Don't misquote me. I never said he "formed the January 6th insurrection." I said he inspired and motivated it/them.
Examples? You keep saying that I am not able to provide examples. I have previously tried to summarize; you don't think I provide enough details, others (
@Riveting-)
discount the entirety of what I say because it's too long! That's okay - different strokes for different folks.
So for your benefit, and because you asked for sourced, concrete examples and want to understand the full, sourced, quoted, researched situation:
Quick highlights:
- Trump mocked Mitt Romney for politically “choking” in competition with Obama by wrapping his hands around his own neck with his tongue out, saying, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe!”
- “You have good genes in Minnesota.”
- “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
- Tweeted: Clinton is the “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” on an image of piles of cash and the Star of David
- “I think Jewish people that vote for a Democrat — I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”
- At the 2015 Republican Jewish Coalition, “I’m a negotiator like you folks, we are negotiators. Is there anybody that doesn’t renegotiate deals in this room? This room negotiates them — perhaps more than any other room I’ve ever spoken in.”
- "shithole countries"
- "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on."
- American Jews: “A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all.”
- 2015 Republican Jewish Congress, Trump: “You’re not gonna support me because I don’t want your money. You want to control your politicians, that’s fine.”
- Marchers in Charlottesville who chanted “Jews will not replace us,” Trump “very fine people on both sides.”
- Proud Boys at the first 2020 presidential debate, telling them to “stand back and stand by.”
- “Big protest in D.C. on Jan. 6. Be there, will be wild!”
- Tweet: “The calvary [sic] is coming, Mr. President!” Trump retweets and says “A great honor!”
- “If you don’t fight like Hell, you’re not going to have a country any more;”
- “When you catch somebody in a fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules;”
- As the J6 crowd chants "Hang Mike Pence" and "Stop the Steal" Trump says “You’ll never take back our country with weakness.” coupled with “We love you; you’re very special”
- On Jan 6th, after Rudy's: “Let's have trial by combat.” Trump immediately follows him on stage: "Rudy, you did a great job. He's got guts. You know what? He's got guts, unlike a lot of people in the Republican Party. He's got guts. He fights, he fights."
AND, because I assume you will try to justify many of these statements (though there are many, many more that are equally evocative), here is a detailed, sourced, academic journal study
of Trump's use of racist and violent dog whistles. Keep in mind, this is largely a study of Trump only through November, 2016. After that it continued to ramp up.
I'd like you pay special note to: Figure 2. Candidate comparison on average usage per speech for five dog whistles. *difference between Trump and other candidate significant at p < 0.05; **difference between Trump and other candidate significant at p < 0.001.usage, based on the post-hoc t tests comparing candidate usage rates.
“I Am the Law and Order Candidate”: A Content Analysis of Donald Trump’s Race-Baiting Dog Whistles in the 2016 Presidential Campaign Department of Psychology, National University, San Diego, CA, USA.
Donald Trump and His Audience
In a word analysis of the 2016 presidential debates,
Krzywinski (2016) concluded that Trump stood out for his repetition and low number of independent concepts compared to the other three presidential candidates. A separate analysis of the “word data” from the primary debates by
Zhong (2016: p. 8) found Trump to speak at a 4th grade level, which contributed to Trump’s effectiveness as a presidential candidate and his appeal to a, “low information audience”. In a study of Trump’s presentation style, a group of ethnographic researchers (
Hall, Goldstein, & Ingram, 2016: p. 72) concluded that Trump gained politically by vicariously empowering a “rural White underclass” through anti-establishment behavior often deemed un-presidential. Recall that anger (
Banks, 2014) is the emotion that primes racial attitudes in voters.
Research shows that this presentation aligned with his message and the voters he was trying to reach.
Oliver and Rahn (2016: p. 199) found that Trump primary voters scored highest in, “mistrust of expertise, national affiliation, and nativism”. Research (
Tesler, 2016a,
Tesler, 2016b) has shown that racial attitudes mattered more in 2016 than in the prior two presidential elections—when a Black man was on the ballot—and that racial resentment and ethnocentrism were more closely linked to support of Trump than support for 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
Contrary to explanations linking economic hardship to support for Trump, Gallup researchers (
Rothwell & Diego-Rosell, 2016: p. 14) found that one of the strongest predictors of Trump support was “racial and ethnic isolation” of White voters. They note in their conclusion that, “cultural views and social identity” are a more powerful influencer of political preferences than economic and most demographic factors (
Rothwell & Diego-Rosell, 2016: p. 19). In a study using the Color Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS) as a measure of racism,
Schaffner and colleagues (2017) found that “the effect of economic dissatisfaction is dwarfed” by the relationship between racism and voting for Trump (p. 16).
