Throughout Donald Trump’s raucous run for the presidency, he promised that his rough tone and aggressive language would shift once he got to the White House. But in the early days of President Trump’s term, his rhetoric has been largely unchanged — blunt, harsh, sometimes threatening, according to those who’ve studied his speech.
The distance from “I alone can fix it,” as Trump promised at July’s Republican convention, to Trump’s tweet late Tuesday — “If Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible ‘carnage’ going on . . . I will send in the Feds!” — is vanishingly small, rhetoreticians say.
"He is super consistent in the way he talks," said Jennifer Mercieca, a scholar of American presidential rhetoric at Texas A&M University and author of a forthcoming book on how Trump speaks. "If we were talking about any other president, we'd have expected that they'd speak differently once they had political power. With Trump, I don't see any moderation."
From his warning to Chicago officials to his Inauguration Day promise that “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” Trump has hewed closely to his campaign themes of smashing the glass case of political correctness, delivering a shock to the nation’s paralyzed capital, and serving up a constant diet of wins.
He seems intent on doing so using the same menu of plain talk and provocative, unpredictable, and sometimes incorrect statements that got him this far.
"I will send in the Feds" fits into a pattern of statements in which Trump threatens force — a rhetorical tactic called ad baculum, a Latin term meaning an "appeal to the stick." For example, Trump said during the campaign that "when people come after me, they go down the tubes."
“He always punches back harder than he’s hit,” Mercieca said.
Trump has said he adopted that approach in his 20s, when he came under the tutelage of New York attorney Roy Cohn, the former aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy who took pride in his aggressive legal strategy.
The pivot from candidate to president can sometimes bring about such an abrupt change in how a politician speaks that voters wonder what happened to the guy they elected. The gravity of the issues they confront, and the reality that a president’s words and gestures move markets, tends to narrow the rhetorical range of any occupant of the White House.
George W. Bush evolved from a folksy campaign style into a more formal and businesslike presidential persona. Barack Obama morphed from the popular sensation who delivered soaring, emotion-laden speeches at his campaign rallies in 2008 into a president known for his cool, reserved manner. Obama, conscious of the change, often cited Mario Cuomo’s famous line about how you campaign in poetry but govern in prose.
No one expected that Trump would adopt a diplomat’s caution, but the new president’s insistence on maintaining his Twitter connection to his 22 million followers and his sometimes rambling talks before federal workers are already making clear that the switch he promised may never happen.
“I can be very presidential,” Trump said in an interview last summer. “I can be more presidential than any president that this country has ever had, except for Abraham Lincoln, because . . . you can’t out-top Abraham Lincoln.”
By “presidential,” Trump meant that he would, as his wife and children had urged him at the height of the primary campaign, tone things down, put aside some of the rough insults and coarse language that he used at his rallies, pull away from the threats and the rabble-rousing (“Get him out!” he called out to security guards confronting a protester at his rallies. “Knock the crap out of him!”)
Making the pivot from candidate to president would, he said, be a cinch. “I’ll just do it,” he said in June.
So far, he has not. His presidential rhetoric sometimes takes the form of a direct threat, but he also uses a related technique in which he praises himself for not taking action against someone. After one of his debates with Hillary Clinton last fall, Trump boasted about not having raised the topic of her husband’s marital infidelities: “I’m very happy that I was able to hold back on the indiscretions with respect to Bill Clinton,” he said.
Speaking to CIA employees the day after the inauguration, Trump lashed out against news reporters as “the most dishonest human beings on Earth” because they used photos showing that Trump had drawn a far smaller crowd than had attended Barack Obama’s swearing-in eight years earlier. Later that day, Trump had his press secretary, Sean Spicer, warn White House correspondents that “We’re going to hold the press accountable.”
“Trump’s threats of force are a way of intimidating, and of responding to a perceived slight,” Mercieca said. In the latest instance, Trump’s comment about Chicago came on the heels of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s statement slamming the president for obsessing over the size of the crowd at his inauguration.
“The idea behind this tweet is that he will take care of this piece of ‘American carnage’ through force,” said George Lakoff, a linguist who is director of the Center for the Neural Mind and Society at Berkeley. “He’s always selling. He’s saying, ‘I’m the hero here.’ ”
Trump’s habit of promising that he will personally fix problems strikes his critics as narcissistic and grandiose. But his supporters often take comfort in such statements.
Lakoff argues that the difference between those who hear Trump’s assertions of control as threatening and those who hear them as progress stems from the different worldviews that liberals and conservatives have about both family and nation.
When Trump promised in his inaugural address that “I will never ever let you down,” he was appealing to conservatives who share his belief that families — and countries — work best when led by a strict father whose authority is clear and moral, Lakoff said. Many liberals, by contrast, base their notion of optimal family structure on the idea of a nurturing parent rather than a strict father. Trump’s language therefore strikes them as overly authoritarian.
By this theory, when Trump seems to flit from topic to topic, he’s not being incoherent, but rather is building a case that he will be the strict father who asserts his authority in all spheres, whether it’s protecting the nation by building the wall on the Mexican border, or by expanding the nuclear arsenal. “Trump is always selling and always making deals,” Lakoff said. “When he tweets ‘send in the Feds,’ he’s saying, ‘I want you to buy what I’m selling, which is me — I’m taking care of this, I’m in control,” Lakoff said.
Trump used the epidemic of homicides in Chicago throughout the campaign to make the case that Obama had been too lenient toward criminals, leaving Americans unsafe.
Last August, Trump, speaking on Fox News, said that a “top police officer” in Chicago had told him that the violence could be halted in a week. That led the city’s police superintendent, Eddie Johnson, to respond that “if you have a magic bullet to stop the violence anywhere . . . then please share it with us.”
At the Republican convention in Cleveland, Trump accused Democrats of a “rollback of criminal enforcement” that he said had reversed progress in reducing crime.
“Crime is out of control, and rapidly getting worse,” Trump said in July. “Look at what is going on in Chicago and our inner cities. Not good!” he tweeted. “This election is a choice between law, order & safety — or chaos, crime & violence. I will make America safe again for everyone.”
By contrast, Obama’s language responding to the violence in Chicago sought to put the murders in the context of a sharp overall decline in crime across the country. Obama said in July that “I think it’s just important to keep in mind that our crime rate today is substantially lower than it was five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. We should never be satisfied when any innocent person has been killed, but that should not be something that is driving our anxieties, relative to where we’ve been in the past.”
But even though Obama had sent his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, to the city to meet with officials and relatives of victims, many in Chicago said Obama’s words lacked urgency.
Within Chicago’s black community, the word “carnage” came up frequently to describe the spate of murders. Spike Lee’s movie, “Chi-Raq” in 2015 picked up on local slang to compare the murders in Chicago to the war in Iraq.
But when Trump picked up the term, he was criticized as not having the standing to speak that bluntly about a place where he was perceived as an unfriendly interloper. Only those who had shown the commitment to the place and the problem could get away with that kind of language. To many in Chicago, that made sense; to Trump and those who saw him as a bulwark against political correctness, that was the kind of linguistic elitism that they wanted their president to burst through.
