Whose rhetoric was hollow?
Read moreNumerous times in the six months prior to the last US presidential election, I heard Mrs Clinton proclaim that one of her goals was to expose “the hollowness of Trump’s rhetoric”. While I did not follow the candidates pronouncements on a daily basis, I did nonetheless see enough of them to get clear impressions of the tone and content of
A trail of excuses and missed opportunities
Read moreIn the April 5th edition of The Financial Times, columnist Edward Luce penned a thought-provoking article entitled “Beware of the return of the Clinton dynasty”, where he warns the world that Hillary Clinton has recently been “dipping her toes into the public waters” once again. Mr Luce asserts that, some five months after her unsuccessful run for the presidency of
On Hillary Clinton’s discourse: Where was the story that lets us inside?
Read moreLast time, I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s exceedingly weak response in a Meet the Press interview from March 22, 2016. Personally, it was the first time I could see any real possibility that Donald Trump might defeat Clinton in November’s vote. With such vague and uninspiring answers to this sort of undemanding question, I thought that she was perhaps finding
Using a narrative-based approach to explain the failure of Hillary Clinton’s campaign
Read moreIn the next few posts, I plan to go deeper into my explaining my conviction that Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump was due in large part to her failure to define and tell a meaningful personal narrative. On the 22nd of May 2016, some six months before the United States presidential election, candidate Hillary Clinton appeared on the popular
The sheer power of repetition in political discourse
Read moreIn the last post, we looked at some rather unique elements of President Trump’s approach to speech-making. Whatever one’s opinion of Mr Trump, there is no denying that he was able to captivate audiences at his campaign rallies with his unconventional, irreverent, and often inflammatory rhetoric. By speaking with steadfast certainty, and by fervently repeating his convictions, he establishes an
Donald Trump’s radical departure from traditional political parlance
Read moreAs we discussed briefly in the previous post, simple sentences and continual repetition of his core concepts are two cornerstones of Donald Trump’s approach to speech-making. Today, I would like to take a closer look at these and other aspects of the president’s unique form of discourse. From a rhetorical perspective, his manner of speaking represents quite a dramatic change