Wood’s (2017) research using the American National Election Study found that moving from the 50th to the 75th percentile on the symbolic racism scale, “made someone 20 percent more likely to vote for Trump”.
In a study using Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) as a proxy for group threat,
Mutz (2018) found status anxiety issues, a.k.a. status threat, to be determinant of voting behavior in the 2016 presidential election.
Mutz (2018) concluded, “Those who felt that the hierarchy was being upended—with whites discriminated against more than Blacks, Christians discriminated against more than Muslims, and men discriminated against more than women—were most likely to support Trump” (p. 4338). Researchers (
Fowler, Medenica, & Cohen, 2017) constructed a survey of White vulnerability (described above as status threat) in millennial voters. They found that fear of losing ground to non-White groups, which is driven “primarily” by racial resentment, has been identified as the largest predictor of voting for Trump (
Fowler et al., 2017).
Dog whistles are an effective way to continue courting racist supporters while both appealing to the unspoken racial resentment of other voters and creating enough doubt about the candidate’s intended meaning to satisfy and provide plausible deniability to racially centrist Republicans and undecided voters. If Trump was race baiting in his speeches, there was a sympathetic audience to receive those messages; his campaign could have learned as much from reactions provoked by Trump’s Twitter account and the unwavering support he received from a core group of Republican voters following his candidacy announcement, in which he openly criticized Mexican immigrants. But there are reasons to believe that dog whistling would have been effective on more than Trump’s most loyal supporters. Racial appeals attract low-education (
Silver, 2016) and low-information voters (
Oliver & Rahn, 2016;
Tesler, 2015) and dog whistles simplify complex issues (
Hanley López, 2014;
Krzywinski, 2016) by provoking an emotional response such as racial resentment (
Potts, 2016;
Silver, 2016;
Wood, 2017) or nativist anger and anxiety (
Oliver & Rahn, 2016). Even though most of the preceding research on Trump voters was published after the election, the reactions Trump received during the campaign are an indicator that Trump was communicating something meaningful, and often emotion-provoking, to voters.
The preceding review established the alignment of certain terminology as effective race baiting, Trump’s political persona, and the potential receptiveness among a portion of the electorate to race baiting. According to the Integrative Model of content analysis, these areas should be aligned. The history of racial appeals, including dog whistling, shows that they appeal to voters on an emotional, rather than a rational, level. The evidence presented in the preceding section established that Trump’s persona as an anti-establishment candidate was suited to taking advantage of the anger of potential voters. The research presented also indicates that voters feeling isolated, threatened, and angry were likely to support him. The “straight-talking” persona of the messenger and the vulnerability of the audience to emotional appeals have been established; what is left to be determined is whether Trump consistently delivered the type of message designed to take advantage of those factors.
In the following content analysis, the words of Donald Trump are examined to determine whether he consistently used dog whistles during the 2016 election. It is predicted in Hypothesis 1 that Trump consistently used dog whistles in his campaign. The standard of consistent usage is to ensure accurate representation of Trump’s messaging. To be considered consistent usage, a term must meet two criteria: appearance in at least 50% of the candidate’s speeches and overall usage averaging at least once per speech. The criteria were chosen to balance one another in terms of assessing usage of a term within and across speeches. Therefore, a dog whistle was consistently used if the message receiver was sufficiently likely to hear the term in any given speech1.
The emotionally charged and divisive 2016 election cycle indicated that there was something atypical occurring, yet it is worth considering whether these dog whistles were one of these atypical elements or merely ordinary policy-speak from a Republican presidential nominee. To answer this question, I subject the speeches of the preceding two Republican presidential nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain, to the same analysis. The decision to include Romney and McCain is in line with previous literature assessing Trump’s appeal (
Schaffner et al., 2017) and intended to address not only the possibility that the dog whistles in the study are merely US Republican candidate terminology but also how Trump’s use of the terms aligns with comparable, prior usage. If the terms are Republican policy-speak, Trump’s use of them should be in line with that of previous Republican presidential nominees. Hypothesis 2 is based on prior research positing that these terms are more than shorthand for policy: they are laden with additional, racialized connotations. Differences in dog whistle usage between Trump and the other candidates would place into context the uniqueness of the behavior seen at Trump rallies as well as the findings establishing the racist tendencies and status fears of some Trump supporters.
