Pete Buttigieg Called for Uplifting Politics. Donald Trump Disagreed.

Dirty political talk is as old as politics itself. On the same day that Pete Buttigieg asked American voters to choose “a better politics,” former President Donald Trump boasted that he thrives on the political dark side.


Pete Buttigieg Asked the United States to Choose Dignity

Pete Buttigieg

During his August 21, 2024 Democratic National Convention speech, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg asked the United States of America to upgrade its political talk. He said, “I just don’t believe that America today is in the market for darkness.” Instead, it is time, he told us, to take politics seriously. Positive politics, he explained, invite us to make positive national choices:

“Yes, politics at its worst can be ugly, crushing, demeaning, but it doesn’t have to be. At its best, politics can be empowering, uplifting. It can even be a kind of soul craft.”

Buttigieg asked voters to decide what tone they want their political leaders to use. Now, in my experience, most people say that they prefer dignified political discussion. Nevertheless, their values and actions don’t seem to connect; in real life, the nastiest candidates often get more votes. Buttigieg begged us to take a stand: darkness or light? He emphasized that choice: 

“So, this November, we get to choose. We get to choose our president. We get to choose our policies, but most of all, we will choose a better politics. A politics that calls us to our better selves and offers us a better every day.”

Buttigieg asked his audience to think about how politics can improve our lives. He reminded us that we do not vote in November to choose the winner of a reality show contest. Instead, we are choosing what kind of lives we choose to live:

“I don’t presume to know what it’s like in your kitchen, but I know, as sure as I am standing here, that everything in it, the bills you pay at that table, the shape of the family that sits there, the fears and the dreams that you talk about late into the night there, all of it compels us to demand more from our politics than a rerun of some TV wrestling death match.”

The October 15, 2019 Democratic Primary Debate: Superficiality Ruled the Stage

Buttigieg’s message: we should choose positive politics because we want to live better lives.

Alas, not everyone agrees.

Donald Trump Boasted about the Dark Side

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump scorned uplifting politics at a North Carolina campaign rally that same day. Trump announced that he would henceforth call the Democratic nominee “Comrade Kamala.” In fact, to the crowd’s cheers, Trump loudly reviewed his name-calling skill:

“[Kamala Harris] ruined San Francisco, she ruined California. And if she gets in, our country doesn’t have a chance. This calamity is on Comrade Kamala Harris’s shoulders. I think her name will be Comrade because I think that’s the most accurate name. I’ve been looking for a name. People are saying, “Sir, don’t do it.” You know all my names, they’ve all worked. They’ve all been very successful, and I really didn’t find one with her. “Sir, she’s a woman.” I said, “So is Hillary Clinton, I called her Crooked Hillary.” Nobody complained about that, right? Right? Mr. Governor, nobody complained about that. No, I called her Crooked Hillary. I called people names. I call Crazy Nancy Pelosi crazy because she is, she’s nuts.” [italics added]

“I called people names,” Trump literally boasted. The nickname “Comrade Kamala” joined the ongoing Republican movement to brand her as, not just a liberal, but a literal communist. Trump also talked about how astute he was to call former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi “Crazy Nancy.” He repeated the nickname “Crooked Hillary” as if name-calling were a major life accomplishment. He didn’t mention “Lying, Lying Ted [Cruz]?” or “Little Marco [Rubio]” in this speech, but he could have. Are we voting for a president – or a playground bully? 

Indeed, Trump griped that his advisors told him to stop calling people names. To his rally crowd’s delight, he said that he was going to fire the advisors. He sneered:

“‘Please, sir, don’t get personal, talk about policy.’ Let me ask you about that. We’re going to do a free poll. Here are the two questions: should I get personal, should I not get personal? Ready? Should I get personal? Should I not get personal? I don’t know, my advisors are fired. No. We’d rather keep it on policy, but sometimes it’s hard when you’re attacked from all ends.”

Needless to say, Trump’s cheering crowd did not make the positive choice.

Trump’s only defense was that his crude tactics succeeded: if we imagine that he was taking up Buttigieg’s challenge, Trump asked the voters – in so many words – to vote for crudeness. Trump didn’t just go to the dark side; he bragged about it: “You know all my names, they’ve all worked.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the 2024 Democratic National Convention

Trump's "Jekyll and Hyde" Convention Speech Promised Fierce Leadership

A Contrast: Two Political Styles?

Now, Buttigieg aside, I’m not going to pretend that Democrats are always nice. Still, in the realm of dirty politics, the American people do seem to face a choice. Buttigieg asked the voters to choose positive politics, while Trump crows about his name-calling skill.

