Disruption, Demonization, Deliverance, and Norm Destruction: The Rhetorical Signature of Donald J. Trump

Jamieson, Kathleen Hall; Taussig, Doron

doi:10.1002/polq.12699

Cited by 81 publications

(39 citation statements)

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“…And this should be particularly true for those who regularly consume news and understand politics because they are more regularly exposed to political messages. To the extent, then, that authoritarians in our studies have been previously and extensively exposed to messages of intolerance in the real world, particularly in the context of the 2016 US presidential campaign (Jamieson & Taussig, 2017;Lamont, Park, & Ayala-Hurtado, 2017), they may also be less reactive to the stimuli presented in our experiment.…”

Section: Authoritarianism and Selective Exposurementioning

confidence: 89%

Selective exposure and the authoritarian dynamic: Evidence from Canada and the United States

Hinckley

Harell

2020

J. Soc. Polit. Psych.

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This study explores to what extent selective exposure to political messages can produce political (in)tolerance among authoritarians and non-authoritarians. Drawing on a selection-exposure experiment embedded within an online survey conducted in the United States (N = 1978) and Canada (N = 1673), we explore how authoritarians and non-authoritarians react to framing around civil liberties controversies. Participants were randomly assigned to receive a message about a controversial group. In the forced-choice condition, participants were randomly assigned a political or non-political message. In a second condition, participants were given a choice of which message to read more about. The results show that authoritarians who are politically knowledgeable generally avoid messages that promote free speech by consuming non-political information. While messages about the dangers of free speech have the potential to produce more intolerance among authoritarians, we found that this effect was limited to those who are the least likely to consume them when given a choice. By contrast, we found that messages about the risk posed by free speech produced intolerance among non-authoritarians for whom threat-related cognitions were already chronically accessible. The effects of pro-civil liberties messages were limited to unthreatened non-authoritarians. Hence, we conclude that in the contemporary information environment selective exposure can increase polarization around a civil liberties controversy by producing attitude change but this occurs mainly among non-authoritarians.

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Section: Authoritarianism and Selective Exposurementioning

confidence: 89%

Selective exposure and the authoritarian dynamic: Evidence from Canada and the United States

Hinckley

Harell

2020

J. Soc. Polit. Psych.

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“…(Thoemmes & Conway, 2007) and that this reduced complexity represents a quality of successful leaders. Further, a trend has been observed whereby complexity is reduced while attempting to attain power, but then is reduced after successfully attaining it (Suedfeld & Rank, 1976) -a trend that Trump has not followed as his simple and de-professionalised rhetoric has been retained post-election, representative of his rhetorical signature (Jamieson & Taussig, 2017 Lim (2008, p. 22) has stated that anti-intellectualism leads to 'the rejection of rhetorical or linguistic complexity' and replaces this in practice with linguistic simplicity, often utilised to reinforce this rejection of research-supported knowledge. This has been demonstrated by Golshan (2017) who revealed the disordered language with which Trump communicates, and the emphasis on main clauses and simple sentences at the expense of the complexity that comes with subordinate clause use.…”

Section: Informality and Simplicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Donald Trump, legitimisation and a new political rhetoric

Ross

Rivers

2020

World Englishes

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The rise to the US Presidency of Donald Trump has been accompanied by the emergence of a new political rhetoric, one that is most frequently observed on the social media platform Twitter. Although Twitter has been a feature of political campaigns and communication for several years now, the public has not been exposed to the deprofessionalised, informal use demonstrated by Trump. The rhetoric of Trump can be said in large part to be influenced by his personal history, and his persona as a celebrity TV star, especially through the informality, insults inclusive of nicknaming, and framing himself as a winner and opponents as losers. Although this new rhetorical style is present in all his discourse on Twitter, we focus this study on Trump's pursuit of legitimacy for his proposed border wall on the US-Mexico border, and do so from a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective by utilising Reyes' (2011) framework for legitimisation in political discourse. 1 INTRODUCTION Donald J. Trump's ascendency to the Presidency of the United States in 2016 heralded a new form of politician in conjunction with a new style of political rhetoric and communication. To understand Trump and his place within American and global politics, it is unwise to ignore his celebrity persona and background. King (2018, p. 2) states that where in the past 'politicians have sought to exploit the tropes and images of celebrity, the Trump Presidency marks the point where the President is a celebrity' (italics added). This is linked to both his past as a billionaire businessman, but most notably his role in the reality TV show The apprentice, which presented him with a kind of fame unique to reality TV show characters and different from the past, where 'fans are encouraged to feel that they know these people, not as fictional characters but as flesh and blood' (Von Drehle, 2016, p. 26). He has carried this fame and the influence of his celebrity into the political sphere, where the 'fact that he did not sound or behave like a typical politician won him points for authenticity' (Singer, 2016, p. 97), and this authenticity is evident in all of his political rhetoric, but particularly on his preferred mode of communication, the social media platform Twitter. Twitter has now been a prominent tool of political communication and participation for more than a decade, with politicians and political organisations engaging in what Maireder and Ausserhofer (2012, p. 306) describe as the

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“…Arguably beyond other plausible hypotheses concerning economic protectionism and Russian interference, it was immigration that elected Trump to office. Indeed, whenever faced with problems on other fronts, his default is to stir up attention by referring to some immigration‐related issue (Jamieson and Taussig ). It also matches closely the globalist versus nationalist theme that is central to contemporary right‐wing populism across Europe and North America.…”

Section: The Us Immigration “Debate”mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Asymmetric Border: The United States’ Place in the World and the Refugee Panic of 2018

Agnew

2019

Geographical Review

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The year 2018 saw a moral panic in the United States in the media and among many citizens over the treatment of refugees/asylees at the U.S. southern border, particularly the separation and detention of children apart from their parents. This happened in the context of a period in U.S. political history in which “immigration,” without much discernment about different types of immigration, was central to political discourse. In fact, in terms of numbers, there was no immigration crisis at the border. Undocumented migration from Mexico across the southern border of the United States has been in decline for many years, and the irregular movement of people from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras is currently small by historical standards. The only crisis, to which the U.S. panic was a response, has been a human rights crisis. Families and children seeking asylum from horrendous civil‐rights conditions in their countries of origin were criminalized and denied their right to asylum hearings. The panic points both to the extreme politicization of immigration in the United States, particularly since Donald Trump's entry into national politics in 2015, and to popular confusion over categorizing different types of immigrants. But it also raises questions about the nature of the U.S. southern border in relation to the United States’ place in the world. Rather than thinking about the United States as simply the rich destination country of unfortunate people coming from poor origin countries, the refugee panic of 2018 brings into the focus the fact that the United States itself is complicit in the conditions in those countries that produce so many refugees in the first place.

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Disruption, Demonization, Deliverance, and Norm Destruction: The Rhetorical Signature of Donald J. Trump

Cited by 81 publications

References 0 publications

Selective exposure and the authoritarian dynamic: Evidence from Canada and the United States

Selective exposure and the authoritarian dynamic: Evidence from Canada and the United States

Donald Trump, legitimisation and a new political rhetoric

The Asymmetric Border: The United States’ Place in the World and the Refugee Panic of 2018

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