Mitt Romney is included not only because he was the most recent Republican presidential nominee but also because his candidacy was the first to follow the birth of the Republican-aligned Tea Party movement, which has been criticized for the racialized speeches given at some of its rallies (
Bonilla-Silva, 2018;
Hanley López, 2014). John McCain ran against the first Black, major party, presidential nominee in US history. McCain’s language in that contest holds value especially in comparison to Trump’s, considering Trump’s contribution to the racist Birther movement. Finally, given the prior discussion of the Southern Strategy, Trump’s speeches are also compared to those given by Richard Nixon as 1968 Republican presidential nominee, solely because of Nixon’s role as a pioneer of the modern dog whistling strategy and his usage of “law and order” to appeal to the “silent majority” who were disturbed by the pace of change, particularly the prevalence of antiracist protests and other demonstrations in the mid-1960s (
Ehrlichman, 1982;
Marable, 2007).
It is predicted in Hypothesis 2 that Donald Trump’s use of each dog whistle significantly and meaningfully exceeded Romney’s, McCain’s, and Nixon’s in t-test comparisons, with a minimum significance level of
p < 0.05. Only in the case of the term “law and order”, is it expected that Nixon’s use exceeded Trump’s2. This prediction is based on the idea that something different was occurring in 2016, and Trump played a role in that difference. This is because supporters often take their cues from political elites (
Mendelberg, 2008;
Nelson & Kinder, 1996). It is predicted that Trump’s dog whistling is significantly greater due to the difference between Trump’s and the other candidates’ rallies; the difference was most noticeable in the behavior reported during Trump rallies, which are indicative of an emotional or automatic reaction to Trump’s words (
DiAngelo, 2018;
Freud, 1961;
Rösch, Stanton, & Schultheiss, 2013;
Yalom, 2005).
A delicate operationalization issue presents itself when dealing with coded language: intent. Donald Trump’s intent, or that of most of the other politicians included in the study, in dog whistling is not specifically examined. Intent cannot be concluded absent a statement such as those that, eventually, trickled out from operatives like Reagan’s Lee Atwater or Nixon’s Gordon Brownell (
Lassiter, 2006). This study is interested in the historical thread that can be drawn using coded messages for which we know the meaning. Did Trump consistently use dog whistles, i.e. do his critics have solid ground to stand on when accusing his campaign of being racially divisive? In Hypothesis 1, I predict that Trump did use the following dog whistles consistently, as measured by appearance in at least half of his speeches and averaging at least once per speech, throughout his campaign as the Republican presidential nominee:
law and order,
illegal,
Islam,
school choice,
voter identification, and
welfare. And is Trump’s dog whistle usage particularly heavy-handed compared to that of his political predecessors? In Hypothesis 2, I predict that Trump’s average dog whistle rate is significantly greater than the other candidates’ in terms of each dog whistle (except
law and order) and overall totals, as measured by
t-test comparisons.
6. Method
The speeches Donald Trump made as Republican presidential nominee were downloaded from the American Presidency Project (APP) website. The APP website is non-partisan and hosted by University of California at Santa Barbara. Trump’s speeches as shown on the APP website were cross-checked with official speech scripts available at the official Trump campaign website (donaldjtrump.com). The APP website was also the resource for speeches by the comparison candidates; all the following candidate quotes are from said resource. The speeches were subjected to content analysis using the procedure detailed in the subsequent section.
