What Donald Trump Talks About When He Talks About ‘Donald Trump’
The first debate of the 2024 presidential campaign, scheduled to take place next week, offers voters a chance to scrutinize the candidates’ political views and personal demeanor. For linguists, however, it also offers a rare side-by-side comparison of the way the candidates speak. You don’t have to follow politics to know that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have extraordinarily different verbal styles. Of the two, Biden’s is the less interesting, linguistically speaking, because it’s the more conventional. Trump’s, on the other hand — no matter what you think of his ideas — is fascinating. It’s sui generis.
Still, it’s possible to draw connections between Trump’s verbal mannerisms and other speech patterns in the world at large. The one that’s been on my mind this week is his habit of referring to himself by name, such as, “You wouldn’t even be hearing about the word ‘immigration’ if it wasn’t for Donald Trump.” In reference to making Barack Obama present his birth certificate: “Trump was able to get them to give something.” Also, “Nobody respects women more than Donald Trump” and “Eighteen angry Democrats that hate President Trump, they hate him with a passion.”
This may seem to suggest, variously, a Tarzanian linguistic tendency, a desire to market himself as a brand or just a plain old inflated ego. But the truth is more interesting because there is more to first-person pronouns — i.e., the “I” and “me” that we normally use instead of our own names — than simply ways of referring to the self. And there are many reasons that a person might seek to avoid these words, even in informal speech. There’s even a name for that tendency: illeism.
Sidestepping these pronouns can be a way to deflect attention from one’s self, to avoid seeming self-absorbed. In Mandarin, one might use the term “little person” rather than “I,” as if humbling oneself both linguistically and physically. The Anglophone version of this is the colloquial way we can refer to ourselves in the third person: “Who just got a raise? This guy!,” while pointing to oneself, is perhaps a little less blunt than simply saying, “I just got a raise!” “This girl needs to get home” can feel like a more gracious way of taking one’s leave than “I need to get home.” Creating an exterior third-person perspective frames the departure as a scene someone else is acting out.
Swapping in one’s own name can be trickier. People mocked LeBron James for using the third person to explain why he joined the Miami Heat: “One thing I didn’t want to do was make an emotional decision,” he said. “I wanted to do what was best for LeBron James and what LeBron James was going to do to make him happy.” This sounded obnoxiously regal to many, but it’s just as possible to see it as the opposite. Referring to himself from afar encouraged us to imagine a scene that he was in, to foster some kind of understanding of his decision.
Psychologists even encourage us to try thinking of ourselves as “you” or “he/she/they” in order to imagine how others see us. It’s another way of reminding yourself, “It’s not all about me.”