Yulia Danyushina, PhD, Doctor in Linguistics, Professor Military Academy, Moscow, Russia
“VERBAL TRUMPOLOGY” (ON RHETORIC AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES OF D.TRUMP)

With the rapidly increasing public and academic interest in the persona of Donald Trump, we consider important to trace his lingual and communicative features as a special part of his individuality. Journalists, political analysts, sociologists, psychologists, as well as linguists have already done lots of research of his speech characteristics, and even introduced the term “the Trumpese language” to define his peculiar speech style, new and unusual for consensual politicians. After his being elected the 45^th President of the USA (taking into account the global importance of this position and its communication, and Trump’s intentions to continue communicating with the nation and the world directly by means of his Twitter account) it is high time to introduce a new cross-discipline of “Verbal Trumpology” as an umbrella term for researching the rhetoric and communicative peculiarities of Donald Trump.

Researchers and journalists have already identified the trend of decreasing the level of speech complexity in politicians’ speech in our era of multimedia, because “simpler language resonates with a broader swath of voters in an era of 140-character Twitter tweets and 10-second television sound bites” [3]. The Boston Globe staff reviewed the language used by the 2016 US Presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans, putting the transcripts of the candidates’ speeches through the Flesch-Kincaid readability tests (which give higher grade levels to those using longer words and longer sentences, which tend to be more complex and require a higher grade level to comprehend). According to this study, Trump “speaks in punchy bursts… It’s all easily grasped, whether it’s his campaign theme (“Make America Great Again”), words about his wealth (“I’m really rich”), or his disparagement of the Washington culture (“Politicians are all talk, no action”). He dismisses his opponents with snippy sound bites that… have been devastatingly effective”. To sum up, “with his own choice of words and his short, simple sentences, Trump’s speech could have been comprehended by a fourth-grader” (i.e. the 4^th grade school pupil) [3], while his competitors in the election could only be understood by people with higher level of education. We have also discovered the specifics of the Internet communication impact [1] efficient in business and political spheres in the information age.

Now, we have analyzed the key recent speeches by D.Trump including the nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention July 21, 2016; his Presidential campaign speeches; three Presidential Candidates Debates; President-Elect Victory Speech November 9, 2016; News Conference 11 January 2017; Inauguration Speech 20 January 2017, and the textual content of D.Trump’s official Twitter account. The results of this analysis reveal the following major characteristics of his speech, verbal and communicative style:

- purposeful simplicity (lexical, grammatical, stylistic) – short and clear words and sentences, transparent style of expressing himself (e.g. “Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored... I will present the facts plainly and honestly. We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore… The democrats are holding their convention next week. Go there. But here, at our convention, there will be no lies”, “I've met Sarah's beautiful family”;

- colloquial manner with informality, self-interruptions and digressions, and use of slang (e.g. “The Democrats on the other hand, received 20% fewer votes than they got four years ago, not so good”, “Boo! In our nation's capital, killings have risen by 50%”; “43 million Americans are on food stamps); sloganism of his oral and written speech – there are lots of bright and memorable slogans, mottos and memes (e.g. “we will be a country of generosity and warmth, but we will also be a country of law and order”; “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo”; “My pledge reads: "I'm with you the American people." I am your voice”;

- use of verbal intensifiers (e.g. “violence… will soon, and I mean very soon come to an end”; “In 2009 ISIS was not even on the map”; repetitions and parallelisms (e.g. “this is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction and terrorism and weakness. Boo! But Hillary Clinton's legacy does not have to be America's legacy”; “We will make America strong again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again. And we will make America great again!”)

- massive use of imperative mood (e.g. “Build the wall!”, “Believe me!”);

- combination of all above mentioned in promising without specifying how to achieve it, which can be relatively defined as ‘seller’s speak with suggestive effect” (e.g. “Our trade deficit in goods reached, think of this, our trade deficit is 8 hundred billion dollars. Think of that. $800 billion last year alone. We will fix that”; “Boo! Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!” – all the examples are taken from D.Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention).

As for extra-linguistic innovations, successfully used by D.Trump during his election campaign, individualized targeting and personification in electronic communications (based on the use of Big Data analysis) are worth mentioning and specific research. H.Grassegger and M.Krogerus [2] state that on the day of the last debates, over 175 000 highly individualized and elaborately modified messages were sent by Trump’s team in social networks to match exactly the psychological specifics, socio-political preferences of the addressees, and to influence their electoral choice. The cumulative effect of these rhetoric, lingual and extra-lingual, communicative techniques was the victory in the election, which proves their efficiency and need to study them further.

References

1. Daniushina, Yulia. “Multi-Level Analysis of the Business Web Discouses in English”. Doctoral dissertation (Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences). Moscow, 2011.

2. Grassegger, Hannes Von und Mikael Krogerus. Ich habe nur gezeigt, dass es die Bombe gibt. URL: https://www.dasmagazin.ch/2016/12/03/ich-habe-nur-gezeigt-dass-es-die-bombe-gibt/

3. Viser, Matt. Trump tops GOP field while talking to voters at fourth-grade level. The Boston Globe. Oct. 20, 2015. P.3.