Trump more than ever mixes anger, fear and insults to stir supporters, say researchers

WASHINGTON — Before a capacity crowd at Madison Square Garden late last month, former President Donald Trump bellowed that the United States is “occupied” by illegal immigrants and that he will “rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered.”

Day one, if he’s elected, will be the “largest deportation program in American history.”

On stage in Arizona Thursday night with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Trump proposed former U.S. House member Liz Cheney should face guns of war. Cheney, a Republican who’s campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris and who helped lead the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 riot, should have “nine barrels shooting at her” because she is a “war hawk,” Trump said.

“Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face,” Trump said.

These types of comments are exactly why political scientists and historians are sounding the alarm on the former president’s language. The experts have found that Trump, who is neck-and-neck with Harris for a second term in the Oval Office, is increasingly divisive and threatening. They warn Trump’s speeches and social media posts, laden with insults, have become darker and more violent since his political career began in 2015, and urge more examination of their consequences in the real world.

Trump’s speeches have also become longer over the years and more meandering and random — an approach he describes as “the weave.” An analysis by the New York Times found Trump’s speeches last on average 82 minutes, up from 45 minutes in 2016.

Robert C. Rowland, who studies political rhetoric at the University of Kansas, summed up Trump’s recent speeches, social media posts and interviews as essentially delivering “fear, anger, grievance, braggadocio.”

“‘Things are terrible here.’ ‘We won’t have a country left.’ ‘We’ll have a nuclear war.’ He said things like that at the very end of the 2020 campaign, but this is different than most of his time in politics, and with that, even stronger claims about his greatness — all untethered from any discussion of how any of (his proposals) would actually happen,” said Rowland, author of the 2021 book “The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy.”

When contacted for comment about the former president’s evolving language, Trump’s campaign provided a statement from a Republican National Committee representative who criticized the media for not giving “the same attention to the brutal rape and murder of victims like Rachel Morin, Laken Riley, and Jocelyn Nugary.”

The correct spelling is Nungaray.

The women, whose deaths Trump has spotlighted in his campaign, were respectively attacked and killed in 2023 in Maryland by a man from El Salvador, in 2024 in Georgia by a man from Venezuela, and in 2024 in Texas by two men from Venezuela. Nungaray’s mother has appeared with Trump on the campaign trail.

The RNC’s Anna Kelly said in an emailed statement, in which she provided links, that “President Trump says the truth: the Harris-Biden administration has allowed over 100 terror suspects who crossed the border into the country, nearly 16,000 illegal immigrants have been apprehended trying to cross the border, and over 5,000 unvetted illegal immigrants are being released into the U.S. everyday. Americans, including Hispanic Americans, overwhelmingly support President Trump’s plan to secure our country, and they are ready to Make America Safe Again on November 5.”

While Trump has focused on high-profile violent crimes perpetrated by immigrants who lack legal status, numerous analyses have shown that immigrants do not commit crimes at a rate higher than native-born Americans.

Graphic descriptions of killings

Increasingly, Trump describes gruesome scenes of rape and murder to his campaign rally audiences, warning them that “Kamala has imported criminal migrants from prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions from all around the world.”

Before his arena crowd in Manhattan last month, the former president recounted the details of the September 2016 murders by MS-13 gang members of two teenage girls on Long Island. “They didn’t shoot them. They knifed them and they cut them into little pieces because it was so painful,” he said.

University of California Los Angeles researchers Nikita Savin and Daniel Treisman analyzed 99 of Trump’s speeches from April 2015 to June 2024 and found an upward trend in the frequency of violent vocabulary. They published their results in a working paper in July.

“What’s significant is this very clear over time upward trend since 2015,” Treisman told States Newsroom in an interview in early October.

Savin and Treisman also inspected 127 speeches delivered by major party candidates in the 20 months prior to each U.S. presidential election since 2008. Trump’s and the others’ speeches were chosen by the same criteria: the last major public speech of each month.

The pair have continued to monitor Trump’s language as part of their working paper.

“I just analyzed the last speech in September in Wisconsin, and that speech contained a higher frequency, or as high a frequency, of violent words as in any of his previous speeches that we’ve looked at,” Treisman said.

‘They’

Using a specialized dictionary of 142 words related to violence, the pair studied Trump’s language for words like “crime,” “war,” “prosecute,” “prison,” “missile,” “death,” “massacre” and “blood.” They also scrutinized for markers of economic and populist content.

