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ABSTRACT
The absence of Jews from President Donald Trump’s 2017 Holocaust Remembrance Day speech was not the first occasion Trump’s relationship to anti-Semitism was brought up by the popular press, but this paper argues it is one example of many in the emergence of a new mode of presidential speech in the United States that I term “contumelious oratory.” This paper analyzes several examples of the Trump’s administration’s rhetoric including tweets, press conferences, and public speeches. I read the Trump administration’s briefness, strategic absences, metaphors, and hyperbolic statements as salient features of the new, contumelious oratorical mode. It is important to identify how this communication departs from traditional presidential speech of previous United States presidents, classify the techniques used, and grasp clearly the potential damage this type of speech can do. The Trump teams’ contumelious oratory does not placate, it provokes.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 A cursory Google search using the terms “Donald Trump” and “Anti-Semitism” will net thousands of results. For a few examples see: Heilman (Citation2016), Mark (Citation2017), Kestenbaum (Citation2017), A Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism (Citation2019), Stanley (Citation2019), Levin (Citation2019), Man (Citation2019), Kampeas (Citation2019), Beauchamp (Citation2019).