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Business and personal 45th and 47th President of the United States Incumbent Tenure
Impeachments Civil and criminal prosecutions | ||
45th and 47th president Donald Trump is widely recognized for his distinctive communication style, which has captivated audiences and redefined modern political discourse. His populist and nationalistic rhetoric emphasizes themes of resilience, loyalty, and a commitment to addressing the concerns of everyday Americans. By positioning himself as an outsider challenging a political establishment, Trump has fostered a strong connection with his supporters, who see his approach as a bold stand for their values and aspirations.
Trump's straightforward and unfiltered manner of speaking resonates deeply with many, as it simplifies complex issues and conveys a sense of urgency. His use of accessible language ensures his messages are easily understood, enabling them to reach a wide and diverse audience. Central to his communication strategy is a focus on themes of national pride and a vision for restoring America's greatness, which has inspired millions to rally behind his leadership.
A hallmark of Trump's rhetoric is its emotional appeal, which underscores his ability to tap into the hopes and concerns of his base. His speeches often highlight the importance of unity, strength, and determination in overcoming challenges, reinforcing his image as a leader who prioritizes the needs of the people. While his style is polarizing to some, many view it as a refreshing break from traditional political norms, offering a more relatable and authentic voice in the public sphere.
Critics argue that Trump's communication style borrows from authoritarian playbooks, citing his use of scapegoating, appeals to nationalism, and rhetorical attacks on the media. While supporters view his rhetoric as a refreshing departure from political correctness and establishment politics, detractors contend it erodes democratic norms and fuels divisiveness. This rhetoric remains a defining element of Trump's influence on American politics, with his third consecutive campaign in 2024 being ultimately successful.
Supporters celebrate Trump's ability to energize political engagement and foster a sense of empowerment among his followers. His rhetoric emphasizes action, optimism, and a readiness to confront obstacles head-on, creating a sense of shared purpose and collective effort. As a defining feature of his influence, Trump's communication style continues to shape the political landscape, driving enthusiasm and momentum as he leads the nation once again.
Trump's rhetoric has its roots in a populist political method that suggests nationalistic answers to political, economic, and social problems. [1] It employs absolutist framings and threat narratives [2] characterized by a rejection of the political establishment. [3] Trump's rhetoric has been identified as using a three-fold rhetorical strategy, that being "it tells audiences what is wrong with the current state of affairs; it identifies the political agents that are responsible for putting individuals and the country in a state of loss and crisis; and it offers an abstract pathway through which people can restore past greatness by opting for a high-risk outsider candidate". Through the creation of a crisis narrative, Trump's rhetoric relies on creating a sense of insecurity among voters that it promises to eradicate for political gain. [4] His absolutist rhetoric emphasizes non-negotiable boundaries and moral outrage at their supposed violation, [5] and heavily favors crowd reaction over veracity, with a large number of falsehoods which Trump presents as facts, [6] which have been described as using the big lie, [7] and firehose of falsehood propaganda technique. [8]
Trump's scenic construction (introduction of characters and setting stage depicting an issue) uses black and white terms like "totally", "absolutely", "every", "complete", and "forever" to describe malevolent forces, or the coming victory. For example, Trump described John Kerry as a "total disaster", and said that Obamacare would "destroy American health care forever". Kenneth Burke referred to this type of "all or none" staging as characteristic of "burlesque" rhetoric. [9]
By 2024, The New York Times reported that Trump's speeches had grown "darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past" and that experts described it as increasingly rambling, tangential, and featuring behavioral disinhibition as a possible consequence of advancing age and cognitive decline. It highlighted an average rally length of 82 minutes compared with 45 minutes in 2016, and a 13% increase in use of all-or-nothing terms like "always" and "never". It also found 32% more negative words than positive words compared with 21% in 2016, and a 69% increase in swearwords. [10]
Research has identified Trump's rhetoric as heavily using vitriol, demeaning language, false equivalency, exclusion, [11] and fearmongering [12] [13] [14] [15] about immigrants, crime, and minorities as essential to his support. [16] [17] Trump uses rhetoric that political scientists have deemed to be both dehumanizing and connected to physical violence by his followers. [18] Sociologist Arlie Hochschild states that emotional themes in Trump's rhetoric are fundamental, writing that his "speeches—evoking dominance, bravado, clarity, national pride, and personal uplift—inspire an emotional transformation," deeply resonating with their "emotional self-interest". [19] [20] One study suggests that the use of spectacular racist rhetoric aided in the significant environmental deregulation that occurred during the first year of the Trump administration. According to the authors, this served political objectives of dehumanizing its targets, eroding democratic norms, and consolidating power by emotionally connecting with and inflaming resentments among the base of followers, but most importantly served to distract media attention from deregulatory policymaking by igniting intense media coverage of the distractions, precisely due to their radically transgressive nature. [21]
