Trump is using anger, fear and insults more than ever to mobilize his supporters, researchers say • Georgia Recorder

On November 2, 2024By Karl

WASHINGTON — In front of a crowd at Madison Square Garden late last month, former President Donald Trump shouted that the United States was “invaded” by illegal immigrants and that he would “liberate every city and town that was invaded and conquered.”

Day one, if elected, would be “the largest deportation program in American history.”

On stage with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Trump in Arizona on Thursday night recommended Former US House of Representatives member Liz Cheney must face the weapons of war. Trump said Cheney, a Republican who campaigned for Vice President Kamala Harris and led the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 riot, should be “shot at with nine barrels” because she is a “war hawk.”

“Let’s see how he feels about it when the guns are pointed in his face,” Trump said.

Such comments are why political scientists and historians are alarmed by the former president’s language. Experts have found that Trump, who is running neck-and-neck with Harris for a second term in the Oval Office, has become increasingly divisive and threatening. They warn that Trump’s insulting speeches and social media posts have become darker and more violent since his political career began in 2015, and they demand greater scrutiny of their real-world consequences.

Trump’s speeches have also become longer, more convoluted and random over the years; It’s an approach Trump describes as “weaving.” One analysis The New York Times found that Trump’s speeches increased from 45 minutes in 2016 to an average of 82 minutes.

Robert C. Rowland, who studies political rhetoric at the University of Kansas, summarized Trump’s recent speeches, social media posts and interviews as essentially “fear, anger, complaints and bullshit.”

“’Things are terrible here.’ ‘We won’t have a country left.’ ‘We will have a nuclear war.’ He said something similar at the very end of the 2020 campaign, but it’s different than most of his time in politics, and with that there are even stronger claims about his greatness — all of which are independent of any discussion of what (his proposals) are like. “Indeed it would,” said Rowland, author of “Donald Trump’s Rhetoric: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy,” published in 2021.

When contacted for comment on the former president’s evolving language, Trump’s campaign provided a statement from a Republican National Committee representative criticizing the media for “not giving the same attention to the brutal rape and murder of victims like Rachel Morin, Laken Riley, and Jocelyn.” Nugary.”

The correct spelling is Nungaray.

The women whose deaths Trump drew attention to in his campaign were respectively attacked and killed. 2023 By a man from El Salvador in Maryland 2024 by a Venezuelan man in Georgia and 2024 By two Venezuelan men in Texas. Nungaray’s mother went on the campaign trail with Trump.

The RNC’s Anna Kelly said in a statement she emailed and linked: “President Trump is telling the truth: The Harris-Biden administration allowed this to happen.” More than 100 terrorist suspects Those who crossed the border and entered the country, approximately 16,000 illegal immigrants They were caught trying to cross the border 5,000 unchecked illegal immigrants are being released into the USA every day. Including Americans Hispanic Americansoverwhelmingly Support “President Trump has a plan to keep our country safe, and they are ready to Make America Safe Again on November 5th.”

While Trump has focused on high-profile violent crimes committed by immigrants without legal status, numerous analyzes showed that immigrants do not commit crimes at higher rates than native-born Americans.

Graphic descriptions of murders

Trump describes increasingly gruesome scenes of rape and murder to his campaign rally audience, warning them that “Kamala is bringing in criminal immigrants from jails, prisons, mental institutions, and asylums from around the world.”

Before an arena crowd in Manhattan last month, the former president outlined the details of the incident. September 2016 murders of two teenage girls on Long Island by MS-13 gang members. “They didn’t shoot them. “They stabbed them and cut them into small pieces because it was so painful,” he said.

University of California, Los Angeles researchers Nikita Savin and Daniel Treisman analyzed 99 speeches made by Trump from April 2015 to June 2024 and found a trend of increasing the frequency of violent words. They published their results in a workbook paper in July.

“What’s important is this very clear upward trend over time since 2015,” Treisman told States Newsroom in an interview in early October.

Savin and Treisman also examined 127 speeches made by major party candidates in the 20 months before every U.S. presidential election since 2008. Trump’s and others’ speeches were chosen according to the same criteria: the last significant public speech of each month.

The two continued to monitor Trump’s language as part of their working documents.

“I just analyzed the last speech that was given in Wisconsin in September, and that speech contained words of greater or equal intensity of violence as all of his speeches that we have previously reviewed,” Treisman said.

