Like Nobody's Ever Seen Before by Geoff Carter

Attribution: DonkeyHotey, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Geoff Carter

Linguists and educational theorists have argued for centuries over the question of whether thought gives rise to language or whether the reverse, that language affects and determines thought, is true. The once widely-accepted Sapir-Whorf hypothesis postulates that language determines thought, while Fodor’s theory maintains the opposite, that thought and language are inherently independent (The Medium).

Other researchers have concluded that different types of thought are affected in differing degrees by language. Sapir and Whorf also argued that speakers of different languages exhibited different thought patterns (Scientific American). Some languages assign gender to nouns, others rarely—if ever—assign time designations to verbs, so whether an action happened yesterday, is happening now, or will happen tomorrow, is impossible to determine. All these differences necessarily reflect differences in the thought process.

If language does affect thought, then it might be argued that the strange, simplistic, banal, and crass manner of President Trump’s discourse either affects or is possibly a product of current American thought.

First of all, Trump’s speech patterns, vocabulary, lexicon, and verbal expression need to be examined. According to a study reported in Newsweek, Trump “communicates at the lowest grade level of the last 15 presidents, according to a new analysis of the speech patterns of presidents going back to Herbert Hoover,” and that Trump was measure“on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale and…clocked in around mid-fourth grade, the worst since Harry Truman, who spoke at nearly a sixth-grade level.”

After listening to the man speak in public over the past ten years, this is hardly surprising. According to an analysis of Trump speeches, Factba.se has concluded that “(Trump’s) words were run through a variety of lexicological analyses, besides the Flesch-Kincaid, and the results were the same. In every one, Trump came in dead last. Trump also uses the fewest “unique words” (2,605) of any president—Obama was the best at 4,869—and uses words with the fewest average syllables, with 1.33 per word, compared to positively multi-syllabic president Hoover at 1.57 (Newsweek)” and that “by every metric and methodology tested, Donald Trump’s vocabulary and grammatical structure is significantly more simple, and less diverse, than any President since Herbert Hoover.”

While Trump has always maintained his two greatest assets “have been mental stability and being like, really smart”, senior members of his first administration have characterized his as a “moron”, “a kindergartener” and a “fucking moron”, qualities reflected in his language.

But if nothing else—and there is very little else—Donald Trump is a grandmaster of marketing, and that his use of simplistic conversational language could be argued to be a shrewd use of his branding skills. We’ve all heard him repeat the same phrases over and over and over again: “Like nobody’s ever seen before”, “never seen anything like it”, “believe me”, “a lot of money”, and variations of “winning, winning again, winners”. On the flip side, we have “terrible”, “a mess”, or “awful”.

As stated in CNN, “he adopts phrases and goes back to them (phrases) over and over again. He punctuates sentences with a smattering of superlatives and decisive adjectives – Great! Wrong! SAD! He makes promises and assurances that are verbal equivalents of the forceful handshake he so often employs.” In short, Trump’s verbal style is first cousin to a salesman’s hard sell.

This is one of first premises of marketing: repetition. The more someone hears something, the more it sticks in their mind, and the more likely they are to believe it. Take the term “fake news”. Since Trump coined the phrase and has repeated it endlessly, it has become part of the political vernacular. Any criticism of the mainstream media is now usually predicated by the term “fake news”. His absurd and juvenile nicknames for his political opponents like “Sleepy Joe” or “Crooked Hillary” or “Little Marco” work because they’re catchy and stick in our minds. And, as Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, has stated, “Trump’s draw… is tied to his ability not to sound like a politician or an expert. People feel he’s talking to them, she said, which makes people feel comfortable” (USA Today). So, counterintuitively, the less Trump (or anyone, I suppose) sounds like an expert, the more ordinary people might like him. People always said George W. Bush was a person they felt they could have a beer with (so much for American exceptionalism).

This name-calling is also symptomatic of Trump’s willingness to employ his rhetoric to legitimize—and sometimes encourage—political violence. According to The Newsroom, a UCLA study has determined that “President Donald Trump’s use of violent vocabulary in speeches has increased over time, and is now at a higher level than any other U.S. major party presidential candidate analyzed.”

This is part of the political discourse now. We all remember Trump speaking to his followers in Washington, D.C. on January 6^th, 2021, telling them to “fight like hell” or telling other crowds, “I am your retribution!” or telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” or saying that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” or “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country” (The Atlantic).

This weaponization of rhetoric can—and probably has—inflamed citizens with aggressive personalities. In fact, attacks on ethnic, racial, and religious minorities have been on the rise since Trump has assumed the office of the presidency. According to an article by Brigitte L. Nacos, Robert Y. Shapiro, Yaeli Bloch-Elkon in the academic journal (Perspectives on Terrorism), “We found… Trump’s aggressive, divisive, and dehumanizing language was seconded by his followers and inflicted directly or indirectly psychological and physical harm to Trump’s declared enemies.”

African Americans, Jews, the LGBTQ+ community, among many others, have become the target of Trump’s hate speech. To bolster his populist stance, Trump has used language to create an “us and them” dichotomy. Demonizing the other by spreading stories like “Haitian immigrants are eating our cats and dogs” or that Mexico was sending “rapists and criminals” across the border or referring to Haiti and El Salvador as “shithole countries”. Way back in 2015, he came under fire for mocking Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter. Whether Trump was being hateful or thought he was being funny, but the incident did not seem to affect his favorable poll numbers.

In fact, this sort of derogatory rhetoric seems to have “trickled down” into social media and normalized political discourse. Trolls regularly call democrats “libtards”, “retards”, “dumbasses”, and worse. The use of the “f word” is seeming to become more and more mainstream.

Many seem willing to ignore the fact that this man is a chronic and pathological liar, and that he has grown so confident in his power, he now lies about his own lies. He has told so many mistruths about the war in Iran that no one can figure out exactly what is going on. The Straif of Hormuz is open, now closed; we’ve won, but we’ll be negotiating, we’ve annihilated the Iranian Army, the Strait is still closed. Whatever the reason, this is indeed something “like nobody has ever seen before.”

Donald Trump has sold himself to the American people—twice. And shame on us for it. Perhaps because we are so conditioned by the ubiquitous marketing and advertising culture in this country, we may have lost the ability to think critically or independently. Whether Trump’s use of language—and our implicit acceptance of it—might be a cause of how we think or a symptom of it is a disturbing question. Is Trump’s hatred, bullying, and cruelty a reflection of us, or are we becoming more like him?

Let’s hope we can regain our good American common sense and rid ourselves of this snake-oil salesman before he ruins this country beyond repair.