Trump, ‘vermin’ and Nazi rhetoric
Sam Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal land. This is ABC News Daily. With just under a year until a presidential election in the United States, Donald Trump, who has a real chance of winning, according to polling, is shifting his language in a disturbing way. During a rally this month, the former US leader used rhetoric reminiscent of the Nazis, calling his domestic opponents and critics ‘vermin’. Today, a historian of American political language, Dr. Jennifer Mercieca on how Trump uses language to whip up support.
Jennifer, I don’t think any of us, even outside of America, are strangers to Donald Trump and some of the outrageous things that he says, but his rhetoric is changing, isn’t it? Take me to this event he attended on November 11th. Tell me about what he was doing on that day and what he was saying.
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: Sure he was giving a campaign speech. So it was a campaign rally…
Donald Trump: Well, it’s a great place. And I just want to say a very big hello to New Hampshire…
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: And he went on and on for several hours. And during his speech he vowed to root out, using his words, what he called the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country…
Donald Trump: The left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible. They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream. The real threat…
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: He said that the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.
Sam Hawley: And it was that use of the term vermin, of course, that drew comparisons to Hitler and Nazi Germany…
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: That’s right. Hitler called his opposition vermin or rats or parasites. It’s a dehumanising rhetoric which we know leads to genocide. And so for Donald Trump to use that dehumanising rhetoric and at the same time telling his followers that his political opposition are enemies, you know, threats to the nation, it’s incredibly dangerous. You can’t predict who will respond to that kind of message, exactly. But you can say statistically that someone will respond to that message. Donald Trump, like other authoritarians, look to previous successful strong leaders. You know, look at other autocrats to see what they do. They look to model their speechmaking, their strategies in general. He quotes all the time Viktor Orban, he quotes Putin. He looks to them sort of as allies.
Donald Trump: Viktor Orban has done a tremendous job in so many different ways, highly respected, probably like me, a little bit controversial. But that’s okay. That’s okay. You’ve done a good job and you’ve kept your country safe. We’ll be discussing NATO…
Sam Hawley: Yeah. He’s praised Hungary’s far right leader, Viktor Orban, who you mentioned there as a strong man. So he certainly cosies up to dictators.
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: He does. And he has done that since he ran in 2015/2016.
Donald Trump: These are top of the line people at the top of their game. President Xi is a brilliant man. How smart is Kim Jong Un? Top of the line, you know…
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: He uses a rhetorical strategy called anchoring, right, which is to try to connect yourself to something or someone who’s powerful or well-liked. And he always did that with Putin, so much so, I mean, it was actually quite embarrassing for him, but he would say things like, you know, “we were on 60 minutes together and it was like we were thoroughbred horses and stable mates”. And he asked if Putin would be his best friend, just really obsequious.
Donald Trump: There was nobody tougher than me with Russia. And yet I got along with Putin. And that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. He’s got 1700 nuclear missiles and so do we. But look, that’s a good thing.
Sam Hawley: Trump’s team denies any connection to Nazi rhetoric, but it’s clear he’s going much further in his language, Jennifer, so why is he doing that now?
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: Yeah, I think that’s the question to ask. I think it’s very clear that he’s using these fascist rhetorical strategies. The reason he’s doing it, I think, is probably less obvious and perhaps even a little bit surprising. And that’s because he’s losing. He lost the 2020 election. He’s in four court cases. Essentially, he looks like a loser. And Donald Trump hates that. Donald Trump hates looking like a loser more than he hates anything. This is why he refused to accept the results of the 2020 election.
Donald Trump: Today I will lay out just some of the evidence proving that we won this election, and we won it by a landslide. This was not a close election…
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: For him, I think it’s better for him to be seen as a strong man, and for us to be afraid of him, than it is in his mind for us to think he’s a loser.
Sam Hawley: Because you would have thought a lot of voters would be really turned off by this, right?
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: Right, right. We have authoritarian impulses. Some scholars estimate that 40 per cent of the American electorate have innate authoritarian impulses that can be activated, and Donald Trump activates those authoritarian impulses in voters. He tells them that the world is chaotic, that they’re out to get you, that crime is up – crime is down – but he tells them that crime is up, right? The world is a scary place, and they’re not even after me, he says. They’re after you, right? Without me, they will get you. I will be your retribution.
Donald Trump: Never forget our enemies want to stop me because I am the only one who can stop them. They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you. They’re not after me. They’re after you. And I just happen to be standing in their way. It’s an honour to do so…
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: He says all of those things right, positioning himself as this strong authority figure, as this authoritarian leader who will be a strong man, who will fight for them and make the world a safe place for them. Those are all things that would appeal very much to authoritarian voters. And so that’s Donald Trump’s rhetorical strategy. I think we’re going to hear a lot of that in the upcoming year.
Sam Hawley: Of course, you’ve been watching and researching Trump’s language for a long time. You’ve even written a book about it where you label him a rhetorical genius. Just explain that.