6.1. Materials
The set of speeches analyzed were subject to an element of sampling convenience in that, in order to be readily accessible to the coders, the speeches needed to be available. The speeches selected were those made at official campaign stops as listed on the Trump campaign website. Press releases were not included, nor were interviews. This decision was made not only to reduce variance in the intent and format of the speeches but also to ensure that content and language in the speech was delivered by Trump himself directly to voters. The basis for this decision is reflected in the research on elite frames and racism, summarized in a preceding section. The political statements examined in these studies were intended by the candidate to create an emotional reaction in potential voters. Therefore, press releases, which are usually straightforward policy or logistical announcements, and interviews, which reflect less of a strategy than prepared campaign speeches because they are extemporaneous, are less likely to indicate a consistent pattern of language usage. A consistent pattern of usage is important because it reflects meaningful messaging from the campaign.
The speeches of the two most recent Republican nominees were available on the APP website, as were the speeches Richard Nixon gave as Republican nominee in 1968. For the reasons outlined above, all the campaign speeches available for these candidates were included in the analysis. I considered that a comparison of Trump’s 2016 Republican primary opponents might be valuable. A sample of the speech transcripts of Trump’s final two Republican opponents, candidates Senator Ted Cruz and Governor John Kasich, was obtained for preliminary analysis. After reviewing the speeches by Sen. Cruz and Gov. Kasich, it was determined that including them posed some methodological issues. Even in the preliminary review, it was clear to coders that the language used by Cruz and Kasich did not include any uses of the dog whistle terms as understood in common parlance and eventually codified during the study’s procedure. The recent elongation of the primary period and the potential for introducing more variation related to primary competition also indicated that including these speeches could create additional, internal consistency issues.
Based on research on the necessity of coded language in racial appeals, a coded racial appeal is more important to deploy in the general election than in the primaries: the appeal to White solidarity (rather than ideologically divisive policy issues) could be an effective strategy to attract undecided and non-Republican voters. Therefore, speeches given during the primaries were removed so that the comparison between presidential candidates would be as even as could be reasonably expected. The final set of speeches included for each Republican presidential candidate begins with the acceptance speech given at the Republican National Convention that election year and concludes with the final speech given before the date of the election. Every available speech given by the candidate during said period was subject to analysis.
6.2. Procedure
Based on prior research, a set of terms, hereafter referred to as dog whistles, were chosen to be included in the analysis. The process of creating a list and, thus, determining relevant constructs before analysis is in line with
a priori (
Neuendorf, 2002) or deductive (
Elo & Kyngas, 2007) content analytic method, in which a predetermined structure based on prior research is used to develop themes and, eventually, codes to guide the textual analysis. While this is a qualitative study, one of its goals was to be able to quantify dog whistles to indicate consistency across speeches and determine which areas were mentioned most. Though the speeches analyzed come from four different years, for the sake of consistency the terms were operationalized the same way across speeches. In order to account for time differences in terminology use, thereby addressing potential inequalities in dog whistle totals between the 1968 set and the modern speeches, I included several 1960s-era dog whistles in the analysis (see Appendix 1).
To be included in the study as a dog whistle, a term needed to have a documented history of usage as code for activating White solidarity against a minority group. A history for these terms is needed because such terminology, once developed, is only useful because it is linked over time to a group to the point that the group need not be mentioned (
Hanley López, 2014). Though dog whistles for non-racial issues such as religion (e.g.,
Albertson, 2006) exist, racial dog whistles are pursued here due to the nature of the Trump campaign events discussed in the introduction to this paper. The dog whistle terms chosen for this study were rooted in the
Hanley López (2014) book on race-baiting, political dog whistles. As noted in the Dog Whistle Terms section, though, many of the terms cited by Hanley López appear in numerous other works and have come to be accepted as coded terminology among historians and political scientists. The dog whistles, italicized in this section, were
law and order,
illegal,
Islam,
school choice,
welfare,and
voter ID.
In the initial listing of dog whistles, three additional terms were considered:
school busing,
food stamps,and
states’
rights.Though these terms are not often used today as racial code, they were more prevalent during the late 1960s and into the 1970s. I included these terms to allow for a fairer comparison specifically between Trump’s and Nixon’s dog whistle totals. However, Nixon did not use these terms in his 1968 campaign speeches and thus the terms were dropped from the list. Though the attempt at a more even comparison between Trump and Nixon failed in that respect, the information learned through content analysis of Nixon’s speeches was helpful toward the second hypothesis, as discussed in the results. Additional details on the coding process are included in Appendix 1.
A codebook for the dog whistles (see Appendix 2) was created using definitions based on research cited in the “Dog Whistle Terms” section. Based on recommendations drawn from similar, qualitative studies of content (e.g.