According to civil rights lawyer Burt Neuborne and political theorist William E. Connolly, Trump's rhetoric employs tropes similar to those used by fascists in Germany [22] to persuade citizens (at first a minority) to give up democracy, by using a barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, personal invective, threats, xenophobia, national-security scares, religious bigotry, white racism, exploitation of economic insecurity, and a never-ending search for scapegoats. [23] Connolly presents a similar list in his book Aspirational Fascism (2017), adding comparisons of the integration of theatrics and crowd participation with rhetoric, involving grandiose bodily gestures, grimaces, hysterical charges, dramatic repetitions of alternate reality falsehoods, and totalistic assertions incorporated into signature phrases that audiences are strongly encouraged to join in chanting. [24] Despite the similarities, Connolly stresses that Trump is no Nazi but "is rather, an aspirational fascist who pursues crowd adulation, hyperaggressive nationalism, white triumphalism, and militarism, pursues a law-and-order regime giving unaccountable power to the police, and is a practitioner of a rhetorical style that regularly creates fake news and smears opponents to mobilize support for the Big Lies he advances". [22]
Media ethicist Kelly McBride has commented that it is a difficult task for journalists to convey this rhetoric in a succinct way, which results in criticisms of "sanewashing"; that is, that journalists are "selectively quoting his speeches to make them sound more coherent than they actually are" and "packaging Trump’s ideas into news stories as if they are sensible suggestions". [25]
Trumpisms or Trump-speak are the mannerisms, rhetoric, and characteristic phrases or statements of Trump. [26] [27] They have been described as colorful comments that "only Trump could get away with". [28] [29] By 2016, Politico observed that what used to be called Trump's gaffes now had the official designation of "Trumpisms". [30] [31] They have become well-known and are the subject of numerous comedic impersonations that imitate Trump's confident exaggerations and general lack of detail. [32] [33] An MIT student built a Twitter bot that used artificial intelligence to parody the President with "remarkably Trump-like statements". [34] Artificial intelligence has also been used to analyze Trump-speak. [35] Trump's children have acknowledged his atypical speech patterns, with both Ivanka and Eric Trump stating that they share some of their father's Trumpisms. [36]
Journalist Emily Greenhouse noted in a 2015 Bloomberg article that Trump may be the most quotable man in politics and highlighted the following example: [37]
I'm the most successful person ever to run for the presidency, by far. Nobody's ever been more successful than me. I'm the most successful person ever to run. Ross Perot isn't successful like me. Romney—I have a Gucci store that's worth more than Romney. [38]
Trump is known for his use of apophasis. [39] For example, he said of Kim Jong-un, "I would NEVER call him 'short and fat'". [40]
Trumpisms frequently come in the form of insults directed at his critics, labeling them "dogs", "losers", and "enemies of the people". [41] [42]
Trump has been identified as a key figure in increasing political violence in America both for and against him. [43] [44] [45] Trump has embraced extremism, conspiracy theories such as Q-Anon, and far-right militia movements to a greater extent than any modern American president. [46] [47] Trump has espoused dehumanizing, combative, and violent rhetoric and promised retribution against his political enemies. [54] Trump's normalization and revisionist history of the January 6 Capitol attack and grant of clemency to all January 6 rioters including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers was described by counterterrorism researchers as encouraging future political violence, [55] [56] and Trump later suggested the two groups may have a place in the political conversation. [57] [58]
In 2023, Reuters released a series of reports examining the highest levels of politically motivated violence since the 1970s that started in 2016 when Trump first ran for president which has seen relatively more violence directed at people instead of property. Reuters notes a few theories for this increase, including the 'coarsening' political rhetoric of the Trump era. [59] They also found that the people who murdered others for political reasons since January 6, 2021 have mostly been associated with the extreme right. [60]
Trump's rhetoric has been described as using " Argumentum ad baculum ", or an appeal to force and intimidation to coerce behavior. [61] Trump has been noted to use either direct or veiled comments with plausible deniability suggesting the possibility of violence by his supporters. [62] [63] [64] [65] [66] He has been described as using stochastic terrorism. [67] [68] In Politico , Michael Schaffer wrote, "In the 45th and possibly 47th president, America has a leading political figure of unprecedented rhetorical violence". [69]
Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign announcement has been criticized for its dehumanizing rhetoric about Mexican immigrants with his comments that "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best ... They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with [them]. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people". [70] [71]
On February 1, 2016, in response to an individual throwing two tomatoes at Trump, he told his rally at Cedar Rapids, Iowa that should a similar incident happen, the audience should, "knock the crap out of 'em, would you?" [72] [73]
On February 23, 2016, after a heckler was removed from one of his rallies at Las Vegas, Nevada, Trump told the audience that, "I'd like to punch him in the face, I tell you," [74]
As of 2016, stochastic terrorism was an "obscure" academic term according to professor David S. Cohen. [75] During an August 9, 2016 campaign rally, then-candidate Donald Trump remarked "If [Hillary Clinton] gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don't know". These comments were widely condemned as instigating violence, and described by Cohen as "stochastic terrorism", further popularizing the term. [76] [75] [77]
On July 28, 2017, while giving a speech to police officers, Trump said "don't be too nice" when arresting suspects. [78] His remarks were criticized by NYPD commissioner James O'Neill. [79]
On February 5, 2018, Trump implied that Democrats that did not applaud him during his State of The Union may have committed "treason". [80] His comment was criticized by Senator Dick Durbin. [81]
In May 2019, during a Trump campaign rally, an audience member suggested shooting illegal migrants crossing the border, to which Trump responded with a joke, saying, "only in the Panhandle you can get away with that". [82] [83] [84] [85]
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Trump routinely used the phrases "China virus" and "Kung flu" which were scrutinized due to their perceived insensitivity to the rising hate crimes against Asian Americans. [86] [87] Trump frequently criticized Antifa and BLM protestors in language that some found concerning. [88] [89] Trump also repeatedly criticized election methods (especially mail-in voting) in certain states which led to election workers being harassed. [90] Assaults and threats against election workers by supporters of Trump increased significantly after the election inspired by his false claims that the election was stolen, which Reuters called "a campaign of intimidation that is stressing the foundation of American democracy". [91] Reuters explicitly labeled some of the death threats as inspired by Donald Trump. [92] The Justice Department has reviewed over 2000 threats made to election workers, various jurisdictions have brought charges against some of those threatening election workers and 12 states have strengthened laws protecting election workers. [93] [94]
On May 30, 2020, ABC News published a story that found 54 instances of violence, alleged assaults and threats where Trump was explicitly invoked in court records or other documents, with 41 echoing Trump and 13 in defiance to Trump. [95] On January 9, 2021, Vox published "a comprehensive timeline of Trump encouraging hate groups and political violence". [96]
Trump's 2024 campaign has been noted for using increasingly dehumanizing and violent rhetoric against his political enemies. [97] [98] [99] [100] Trump has attacked the witnesses, judges, juries, and families of individuals involved in his criminal trials. [101] [102] [103] As with his previous presidential campaigns, [104] [105] [106] Trump's 2024 campaign has regularly espoused anti-immigrant nativist [107] fearmongering, [a] racial stereotypes, [107] and dehumanized immigrants. [117] [118] [119] [97] [98] [99] Trump's anti-immigration tone has grown harsher compared to his previous time as president. [120] Several of Trump's statements and actions have been accused of echoing Nazi rhetoric, far-right ideology, antisemitism, and white supremacy. [121] [122] According to The New York Times in 2023, scholars are undecided about whether Trump's "rhetorical turn into more fascist-sounding territory is just his latest public provocation of the left, an evolution in his beliefs, or the dropping of a veil". It also reported that some experts concluded that Trump "exhibits traits similar to current strongmen like Viktor Orbán of Hungary or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey". [123] Trump's harsher rhetoric against his political enemies has been described by historians and scholars as populist, authoritarian, fascist, [b] and unlike anything a political candidate has ever said in American history. [124] [120] In the 20 rallies since Trump's debate with Kamala Harris, Politico found his rhetoric, especially around immigrants, getting darker, citing experts who found it strongly echoed authoritarian and Nazi ideology. [132]
During and after his term as President of the United States, Trump made tens of thousands of false or misleading claims. The Washington Post 's fact-checkers documented 30,573 false or misleading claims during his presidential term, an average of about 21 per day. [133] [138] [139] [140] The Toronto Star tallied 5,276 false claims from January 2017 to June 2019, an average of 6.1 per day. [134] Commentators and fact-checkers have described the scale of Trump's mendacity as "unprecedented" in American politics, [146] and the consistency of falsehoods a distinctive part of his business and political identities. [147] Scholarly analysis of Trump's tweets found "significant evidence" of an intent to deceive.
