How Trump uses verbs to obscure reality —and dodge responsibility

President Donald Trump is known for his singular way of speaking. It tends to be, to quote Shakespeare, “full of sound and fury.” But according to a language expert writing for the New York Times, the Bard’s next line applies too, for when Trump speaks, much of what he says is “signifying nothing.”

Having spent two terms analyzing Trump’s speech patterns, linguist Sarah L. Kaufman identified a number of patterns.On one hand, Trump tends to speak in a manner that evades responsibility or obscures reality. As an example of this, Kaufman points to when he declared “We’ve won” at a rally in mid-March, even though everyone was well aware that the war was slogging on and delivering terrible consequences. “Let me tell you,” Trump insisted, “we’ve won.”

“Trump’s use of the past participle of ‘win’ expresses a completed action,” writes Kaufman. “’Win’ can’t mean victory when ongoing fighting continues to throw the world economy into chaos. This instance is one of many in which Mr. Trump uses crisp, straightforward verbs to obfuscate.”

Or take his recent statement, “I do believe I will be having the honor of taking Cuba.”

Again, says Kaufman, we see that lack of clarity: “He repeats ‘take’ — an aggressive word — while keeping its meaning hidden. Is he considering capturing the island’s president, as he did with Venezuela; attacking the infrastructure, as in Iran, or simply dragging out the economic torture to a brutal end?”

At the same time, Kaufman explains, he uses language to “proclaim a new form of leadership.”

“Forceful action verbs and verb phrases” like “tell, hit, crush, destroy, knock out, kill, obliterate” and others lend “drama and emotion” to Trump’s speeches, especially when he’s suggesting violence. According to Kaufman, there is a point to such language beyond that violence. While it could be dismissed as “mad ravings,” “reveling publicly over killing, and claiming that verb to describe one’s personal activity, undermines norms of democratic leadership.”

Trump also likes repetition, “restating simple verbs without further explanation … he uses these words to create maximal stakes and paint a vivid, if misleading, picture.”

As an example of this, she pointed to Trump’s State of the Union in January, where he attempted to pin blame for the affordability crisis on the Democrats, claiming, “You caused that problem. You caused that problem. They knew their statements were a lie. They knew it. They knew their statements were a dirty, rotten lie. Their policies created the high prices.”

Writes Kaufman, “He persisted with ‘cause,’ ‘know’ and ‘create,’ repeating the verbs in a chant.” He was leveraging “bullying aggression and hyperbole” to make “his message of blame stick in the minds of listeners… Yet the president did not elaborate on how his targets caused the problem; he offered no details to back up his accusations. The verbs were a dead end.”

She says that while Trump is effective at conjuring emotions with his speech, when it comes to communicating policy, he “reverts to a limited roster of reliable, often coarse verbs that he wields with bravado and uses to say very little.”

Or to once again borrow from Shakespeare, “It is a tale told by an idiot.”

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