Braker-Walters, 2014;
Freeman, 2017) the analysis utilized “hand coding.” Hand coding requires human coders to read and assess the text during the coding process. Hand coding also allows coders to consider the importance of context, as noted above in discussion of the code definitions, and meaning before completing analysis (
Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2018).
The analysis was conducted by the author and four trained analysts. Once the codebook was created, an analyst used it to guide scanning of each assigned speech, mark dog whistles found in the text (e.g., LO for
law and order), review for accuracy based on the codebook, and then conduct a dog whistle count for that speech. Each reviewer examined a set of speeches, which included a subset of speeches examined by other coders as a check on the accuracy of the codebook. As assessed by Krippendorff’s alpha3, interrater reliability on coding was good (α = 0.824). Final coding resulted in 94.77% interrater agreement.
7. Results
The results below are presented in terms of their relevance to the hypotheses generated prior to data analysis. Therefore, only major themes, i.e., frequency of dog whistle codes within candidate data sets, are reported. Topics consistently mentioned by the candidates that did not meet the criteria for coding or did not align with the racism theme underlying the dog whistle analysis are not presented here.
7.1. Hypothesis One
It was expected that Donald Trump used a variety of dog whistles during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump did indeed use all the following terms in his campaign speeches:
law and order,
illegal,
Islam,
school choice,
welfare,
voter ID. Descriptive data for each of the dog whistles Trump used during the campaign are presented in
Table 1. Trump did not consistently use the terms
voter ID or
welfare.
Trump used the immigration dog whistles the most, which is not a surprise given that immigration was the dog whistle topic emphasized in his candidacy announcement. He mentioned it in all but 14 of the 62 speeches examined in this study, finding time even in a policy speech about the military on November 3 to mention it six times. Often, Trump used a fear-based approach to speak about immigration. In his August 23 speech in Austin, he said, “Today I met with the moms of American children killed by
illegal immigrants as a result of the policies Hillary Clinton supports”. Trump repeatedly, graphically used the example of Kathryn Steinle’s murder to stoke fear of immigrants, such as in his November 2 speech in Miami: “(Hillary) strongly supports sanctuary cities like in San Francisco where…Kate Steinle was killed by a five-time deported
illegal immigrant [audience boos]”. Trump also spoke negatively about Islam in 39 of his speeches and mentioned it third most of the dog whistles examined. When
Dog Whistle | Total Usage | Avg. per speech | Highest count | Pct. appearance | Pct. Overall |
Illegal | 314 | 5.06 | 59 | 77.4 | 43.0 |
School choice | 110 | 1.77 | 17 | 62.9 | 15.1 |
Islam | 89 | 1.44 | 14* | 62.9 | 12.2 |
Law and order | 76 | 1.23 | 11 | 50.0 | 10.4 |
Voter identification | 19 | 0.31 | 6 | 6.5 | 2.4 |
Welfare | 7 | 0.11 | 1* | 11.3 | 1.0 |
Total | 651 | 100.0 | | | |
Table 1. Dog whistles in Donald Trump’s 2016 Campaign Speeches.
Note: Numbers in bold indicate consistent usage. *The highest count occurred in two speeches.
Trump spoke about Islam, it was almost always in the context of terrorism. On November 2 in Miami, he said, “When I’m president, we will suspend the Syrian refugee program (applause) and we will keep Radical
Islamic Terrorists the hell out of your community”.
Trump used
law and order most in his address to the Republican Convention (
n = 9) and his August 31 speech on immigration (
n = 11). In that acceptance address, he stated, “I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police: when I take the oath of office next year, I will restore
law and order to our country”. Based on the results shown in
Table 1, Donald Trump consistently race baited during the 2016 campaign.
7.2. Hypothesis Two
To determine whether Trump’s use of these terms is out of line with prior Republican campaigns, Trump’s rate and consistency of dog whistle usage were compared to that of Mitt Romney, John McCain and Richard Nixon. The dog whistle usage rates of the four candidates, including the percentage of speeches each dog whistle appeared in, means, and standard deviations, are displayed in
Table 2.
Trump used the most dog whistles and used them most consistently, i.e. they appeared in the highest percentage of his speeches, in five of the six cases in which there is a meaningful difference between candidates.
