Are American Presidents Becoming Less Rhetorically Complex? Evaluating the Integrative Complexity of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in Historical Context

Abstract

Are American political leaders becoming simpler in their rhetoric? To evaluate, in the present study we place the two most recent U.S. presidents’ integrative complexity against a historical context for three different types of comparable materials: Presidential Debates, Inaugural Addresses, and State of the Union (SOTU) speeches. Results overwhelmingly suggest that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are historically simple when compared to the typical president, and that is true both across parties and within their own political party. Further, segmented regression analyses suggest that part of the reason for Biden’s and Trump’s low complexity is the continuation of an ongoing historical decline in complexity among Presidents that began in 1960. However, each president uniquely defies this trend on one material type: Biden is a historical outlier for his low-complexity debates, and Trump is a historical outlier for his low-complexity inauguration speech. Taken as a whole, these data suggest that although American presidents have been declining in complexity, both Biden and Trump are nonetheless uniquely low in complexity in some ways – possibly for reasons that are different for each president.