Mr. Donald Trump validates anger. He claims his "secret" strategies to defeat ISIS will be more effective than the CIA's efforts. He wears his inexperience on his sleeve, claiming that as an outsider, he will offer the country a fresh perspective.
Euphemistic as he is, most Americans realize that fresh really means ill-equipped, and private strategies likely equate to topics that Trump contemplates while using the toilet.
Trump's policies are certainly embraced for their hateful spirit. The United States is, after all, experiencing some bumps in the road. And although many have the ability to look far enough outside their own yards to see hardships in other countries, in other decades in America's history, there are some who weep with the belief that America has lost its greatness, and thus give their support to the man who promises to bring it back.
Trump supporters think the United States needs to improve, that it is in such a state of disarray, that its politicians should work towards dismembering its constitution, stripping the country of everything that enables it to claim unity and democracy as its guiding truths. Incidentally, the majority of Trump supporters are uneducated.
According to a PBS article that cites an analysis of voters with regards to their education level in states where exit/entrance polling is available, almost half of those with a high school education or less claim Trump as their candidate of choice. A little over 40 percent of voters with an incomplete college education give their support as well. Following this trend, non-college graduates constitute the fourth largest demographic of the Trump base, overlapping with a saturated number of supporters who identify as conservatives and earn less than $50,000 a year.
The appeal of Trump, it would seem, is not only his radical remarks that come at a uniquely vulnerable time in America's life, but also the way he communicates those remarks, and the very specific dialect he has given his campaign.
In the annotated versions of the first two presidential debates, Trump uses the word "disaster " twenty times. He says "Mexico" six times, and "wrong" sixteen times. He never employs these words in the context of a larger substantiated idea. Rather, he uses them in order to convey a biased and base generalization: "She is wrong, "Wrong. Wrong." "Obamacare is a disaster," "Iraq was a disaster," "Hilary Clinton has been a disaster. A disaster."
His redundancy extends to the way he talks about his policies, often choosing to ignore the question at hand and opting to follow his own agenda, which includes the regurgitation of the same issues, over and over, reinforced through the same anecdotes. "Our country is in deep trouble." "We need to build a wall." "Our jobs are going to Mexico. "Ford is leaving." "Ford is leaving." "Ford is leaving."
Nevermind that foreign policy has a lot more to it than Mexico, or that issues with the economy have bigger contributors than Ford leaving (which, by the way, Ford immediately rebutted). But Trump's strategy doesn't involve telling the whole story, or even the true story. Rather, it consists of telling a mutated version whose narrative, no matter its dishonesty, Trump hopes will intensify the more it is spewed.
J.T. Cachiappo and Richard Petty, two researchers on the topic of consumer persuasion, conclude that moderate repetition in speech can lead to an enhanced audience empathy with the commentator. Overuse, however, can have adverse affects, leaving an audience less convinced who would have otherwise fallen prey to this echo effect. Trump's audience, however, is anything but an average audience. And though Trump certainly overuses repetition, his bandwagon has proven that prerequisites of its support do not include fact, historical precedent, or any real intellectual inquiry, and thus, this regurgitation of claims do nothing to shake its blind endorsements.
Repetition is often seen as a sibling to parallelism, which uses a similar syntactical structure in a series of successive phrases. "That is why every woman, every man, every child, every family, and every nation on this planet does have a stake in the discussion that takes place here," says Hillary, in her Women's Rights are Human Rights Speech. Parallelism, however, is subtler, and requires a certain level of cognitive effort on the part of the audience to detect the symmetries between the subjects of each phrase. Trump understands his audience. In fact, he pointedly bragged after winning Nevada's state caucuses that he "loves the poorly educated." He therefore knows that asking what constitutes the majority of his supporters to think, to call upon reason and logic, would eliminate one of the aspects they find so appealing about his campaign: that absolutely no thought is required.
The good faith that so many place in Trump is tantamount to the completion of a research paper using Wikipedia as the sole source. Content is edited late at night by bored high school kids who can't sleep, and facts are adjusted with such subtlety that, to the uneducated eye, they still appear real. Donald Trump is this false singular source. His supporters witness his theories, his speeches, his impassioned gesticulations and his ever-convincing, "believe me," that he spits at the conclusion of every offensive conjecture, and they are sold. Here it is, they think, "international policy framed in a way I can understand," or otherwise, the Idiot's Guide to American Politics.
There is a reason that there is a specific category of television intended to appeal to children. Verbiage is slower, words are louder, intonation is accentuated, and basic ideas are over-emphasized. As many of Donald Trump's supporters are uneducated, they likely do not know a lot about the issues, nor do they have the impetus to learn about them. Hillary Clinton is eloquent, and wields an articulate and accessible language. Nothing, however, is quite as accessible as the rhetoric or thought process of a child. And although Donald Trump is by all other accounts a grown man, he reduces politics to the point of complete distortion, hopeful that his policies will appeal to those who, like he, have no experience thinking critically about the complexities of what it means to be not only the president of the United States, but a defendant of democracy and humanity, in all of its variations.