The dog whistle usage of all three candidates was compared using an ANOVA test. The test showed significant differences among the groups (
p < 0.01) on each of the dog whistles except for
voter ID, which no other candidate used. Games-Howell4 post-hoc tests were performed due to unequal variance and unequal sample sizes.
Figure 2 is a bar graph of average dog whistle usage per candidate, along with whether the usage rate was significantly different from Trump’s
Dog Whistle | Trump Use | % | M, SD | Romney Use | % | M, SD | McCain Use | % | M, SD | Nixon Use | % | M. SD |
Illegal | 314 | 5.06 | 5.06, 8.16 | 1 | 1.9 | 0.02, 0.14 | 0 | 0.0 | -- | 0 | 0.0 | -- |
Islam | 89 | 62.9 | 1.44, 2.60 | 6 | 9.6 | 0.12, 0.38 | 5 | 5.7 | 0.14, 0.69 | 0 | 0.0 | -- |
School choice | 110 | 62.9 | 1.77, 2.58 | 26 | 17.3 | 0.50, 1.87 | 4 | 5.7 | 0.11, 0.53 | 1 | 4.8 | 0.05, 0.22 |
Law and order | 76 | 50.0 | 1.23, 2.03 | 0 | 0.0 | -- | 1 | 2.8 | 0.03, 0.17 | 23 | 38.1 | 1.10, 2.36 |
Welfare | 7 | 11.3 | 0.11, 0.32 | 1 | 1.9 | 0.02, 0.14 | 2 | 5.7 | 0.06, 0.24 | 12 | 23.8 | 0.57, 1.25 |
Voter ID | 19 | 6.5 | 0.31, 1.21 | 0 | 0.0 | -- | 0 | 0.0 | -- | 0 | 0.0 | -- |
Total | 651 | 46 | 14 | 36 | | | | | | | | |
Table 2. Dog whistle usage consistency comparison.
Note: Highest appearance percentages for each dog whistle noted in bold type. Speeches analyzed for Trump: 62, Romney: 52, McCain: 35, Nixon: 21.
Figure 2. Candidate comparison on average usage per speech for five dog whistles. *difference between Trump and other candidate significant at
p < 0.05; **difference between Trump and other candidate significant at
p < 0.001.
usage, based on the post-hoc
t tests comparing candidate usage rates.
Trump’s usage of dog whistles was found to be significantly greater (
p < 0.001) in almost every case. The comparisons in
Table 2 show a meaningful difference as well, as in multiple cases Trump used a dog whistle that the comparison candidate used inconsistently or not at all. Based on the criteria for consistent usage, no candidate except Trump consistently used a dog whistle, though
law and order was used by Nixon an average of about once per speech. Hypothesis Two was supported with one exception: Nixon’s use of
law and order did not exceed Trump’s usage in a meaningful or statistically significant way.
8. Discussion
The results for both hypotheses support the claim that Donald Trump consistently race baited during the 2016 US presidential campaign and did so at a rate significantly and meaningfully higher than comparable Republican presidential candidates. These results fit into the integrative framework for linking messenger, receiver, and content, as presented in the literature review. The racist stereotypes inherent in dog whistles, including the fear they inspire, align with studies demonstrating how racial resentment and status threat motivated White Americans to vote for Trump. Donald Trump’s swaggering persona, blunt language, and emotional appeal align with studies showing the susceptibility of Trump supporters to such an approach. The anger inherent in much of his message (
Smith & Hanley, 2018;
Stevenson, 2016), and echoed by rowdy rally crowds (
Mathis-Lilley, 2016), has the power to enhance the influence of ideas about race on political behavior.
As displayed in
Figure 1, the integrative model I use to evaluate the evidence for whether Trump dog-whistled is built on the alignment of three elements. Trump’s persona, based on evidence presented in the paper, is anti-establishment (
Hall et al., 2016) and appealing to low-information (
Zhong, 2016) and low-education audiences. Trump voters were found likely to be distrustful of expertise (
Oliver & Rahn, 2016), racially isolated (
Rothwell & Diego-Rosell, 2016), holding negative racial animus (
Schaffner et al., 2017;
Wood, 2017), and threatened by demographic change (
Fowler et al., 2017;
Mutz, 2018). Racial appeals have been found to work well with low-information (
Silver, 2016), angry (
Banks, 2014), and anxious (
Oliver & Rahn, 2016) audiences. The final piece to this integrative framework is the content of the messages themselves and, regarding that, the results are clear.