Since 2020, Trump’s negative language about “elites” has trended upward, but “the thing on which he’s most distinctive is his use of the pronoun ‘they,’ — and that he’s very high on that compared to other politicians,” Treisman said.

When the research duo expanded the parameters of comparison to various U.S. and world leaders, past and present, they found Trump’s frequency of violent language “exceeds that of any other politician in a democracy that we studied and falls just a little below the level in a selection of Fidel Castro’s May Day speeches.”

Savin and Treisman acknowledge the limitations of their study in that it does not explore why Trump’s speech has changed, or the specific consequences of it. Additionally, a dictionary-based text analysis only measures the frequency of words, “without delving deeper into meanings and contexts,” they wrote.

“It doesn’t pick up violent thoughts expressed with nonviolent words. So for instance, his January 6 speech in 2021 doesn’t rate particularly high on our violence measures because he didn’t use a lot of words like ‘kill,’ ‘death,’ ‘blood’ and so on. He said, ‘Let’s go and walk down to the Capitol,’” Treisman said.

The authors wrote that, “Given the troubling evolution of his vocabulary, more research along these lines is clearly warranted.”

States Newsroom fed 238 of Trump’s social media posts across X and Truth Social into two AI word cloud generators. The posts, from randomly chosen days in August through October, comprised 8,664 words, but boiled down to roughly 1,500 unique words when grouped by repetition.

Trump’s top five words were, unsurprisingly, “Kamala,” “Harris,” “great, “now” and “Trump.”

But making it into the top 75 most used words out of 1,500 were “comrade” in 15th place, “fake” at 23rd on the list, “war” as the 54th most used, “radical” at 61st on the list, and “lyin’” at 72. 

‘The enemy from within’

Trump told his supporters in New York City Sunday they are fighting against a “radical left machine” who he said — not for the first time — is the “enemy from within.”

In an Oct. 14 interview, Trump told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that “the enemy from within” are a “bigger problem” than migrants who are “totally destroying our country.”

“We have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics … and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or if really necessary, by the military,” he responded when Bartiromo asked if he anticipated trouble on Election Day.

On Oct. 12, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform an ad celebrating Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film “Full Metal Jacket,” juxtaposing it with scenes of drag performers and a clip of Admiral Rachel Levine, a physician and, as head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, the first openly transgender federal official. The message he posted with the video: “WE WILL NOT HAVE A WOKE MILITARY!”

Trump appears to disagree with any criticism that his campaign uses negative language or themes. On Wednesday, he wrote on Truth Social: “While I am running a campaign of positive solutions to save America, Kamala Harris is running a campaign of hate.”

Recently, his campaign’s personalized fundraising text messages to supporters declare Trump’s “love” for them.

‘Don’t let them eat us’

In the days following the Sept. 10 debate between Trump and Harris, the former president posted on his Truth Social platform a series of AI-generated images depicting cats begging voters to support Trump. “Don’t let them eat us. Vote for Trump,” read one sign held by a litter of orange tabby kittens.

The string of posts followed Trump’s false claim during the debate that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating pet cats and dogs. The rumor began to circulate among Trump supporters ahead of his matchup with Harris, and Trump continued to push the lie.

The small city in Ohio was the target of bomb threats for days afterward, to the point that the state’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine dispatched state troopers to 18 local school buildings.

Rowland, who spoke to States Newsroom in both September and October, pondered whether Trump’s all-in attitude on the cats-and-dogs lie would hurt the former president’s reelection prospects.

“He’s picked this meme that is just so absurd and obviously false,” Rowland said Sept. 13.

Just over a month later, Rowland told States Newsroom, “It hasn’t moved anything. If anything, it’s gone the other direction.” Polling has shown Trump and Harris nearly tied for several weeks.

Rowland said overall, Trump’s recent “lack of coherence and the negative emotions are the things that I think are most striking.” 

“He never previously talked about policy in detail, but now there’s almost no discussion of policy at all. Insults have replaced it, in a way,” Rowland said.

“I juxtapose this against the most effective leaders of both parties, people like Ronald Reagan — they really made a case. Now, one could agree or disagree with it. And Barack Obama, when he was running he certainly laid out an agenda, and that’s not what I see at all (in Trump),” Rowland said. “I’ve never seen anything like it in American politics.”

This story was originally published by News From The States