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: Sure. Yeah, I know that doesn’t sound good…
Sam Hawley: …Yes, genius is not the term that pops into your mind when you think of Donald Trump…
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: No. Although he would love for us to believe he’s a genius.
Sam Hawley: Yes, of course.
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: No. You know, so it’s a little tongue in cheek, but it’s also actually going back to Hitler. So a rhetorical or literary theorist named Kenneth Burke wrote an analysis in a book review of Mein Kampf when it first came out about Hitler. He described in that review what he called Hitler’s demagogic effectiveness. And so rhetorical genius to me is just kind of an updated way of saying those same words. Demagogic effectiveness doesn’t roll off the tongue, you know, to a modern ear. But the idea is the same, which is to say that it’s unethical, like absolutely dangerous, weaponized communication. And at the same time, Donald Trump is very savvy. He’s very good at figuring out what needs to be said strategically to keep the audience’s attention, to confuse the debate, to reroute our attention away from any concerns that we might have about things that he’s saying towards something else.
Donald Trump: It was a rigged election. It was stolen. And because of that, we have unhappy people in the front row, and we have a lot of other unhappy people because of that. We have inflation and we have high taxes, and we live…
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: In an attention economy where people are trying to keep our attention all day long. They’re trying to get it and keep it. And for some reason, Donald Trump has been able to keep at least this nation’s attention for eight years at this point. And it’s not a good thing. It hasn’t been good for the nation, but there is some rhetorical genius there.
Sam Hawley: Yeah. Right. And you mentioned one method. You know, they’re coming after you. I’m standing in their way. But what are some of the other key characteristics of Donald Trump’s speech?
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: So in in the book that I wrote about the 2016 campaign, I described how he used three rhetorical strategies to connect to his followers things like ad populum. Donald Trump is nothing without followers, and so he’s constantly praising the wisdom of his people. His people are so smart. His people are so loyal. They’re so American. They’re the best people.
Donald Trump: There’s nowhere else I’d rather be than right here on Main Street with thousands of proud, hard working South Carolina patriots who believe in God, family and country. Do we all believe in God, family and country? I think so…
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: And so that has been one of his key strategies. Another one he uses is paralipsis and colloquially that’s “I’m not saying, I’m just saying”. It allows him to ironically say and not say to say two things at once so that you can’t hold him accountable for what he’s saying.
Donald Trump: He said, Chris Christie is a fat pig. You you cannot say that, sir. (crowd laughs) You can- Please, please take that back. No, no, no. He said, Chris Christie is a fat pig. You cannot do that…
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: And then he uses American exceptionalism. And as a strategy, American exceptionalism is used a lot of times by presidents, and usually it’s used to hold the nation accountable to its best version of itself. Presidents will say things like, we were meant to promote and protect democracy around the world, therefore we ought to give aid to Ukraine, for example. Donald Trump uses it as America winning full stop. He says things like, I was born on Flag Day, you know? So that sort of makes me like America itself, right? So he’s the personification or the apotheosis of American exceptionalism.
Donald Trump: We will restore patriotic education to our schools, and we will teach our children to love our country, to honour our history, and always salute our great American flag.
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: All of those things work together to keep Trump and his followers connected, to give them pride of place and status and hierarchy, things like that.
Sam Hawley: Well, Jennifer, we know Donald Trump remains immensely popular because, according to current polling, he’s in the lead, of course, for the Republican field. But he also has a pretty decent chance of beating Joe Biden for the presidency in 2024. But does that necessarily mean that the rhetoric he’s using is cutting through?
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: It’s a great question. I used to think that Donald Trump was really the only one who could use these strategies successfully. But in hindsight, I think that really it’s the right rhetoric for the moment. If you’re a right wing politician, meaning that we have this attention economy, it’s dominated by outrage, by call out culture, by negativity. And so I think that there is an electorate of highly engaged political news, consumers who are scared out of their mind, those voters who are prepped to look for a strong authoritarian leader. However, it’s incredibly anti-democratic, and I don’t think there are actually enough voters in that media audience to actually carry the election.
Sam Hawley: If he was re-elected… And I can hear you saying that you don’t think he will be, but the polls are showing he’s in with a shot here. If he’s re-elected on the back of that sort of language, what are the wider consequences of a victory like that?
Dr. Jennifer Mercieca: Yeah, it’s going to be really bad. Yeah. And I say that in a nervous, extremely nervous way. It’s going to be very bad if he is re-elected. I don’t doubt that they will do a better job of all of the sort of authoritarian types of things that they tried to do in the last time he was in office. They’re already doing vetting of loyalists and things like that to put into positions. You know, it’s going to be a very different United States if Donald Trump becomes president, I think, for the worse.
Sam Hawley: Dr. Jennifer Mercieca is a historian of American political rhetoric and a professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Texas A&M University. This episode was produced by Bridget Fitzgerald, Nell Whitehead, Sam Dunn and Anna John, who also did the mix. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I’m Sam Hawley. ABC News Daily will be back again tomorrow. Thanks for listening.
