E40: Presidential rhetoric, unmasked (w/ Dr. Cameron Mozafari)

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The president and his administration use rhetoric every day in speeches, press conferences, and written texts like executive orders and proclamations, but the material effects of this discourse can sometimes be difficult to observe. Today, however, the United States is the epicenter both for the COVID-19 pandemic and an unprecedented wave of civil resistance against local police departments and federal enforcement actions authorized by the president. So, how is the current administration's rhetoric implicated in the pandemic, policing, and protest?

To help us navigate these questions, our guest today is Dr. Cameron Mozafari, who uses methods from corpus linguistics to analyze emotional appeals and other rhetorical patterns in presidential speeches. First, Cameron walks us through his recent Trump-COVID 19 Corpus project, in which he has collected and organized all of the Trump Administration's public statements about the Coronavirus crisis. Based on initial analyses of this data, we discuss Trump's treatment of the virus as a war (as opposed to more typical framings of pandemics as water or natural disasters); the differences in register and epistemic certainty between the language employed by Trump and that of Drs. Fauci and Birx; as well as how (in)frequently Trump and Pence use the words "mask" and "social distancing" vs. words related to war.

Next, we analyze a related instance of problematic presidential rhetoric: the recent “Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence." We talk through how the order constructs a dichotomy between US national identity & "property" vs. Marxism / Anarchism & "crime" / "violence." This dissociation, we argue, is an attempt to shore up the administration's and local police departments' legitimacy at a time of unpopularity and unrest. It also serves to mask the state violence that has incited recent popular unrest and been wielded in response to it. Finally, Cameron tells us about a violent incident earlier this summer at a protest in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we consider how clashes like this one are revelatory of the material effects of presidential rhetoric.

Works referenced in this episode

Blaire, C. (1999). Contemporary U.S. memorial sites as exemplars of rhetoric's materiality. In J. Selzer & S. Crowley (Eds.), Rhetorical bodies (pp. 16-57). Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P.

Fairclough, N. (2003). Intertextuality and assumptions. Analysing discourse:Textual analysis for social research (pp. 39-62). New York, NY: Routledge.

Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The way we think. New York: Perseus Book Group.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P.

Perelman, C., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The new rhetoric: A treatise on argumentation. (J. Wilkinson & P. Weaver, Trans.). London, UK: U of Notre Dame P.

Roberts-Miller, P. (2019). Rhetoric and Demagoguery. SIU Press.

Skinnell, R. & Murphy, J. (2019). Rhetoric’s Demagogue | Demagoguery’s Rhetoric: An Introduction. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 49:3, 225-232.

Stefanowitsch, A. (2007). Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy. In A. Stefanowitsch & S. Th. Gries (Eds.), Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy (pp. 1-16). Boston, MA: de Gruyter.

Sweetser, E. (2006). Negative spaces: Levels of negation and kinds of spaces. In S. Bonnefille & S. Salbayre (Eds.), Proceedings of the conference "Negation: Form, figure of speech, conceptualization" (pp. 313-332). Tours, France: Publications universitaires François Rabelais.

Thibodeau, P., & Boroditsky, L. (2011, February). Metaphors we think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning. PLOS One, 6(2), 1-11.

Links & resources related to Albuquerque, NM protests

News coverage of the Albuquerque statue protest shooting perpetrated by Steven Baca

Donation page for Fight For Our Lives (FFOL), an Albuquerque-based Mutual Aid organization

National list of local bail funds and other related resources