Trump the Lincoln Memorial: "It's Not You, It's Me"

One aspect of Trump's rhetoric that emerged from the parody of Pericles in the previous post is that one particular tool speakers have at there disposal is humility.  Pericles uses it to great effect, framing his speech in terms of his own inability to do justice to those being honored.  An even more famous example is Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" in which he claims that future generations will "little note nor long remember" what he said, but will never forget those who are honored.

Humility, humbleness, self-deprecation--all are aspects of an important public speaking quality a careful orator can deploy.   At least if that orator is not named "Donald Trump."

Trump's brand seems largely based on an unwillingness and/or inability to be anything other than boastful.  Imagining Trump saying with any sincerity that he is less than great is nearly impossible.

One specific example of this came in his speech yesterday at the Lincoln memorial.  Interestingly, he tries to frame the speech by saying it's more about "you" (the audience) than it is about him.  But an examination of the actual text--and hence the rhetorical landscape constructed by the speech--shows a continual fixation on Trump placing himself front and center.

This can actually be objectively measured.  The program Diction is a content analysis tool that quantifies thematic aspects of public discourse by examining the types and categories of words used.  You can learn more about the way it does this here.

For fun, I compared Trump's address at the Lincoln Memorial on January 19 to another famous speech given at the same location: Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

Running these two texts through Diction is an interesting exercise that points to a number of threads that could be pulled on, but let's focus on just one: self-reference.

This is a variable Diction uses to calculate how focused on speaker is on himself/herself--the extent to which their vision is limited to themselves.  It does this by indexing the number of times the speaker uses self-referencing words ("I", "me", etc.).

You might expect that a speech known as the "I have a dream . . ." speech would score highly on this scale, if for no other reason than the repeated "I" in the conclusion.  But it doesn't.  In fact, King's speech is slightly less self-referential than other comparable speeches.

Trump's speech, on the other hand, scores well above the norm, with an unusually high index of self-reference.

One reason for this is that, as the creators of Diction understand, one can still create a speech that is inherently focused on oneself even if, on the surface, the speaker is denying this.  "You won't believe how great I'm going to be about making this about you rather than me" (to use a laughably extreme example) is still placing the speaker front and center.

In other words, Trump creates a rhetorical worldview in his speech that revolves around himself even as he claims to be doing the opposite.

If noticed, this can be an embarrassing and almost ludicrous aspect of public discourse.  If not noticed, it can become a seductively powerful, even dangerous tool, one that demagogues tend to share: an ability to get an audience to think it's all about them when it's really all about him.