden has a much better sense for the current emotional state than Trump does. But we’ll see.”