Or, in a larger sense, Buttigieg is calling on everyone to run a more civilized campaign, to discuss issues and character rather than to trade mindless insults. Let us not forget that Trump was right, in a sense: name-calling helped him win against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Politics has never been a nice game. Buttigieg does, however, make a point – does he not? Do we really want to elect whichever candidate is most skilled at calling people names? Is the White House to be the adult home of third-grade bullies? Will America’s adversaries back down if the President of the United States calls their leaders crude names?

Of course, Democrats do routinely criticize Donald Trump. Is there a difference? I suggest that there often is.

First, although Democrats can sink low, they rarely create juvenile nicknames for the Republican candidate. Although Trump invents infantile insults like “Comrade Kamala” or “Low-IQ Maxine Waters,” Democrats generally just call him “Donald Trump” or “Trump.” Lately, the Democrats sometimes call Trump “weird,” which seems like a step in the wrong direction.

Second, the Democrats’ attacks against Trump more often arise from his actions and political views, rarely focusing on his personal habits. For example, in this speech, Buttigieg called Trump a “convicted criminal,” which is, at least, factual.

Given the high stakes, combined with the United States’ week defamation laws, it may be too much to expect our politicians to engage in civilized discourse. Sadly, Trump said it best – he calls people names because it wins votes. Surely, however, we voters can heed Buttigieg’s plea and expect politicians to do a little better. Surely, we voters can find it within ourselves to reject a candidate who makes name-calling his proudest public speaking technique. 

by William D. Harpine

A word of thanks. My gratitude to rev.com, a commercial transcript service, for producing verbatim transcripts of these speeches. These are more valuable than the speakers' prepared texts, which do not always reflect what the speaker actually says.

Copyright © 2024 by William D. Harpine

Image of Pete Buttigieg: Department of Transportation photo, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Image of Donald Trump: official White House photo, public domain

Trump Against the "Radical Leftists"

Donald Trump

“We’re going to evict crazy Kamala. Do you know, ever hear of Kamala? Radical left. Radical left.”

So said Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in his August 12, 2024 political rally in Montana. Trump exploited the simple rhetorical trope of repetition. One of a demagogue’s most powerful tools, simple repetition can dominate even the most well-intentioned political audience. Instead, in this case, eschewing argument, Trump used what I have previously called the jackhammer method of persuasion. 

Over and over, Trump called Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris a member of the “radical left.” Now, as a rhetorical tactic, repetition has one big advantage: the speaker experiences no need to explain anything, prove anything, or justify anything. As a rhetorical tactic, repetition detours around any reasoned ideas. If we hear something many times, we may grow to believe it: as hammer-like repetition pounds unproved and sometimes ridiculous ideas into our brains. 

Earlier Post: Conservatives, Public Health, and the Jackhammer Method of Persuasion

The Psychological Theory of Repetition

A psychological theory called the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion posits that we adopt attitudes in one of two different ways. We can follow the Central Route, which means that we listen carefully, gather information, and analyze the pros and cons. That requires time and effort; the listener must gather and analyze information with confidence. It’s a lot of work. It often requires a significant knowledge base. In contrast, the Peripheral Route bypasses reasoned thought. An audience member who relies on the Peripheral Route relies on superficial cues: whether the source is likeable or attractive, the speaker’s delivery style, belief in the speaker’s expertise, and, of course, simple repetition. The Peripheral Route makes it simpler to evaluate an argument. In truth, that often makes sense, especially for trivial decisions. 

Nevertheless, I cannot imagine any decision more important than voting for the President of the United States. Does any other action cry out more loudly for Central Route persuasion?


Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, and the “Radical Left”

Over and over, Trump said that Harris and other Democrats were radicals, leftists, or socialists. Only briefly and hyperbolically did Trump explain why he thought Harris was a radical leftist. 

For example, after calling Harris “Radical left. Radical left,” Trump sarcastically explained why Harris was “radical:”

“Well, she has a couple of things that a lot of people from Montana would like. She wants to take away your guns. You like that, right? All right, how about this? She wants to defund the police. Are you okay with that? She wants to allow millions of people to pour into our border through an invasion using an invasion process. I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s for you. It’s not for me either. It’s not for most people in this country. We’re going to evict crazy Kamala and we’re going to, we’re get Joe Biden out of the White House.”

Those talking points are a bit dubious. Although Harris has sometimes opposed increased police funding, there is no record of her wanting to defund the police. PolitiFact previously rated Trump’s claimed that Harris wants to defund the police as “Mostly False.”

Earlier Post: Trump's Speech of January 6, 2021: A "Firehose of Falsehood"


Furthermore, Harris at one time advocated buying back (not seizing) so-called assault weapons, but she has, according to PolitiFact, otherwise never advocated taking away people’s guns. Also, Harris supported a bipartisan border control bill, which is not consistent with Trump’s claim that she supports an invasion process. 

