The politics of pronouns: how Trump framed the ingroup in the 2016 presidential election

ABSTRACT

Outgroup hostility and racialized language were the most important predictors of support for Trump in the 2016 election season. Some scholarship argues that outgroup hostility outweighs the importance of white ingroup attitudes. Using a mix-methods content analysis of Trump’s campaign speeches, this paper agrees that outgroup hostility was the primary rhetorical device used by Trump in his speeches in both the primary and general elections. This work goes further and examines how Trump’s rhetoric framed and constructed the ingroup using outgroup rhetoric to connect the two. We argue that immigration and refugees, specifically, were used by Trump as part of the identity story he told about the ingroup and what it means to be an ingroup member. Our contribution rests on the correlation between hostile outgroup rhetoric—especially towards immigrants and refugees—to the framing and defining of the ingroup (through first-person plural pronouns). Further, we connect this rhetorical device to questions about what is at stake for the ingroup (i.e., power). We highlight a rhetorical mechanism that helps explain how hostile outgroup rhetoric is linked to ingroup framing, a contribution that adds to the literature on this topic.

KEYWORDS:

• Trump
• 2016 election
• campaign rhetoric
• Social Identity Theory
• content analysis
• NVivo

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The American Presidency Project is a non-profit, non-partisan online source of presidential documents. The APP is hosted at the University of California, Santa Barbara is a collaboration between John T. Woolley (UCSB) and Gerhard Peters (Citrus College) since 1999.

2 At the time of data collection, we visited the American Presidency Project and focused solely on campaign speeches of the 2016 presidential cycle. In the search categories, we selected Donald J. Trump and for document category, we selected “campaign documents.” This resulted in 76 items, from these we deleted any interviews and any documents related to winning primaries.

3 https://www.qsrinternational.com

4 Top words were created by holding constant (resetting) what NVivo calls “stop words.” I excluded from the stop words all version of “I”, as well as all version of “we” (e.g., we’re we’ve we’d) and “our” and “ours.”

5 Throughout the speeches, there are other terms used in relation to immigration and/or immigrants that I did not include here, such as crime, jobs, security, worker, manufacturing, drugs, and cartels.

6 Trump’s supporters were predominately white (Huang et al. 2016).