Donald Trump consistently used race-baiting dog whistles during the 2016 Presidential campaign. On average, speeches contained between 11 and 12 dog whistles. Only one of Trump’s speeches, his October 3 speech on cybersecurity, contained zero dog whistles. Trump spoke most about immigration: he maligned undocumented immigrants at an average rate of over five times per speech. Trump warned a crowd in Colorado Springs that, “criminal aliens” are coming for “your job”. Lest anyone believe his words on immigration were empty rhetoric, statistics show that, under Trump, arrests of immigrants increased significantly—41%—while arrests of non-criminal immigrants have risen 171% (
Kopan, 2018). The Trump administration’s treatment of immigrants and asylum-seekers, most notably the treatment of immigrant children including separating them from their parents and later attempting to deport them sans parents, matches the dehumanization described in the prior research on immigrant rhetoric (
Brown, 2016a;
Chavez, 2001;
Chavez, Whiteford, & Hoewe, 2010;
Fernández & Pedroza, 1982).
The term “law and order” had been exposed as race baiting even before Lee Atwater’s smoking gun on the Southern Strategy, yet Trump used it 76 times in 62 campaign speeches. His usage rate and consistency were not significantly different than Richard Nixon’s in 1968. One potential excuse for talking about
law and order is that there was unrest in the country (much like in 1968), particularly the July 7, 2016 shooting of Dallas police officers by Micah Johnson less than two years following the Michael Brown shooting and subsequent Ferguson unrest that contributed greatly to the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement (
BBC News, 2016). But there were many lawful, peaceful demonstrations against police brutality (
Quintana, 2016;
Yan & Park, 2016) and declarations of sanctuary cities (
Luhby, 2016); warnings and complaints about these often served as context to
law and order and
illegal in Trump’s speeches. Some could argue, as Richard Nixon once did, that more law and order would help all citizens. I would argue, considering the response Trump provoked from his supporters and research showing how dog whistle approaches work (
Banks & Bell, 2013;
Brown, 2016b;
Domke, 2001), that it is not accidental that the bulk of the people who would be presumably locked up or deported once “law and order” are restored—the people invoked in Trump’s warnings—are not White: supporters and participants in a Black-led protest movement and Mexican and Central American immigrants.
Trump spoke frequently about
school choice—fifty of his sixty-two speeches use the words. Support for vouchers has been a Republican policy point for at least twenty years; however, if the
school choice dog whistle is merely Republican terminology, it does not explain why his usage difference with each of the two preceding Republican presidential nominees is so large, despite it being the dog whistle Romney used most overall. John McCain barely mentioned
school choice: he used the term four times, and usage stops after September 13, 2008. The differences found here between Trump’s words and those of his predecessors is supported by recent research on the type of voter each candidate attracted:
Schaffner and colleagues (2018) found that there was no relationship between racism and voting for the previous two Republican presidential nominees.
Trump’s comments on
Islam were universally negative. Though the coding instructions mandated that only negative uses of Islam or Muslim would be counted, during the process it became apparent that other usages were not in his speeches. Trump’s crowds were recorded as booing the mention of Syrian refugees on several occasions. Trump followed “Islam” or “Islamic” with “terror” over 90% of the time. On October 22 he warned, “Radical, Islamic terror is right around the corner” and proposed, “extreme vetting” of refugees. In context, Trump’s message uses an us-versus-them dynamic with religious and ethnic minorities portrayed as “them” and potentially sets those minorities up as targets for aggression. It is not surprising that these statements coincided with clashes between protesters, sometimes with Trump encouraging his crowd (
Finnegan & Bierman, 2016;
White, 2016), and an increase in anti-Muslim groups (
Struyk, 2017). Less than a week after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush famously said, “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam…Islam is peace”. When Trump called Mexican immigrants rapists and drug-runners during his candidacy announcement, he added, “Some, I assume, are good people”. Donald Trump did not make that barest of concessions when speaking about Muslims.