‘Them’

Using a special dictionary of 142 words related to violence, the duo examined Trump’s language for words such as “crime”, “war”, “prosecution”, “prison”, “missile”, “death”, “massacre” and “blood” . ” They also examined markers of economic and populist content.

Treisman said that since 2020, Trump’s negative language about “elites” has been on an upward trend, but “the thing that’s most prominent is his use of the pronoun ‘they’ and he’s very high on that compared to other politicians.”

When the research duo expanded the parameters of comparison with various U.S. and world leaders, past and present, they found that Trump’s frequency of use of violent language “exceeded that of any other politician in a democracy we studied and fell slightly below the level in the United States.” A selection from Fidel Castro’s May 1 speeches.

Savin and Treisman acknowledge the limitations of their study in that it does not investigate why Trump’s speech changed or its specific consequences. Additionally, they wrote that a dictionary-based text analysis only measures the frequency of words “without delving deeper into meanings and contexts.”

“He does not perceive violent thoughts expressed in non-violent words. For example, his speech on January 6, 2021 does not score very high on our violence measures because he did not use many words such as ‘kill’, ‘death’, ‘blood’. “He said, ‘Let’s go and march on the Capitol,'” Treisman said.

“Given the problematic development of his vocabulary, further research along these lines is clearly warranted,” the authors wrote.

States Newsroom fed 238 of Trump’s social media posts from X and Truth Social into two AI word cloud generators. The posts on randomly selected days from August to October consisted of 8,664 words but amounted to roughly 1,500 unique words when grouped by occurrence.

Trump’s top five words were, unsurprisingly, “Kamala,” “Harris,” “great,” “now” and “Trump.”

However, among the 75 most used words among 1,500 words, “comrade” ranked 15th, “fake” 23rd, “war” 54th, “radical” 61st and “radical” 61st. I’m lying at 72 years old.

‘Enemy within’

Trump told supporters in New York City on Sunday that they were fighting against a “radical left machine” that he said was an “enemy from within.”

Trump told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo in an Oct. 14 interview that the “enemy within” is a “bigger problem” than immigrants who are “completely destroying our country.”

“We have some very bad people, some sick people, radical left lunatics… and that should be dealt with very easily by the National Guard if necessary or by the army if really necessary,” Bartiromo responded. Problem expected on Election Day.

On October 12, Trump released an ad on the Truth Social platform celebrating Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film “Full Metal Jacket”; juxtaposed this ad with scenes of drag performers and a clip of Admiral Rachel Levine, a physician and serving as U.S. Chief Public Prosecutor. medical service officer corps, First Openly transgender federal official. The message he published along with the video: “WE WILL NOT HAVE AWAKENED SOLDIERS!”

Trump appears to disagree with criticism that his campaign uses negative language or themes. “While I run a campaign of positive solutions to save America, Kamala Harris is running a campaign of hate,” he wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday.

Lately, personalized fundraising text messages his campaign has been sending to supporters have been declaring Trump’s “love” for them.

‘Don’t let them eat us’

In the days following the September 10 debate between Trump and Harris, the former president shared a post on the Truth Social platform: sherry related to created by artificial intelligence images It depicts cats imploring voters to support Trump. “Don’t let them eat us. “Vote for Trump,” read a sign held by a group of orange tabby kittens.

These posts follow Trump’s false claim during the debate that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating domestic cats and dogs. Rumors began circulating among Trump supporters ahead of his matchup with Harris, and Trump continued to push the lie.

small town in ohio aim received bomb threats for days, so much so that the state’s Republican Governor, Mike DeWine, shipped state troopers to 18 local school buildings.

Speaking to States Newsroom in both September and October, Rowland pondered whether Trump’s general stance on the cat-and-dog lie would hurt the former president’s chances of re-election.

“He chose this meme which is so ridiculous and clearly wrong,” Rowland said on September 13.

Just over a month later, Rowland told States Newsroom: “It hasn’t changed anything. “If anything, it went the other way.” Voting It showed that Trump and Harris have been nearly tied for several weeks.

Rowland said that overall, Trump’s recent “lack of consistency and negative emotions are what I think are most striking.”

“He had never talked about policy in detail before, but now there is almost no discussion about policy. In a sense, that has been replaced by insults, Rowland said.

“I compare it to people like Ronald Reagan, who were the most effective leaders of both parties; they really laid out the case. Now one can agree or disagree with that. And Barack Obama certainly laid out an agenda when he was running for office, and I don’t see that at all (in Trump),” he said. Rowland: “I’ve never seen anything like it in American politics.”