So, the listener confronts two links: first, were Trump’s accusations accurate? Well, no, at best, Trump exaggerated Harris’ positions. Second, were her policies “radical left?” That also deserves careful – Central Route – examination. Opinion surveys have shown that half or more of Americans support laws that would ban assault weapons, which, to my thinking, leads me to question whether that policy would be “radical left.” Still, Peripheral Route persuasion obviously invites hyperbole, as does much political talk.


Repetition Was Relentless

No Trump did not appeal to Central Route reasoning: he used a rhetorical jackhammer. Trump repeatedly insisted that his opponents are “radical left.” Referring to Montana’s Democratic Party Senator Jon Tester, Trump said: 

“He’s a radical left lunatic, just like Kamala and we got to elect him." 

(When Trump carelessly said “him,” I must think that he intended to refer, not to Tester, but to Tester’s more conservative opponent.)

After complaining about the 2020 election, Trump continued to rant about radicals:

“I handed Kamala and Crooked Joe a surging economy with no inflation. We had no inflation. We had nothing. We had the greatest economy in the history of the world. True. Their radical socialist lunacy turned it into a failing economy with the worst inflation in probably 70 years.”

(If we were debating by the Central Route, we might remember that in December 2020, Trump’s last full month in office, unemployment hit an astonishing 6.7%. If, however, the horror of “radical socialist lunacy” terrifies us, we can happily stay on the Peripheral Route and ignore the numbers. See the point? An audience that processed information through the Central Route would care about the numbers!)  

Trump continued to complain about radicals as he looked forward to the next election:

“On election day, we’re going to tell this radical left country buster, she’s a country buster, that we’ve had enough.” 

Trump being Trump, he succumbed to the overwhelming need to whine about the 2020 election – again, blaming it on the “radical left:”

“The radical-left Democrats rigged the presidential election in 2020. We will not let them rig the presidential election in 2024.”

Well, in one context or another, Trump made his point: Democrats are not just liberals, they are, he asserted, radicals. Dangerous. Frightening.

Obviously enough, Trump’s rhetorical tactic pleased this crowd precisely because they already believed every word of it. Liberals terrified them. Montana is a gun culture state. Talk radio and Fox News had already convinced them that Democrats are liberal, radical, dangerous gun-grabbers. Did Trump need to prove any of what he said? As far as his audience felt – no! Elections are determined by encouraging voter turnout, not by changing people’s minds, and enthusiastic Peripheral Route persuasion was all that Trump needed. 

Do speeches like Trump’s give us a sound basis to participate in elections using the criteria of good citizenship that we all should have learned in school? I shudder to think.

Nothing New Under the Sun

As the prophet said, there is nothing new under the sun. Name-calling, hyperbole, wild accusations – well, often enough, that’s how American politics works. Notoriously, many voters in the United States of America go through their political lives oblivious to the most basic issues. Trump’s crowd, who showed up precisely to hear the kind of ramble-browsing that Trump so enthusiastically offered, are, like too many of us, happy to live in a world of talking points and imaginary dangers. Trump presented a choice between two groups: the “Radical Left” or Trump and his friends. A stark, binary choice. Basic identity politics. Us or them. Right or wrong. Good versus evil. The underlying value assumptions were never proven, but merely assumed.

Earlier Post: Negative Campaigns Go Way Back!

Never, ever should political pundits underestimate Donald Trump’s powerful political skills. Trump’s platitudes invited his audience to accept, or reject, the “radical left.” His audience wanted nothing to do with the left. Trump continues to do well in opinion polls. With millions of voters convinced that liberals threaten their way of life, Trump powerfully tracked his listeners’ fear and dismay. Did he offer them much in the way of policy? No, but policy was never his purpose. Instead, he filled the audience with outrage that the “radical left” would take away everything they hold dear.

by William D. Harpine

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P.S. Special thanks to rev.com, a commercial transcript service, for preparing a full transcript of this speech. They are doing better than the mainstream media! 

Research Note: Readers who want to learn more about Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo’s Elaboration Likelihood Model are encouraged to look at their excellent book, Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change, which was published as part of the Springer Series in Social Psychology. Most research libraries will have a copy.

Copyright © 2024 by William D. Harpine

Image: Official White House photo

Trump Blames Immigrants for America's Problems. Well, What Else Would He Say?

Hatred of others has long been conservative rhetoric’s essence. It worked for Hitler. It worked for George Wallace. It’s working for Donald Trump.