9. Conclusion
Words matter, especially when they come from a candidate for the highest function in a state. Donald Trump’s words mattered not only because of the position he was in but also because of the strong reactions that came along with them—reactions, according to the research (
Banks & Hicks, 2016;
Brown, 2016a;
Hurwitz & Peffley, 2005;
Mendelberg, 2008;
Slocum, 2001;
Wells & Roda, 2016), he should have expected. Trump’s specific, race-baiting words also mattered because they were tied to campaign promises like the US-Mexico wall (
illegal;
McCaskill, 2016), “extreme vetting” of refugees and a travel ban from Muslim-majority nations (
Islam;
Diamond, 2015), and cracking down on antiracist protests (
law and order;
Levitz, 2016)—while boasting an endorsement from racial profiling ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio (
Siegler, 2016). Though the idiosyncrasy of the Trump campaign is well known, there is a difference between an unscripted remark or tweet and words repeated in speech after speech from July through November 2016. The results show how consistent he was in using the four dog whistles listed above.
Donald Trump mixed the dog whistle approach with more open race-baiting rhetoric as president. Trump famously created an equivalency between the actions of “both sides”, White supremacists and antiracist protesters, following the violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. Post-Charlottesville, Trump held a rally in Arizona and complained about groups requesting the removal of Confederate monuments: “They’re trying to take away our culture, they’re trying to take away our history”, to which CNN’s
Chris Cilizza (2017) replied, “[dog whistle]”.
The next month, Trump called for the firing of National Football League players demonstrating during the pre-game national anthem. He continued to complain about the anthem protests, though most of them had stopped, into the 2018 NFL season. The NFL is almost 70% Black men (
Gertz, 2017) and, until Trump’s comments, only one White NFL player had demonstrated during the anthem. Within the NFL discussion, Trump supporters can argue that the statistic is cherry-picking. In the larger context of Trump’s words, the statistic fits a pattern of Trump agitating White people against non-White people.
In January 2018, in discussion with lawmakers working on an immigration deal, Trump referred to El Salvador, Haiti, and a group of African nations as “shithole countries” (
Dawsey, 2018). During the 2020 presidential campaign, Trump stumbled when asked to disavow the support of White supremacist groups like the Proud Boys (
Collins & Zadrozny, 2020;
Fabian, 2020). He agitated for support of Kyle Rittenhouse (
Brewster, 2020;
Wise, 2020), who killed two men at an antiracist protest over the police killing of Jacob Blake. Trump went back to the dog-whistling about law and order in warning “suburban women” that Democratic candidate Joe Biden was going to “destroy suburbia” with an “invasion” of low-income housing (
Karni, Haberman, & Ember, 2020;
King & Barrón-López, 2020). When Trump was confronted with accusations of race-baiting, he cited statistics on minority populations in the suburbs.
Whether Donald Trump personally holds racist beliefs cannot be concluded here. What can be concluded—what cannot be avoided—based on the words Trump used repeatedly, the history of those specific words in political communication, the response those words provoked among his supporters in real time, and the overwhelming support he received among certain White people, specifically those found to be most likely to hold implicit racist beliefs and support a symbolically racist agenda, is that a cohesive theme of Trump’s campaign speeches is language appealing to the racism of American voters.
As
Tali Mendelberg (2008: p. 113) noted in her review of studies on coded racial messages, “The power of elites to promote or deflate racial politics is strong and consistent”. The preceding findings add to research underlining the value and influence of candidate language, especially in the context of the racial and ethnic angst during the 2016 US presidential campaign and since. Finally, the results contribute to the growing literature demonstrating that race played a role in the 2016 election by providing proof that Trump spoke in a way designed to attract the very voters researchers found to be crucial to his victory: those threatened by the rise of minorities and those exhibiting some form of racism.
Whether Trump benefitted from race-baiting, and the results indicate he did, is different from being able to conclude he did so strategically and intentionally, let alone predict during the campaign whether he would win by preying on the implicit racism of the American public. We cannot, based on the results, conclude that racism is solely responsible for his election. However, the results illustrate that political analysists are on solid, empirical ground in claiming that Donald Trump dog-whistled during the campaign. The findings of this study also indicate that racism, especially the opportunistic racism of consistently arousing and benefitting from racial polarization, belongs in honest discussions of why Donald Trump was elected President of the United States.
