The politics of pronouns: how Trump framed the ingroup in the 2016 presidential election

Abstract

ABSTRACT Outgroup hostility and racialized language were the most important predictors of support for Trump in the 2016 election season. Some scholarship argues that outgroup hostility outweighs the importance of white ingroup attitudes. Using a mix-methods content analysis of Trump’s campaign speeches, this paper agrees that outgroup hostility was the primary rhetorical device used by Trump in his speeches in both the primary and general elections. This work goes further and examines how Trump’s rhetoric framed and constructed the ingroup using outgroup rhetoric to connect the two. We argue that immigration and refugees, specifically, were used by Trump as part of the identity story he told about the ingroup and what it means to be an ingroup member. Our contribution rests on the correlation between hostile outgroup rhetoric—especially towards immigrants and refugees—to the framing and defining of the ingroup (through first-person plural pronouns). Further, we connect this rhetorical device to questions about what is at stake for the ingroup (i.e., power). We highlight a rhetorical mechanism that helps explain how hostile outgroup rhetoric is linked to ingroup framing, a contribution that adds to the literature on this topic.