At yesterday’s political rally speech in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump, while rambling from one topic to the next, returned over and over to immigration. It was immigrants, he said, who cause America’s problems. It was the Democratic Party’s love of immigrants, he said, that disqualifies them for public office. Us versus them. A simple formula: immigrants are bad, while Americans are good.

Conservative speakers have long blamed their own problems and mistakes on someone else. Yes, the United States has crime. In real life, as we will see later, immigrants do not cause our crime problem. Unfortunately, if native-born Americans take responsibility for our society’s own failings, they might want to make changes. Conservatives don’t want to change. That’s what makes them conservative. That, briefly, is why Donald Trump wants to blame immigrants for the United States’ problems. His rally audience seemed happy to accept that explanation, which appealed to their bigotry. Trump’s explanation absolved his audience from accepting responsibility for their own failings. It’s a simple rhetorical trick. Let’s look at how Trump did it.


Trump Said That Immigrants Cause Crime

Indeed, Trump rambled back and forth about immigration and crime throughout his speech. Let’s start by unpacking this passage:

“The radical Democrat Congresses turned our country into one giant sanctuary for serious criminal aliens. We protect all of the criminals; we don’t protect our own people. In fact, they raid our people. And the Republican Party. We believe our country should be a sanctuary for law abiding citizens who love America. If we’re going to make America great again, our first [task] is to make America safe again. We have to have a safe country.”

Now, for an American leader to attack immigrants creates a paradox. The United States is mostly a nation of immigrants. My maternal grandparents were Eastern European immigrants. As Trump commented, many Democrats want to offer sanctuary to refugees. In Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric, however, immigrants are just criminals: “one giant sanctuary for serious criminal aliens.”

In fact, consistent with standard right-wing themes, Trump argued that immigrants—criminals, in his view—receive better treatment then citizens: as he said, “We protect all of the criminals, we don’t protect our own people.” That did not finish Trump’s attack on immigrants, as he quickly turned the tables on the concept of sanctuary cities: remember that he said that: “We believe our country should be a sanctuary for law abiding citizens who love America”—not a sanctuary for others.


Trump Said That American Values Are Anti-Immigrant

As he continued, Donald Trump made it a basic American value to despise immigrants. Let us look at that next: 

“They want to stop us from completing our mission to bring back American values. Secure America’s borders, millions and millions of people are pouring into our country. Nobody has any idea where they’re from. Last month, 129 countries were represented. They’re emptying their prisons into the United States of America.” [italics added]

Well, Trump obviously contradicted himself. If “nobody has any idea where they’re from,” how could we possibly know that they represent 129 countries? The moral issue, however, is more important. That is, immigrants, in Trump’s rhetoric, were not refugees coming for a better life, no, they were criminals who foreign countries maliciously sent us from their prisons. Trump’s speech contrasted the supposedly virtuous American citizens against the criminal immigrants. once you accept Trump’s logic, the way to solve our problems is to keep immigrants away so native-born Americans can live their lives free of foreign contamination. So much for welcoming the “huddled masses.”


Do Immigrants Really Cause Our Crime Problem? No.

Trump’s examples misled his gullible audience, for the numbers clearly show that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at, statistically, a far lower rate than native-born Americans. A major study published in the prestigious Annals of Epidemiology concluded that:

“Results from the present study—conducted with a well characterized and highly-regarded national survey—provide clear and compelling evidence that immigrants are involved in violent and nonviolent criminal behaviors at substantially lower rates than US-born Americans.”

For example, in my home state of Texas, native-born Americans are arrested for murder at twice the rate of undocumented immigrants. Native-born Americans are 2-1/2 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes. Let us keep in mind that the Texas border (which is not far from my home) is the poster for anti-immigrant fearmongering.

More broadly, the United States, like every nation, generates plenty of problems. Crime, income inequality, poverty, and public health all require careful solutions. However, if you want to pretend that we are not responsible for our problems, you need to blame someone else. Immigrants, who are often poor and vulnerable, make easy targets. That was Trump’s trick. The fault, as Shakespeare might have said, lies not in our stars (or our immigrants), but in ourselves.

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Earlier Trump Posts:

Donald Trump Didn't Make His Case for the Emergency Border Wall Declaration Because He Didn't Document His Facts

Divisive Rhetoric Continued in the 2018 US Midterms: The Case of Obama versus Trump

Trump, the "China Virus," and the Art of Controlling the Agenda by Misdirection


Hey! When Trump speaks well, I acknowledge it:

Trump and the NRA: Was the President Using His Business Communication Skills? 

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Research note: The idea that we can blame our problems on “the other” traces far back in human thought. Several scholars have investigated the subject. This month, I am reading essays by the communication critic Stuart Hall, highly recommended.

Image: Official White House photo