By June 2019, after initially resisting, many news organizations began to describe some of his falsehoods as "lies". [148] The Washington Post said his frequent repetition of claims he knew to be false amounted to a campaign based on disinformation. [149] Trump campaign CEO and presidency chief strategist Steve Bannon said that the press, rather than Democrats, was Trump's primary adversary and "the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit". [150] [151]
As part of their attempts to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Trump and his allies repeatedly falsely claimed there had been massive election fraud and that Trump had won the election. [140] Their effort has been characterized as an implementation of the big lie propaganda technique, [7] and has been described as a "firehose of falsehood". [8]
On June 8, 2023, a grand jury indicted Trump on one count of making "false statements and representations", specifically by hiding subpoenaed classified documents from his own attorney who was trying to find and return them to the government. [152] In August 2023, 21 of Trump's falsehoods about the 2020 election were listed in his Washington, D.C. indictment, [153] while 27 were listed in his Georgia indictment. [154]
In what Philip Rucker describes as "an apparent nod" to Trump, former FBI Director James Comey reflects on "the psychology of liars". Comey recalls being a prosecutor against the Mafia, his time in the Trump administration, and the loyalty pledge he was asked to make but refused:
The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth.... [Liars] lose the ability to distinguish between what's true and what's not," Comey writes. "They surround themselves with other liars.... Perks and access are given to those willing to lie and tolerate lies. This creates a culture, which becomes an entire way of life". [155]
A 2024 New Republic article examined the relationship between lies Trump tells and his approval among voters, suggesting it has a significant impact on his support. [156]
At the beginning of early voting, NPR described Trump as using darker rhetoric including escalating insults, threats and lies. [157]
The Fox News Channel (FNC), commonly known as Fox News, is an American multinational conservative news and political commentary television channel and website based in New York City. It is owned by Fox News Media, which itself is owned by the Fox Corporation. It is the most-watched cable news network in the U.S., and as of 2023 it generates approximately 70% of its parent company's pre-tax profit. The channel broadcasts primarily from studios at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan. Fox News provides a service to 86 countries and territories, with international broadcasts featuring Fox Extra segments during advertising breaks.
A big lie is a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth primarily used as a political propaganda technique. The German expression was first used by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (1925) to describe how people could be induced to believe so colossal a lie because they would not believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Hitler claimed that the technique had been used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic.
Donald John Trump is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who is serving as the 47th president of the United States since 2025. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as the 45th president from 2017 to 2021.
Donald John Trump Jr., often nicknamed Don Jr., is an American businessman. He is the eldest child of U.S. President Donald Trump and his first wife Ivana Trump.
One America News Network (OANN), also known as One America News (OAN), is a far-right, pro-Trump cable channel founded by Robert Herring Sr. and owned by Herring Networks, Inc., that launched on July 4, 2013. The network is headquartered in San Diego, California, and operates news bureaus in Washington, D.C., and New York City.
Trumpism is a political movement in the United States that comprises the political ideologies associated with U.S. President Donald Trump and his political base. It incorporates ideologies such as right-wing populism, right-wing antiglobalism, national conservatism, and neo-nationalism, and features significant illiberal and authoritarian beliefs. Trumpists and Trumpians are terms that refer to individuals exhibiting its characteristics. There is significant academic debate over the prevalence of neo-fascist elements of Trumpism.
The Gateway Pundit (TGP) is an American far-right fake news website. The website is known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories.
Donald Trump's use of social media attracted attention worldwide since he joined Twitter in May 2009. Over nearly twelve years, Trump tweeted around 57,000 times, including about 8,000 times during the 2016 election campaign and over 25,000 times during his presidency. The White House said the tweets should be considered official statements. When Twitter banned Trump from the platform in January 2021 during the final days of his term, his handle @realDonaldTrump had over 88.9 million followers. On November 19, 2022, Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, reinstated his account, although Trump had stated he would not use it in favor of his own social media platform, Truth Social. The first tweet since 2021 was made in August 2023 about his mugshot from Fulton County Jail, but the account remained inactive until he tweeted again in August 2024.
Jack Michael Posobiec III is an American alt-right political activist, television correspondent and presenter, conspiracy theorist, and former United States Navy intelligence officer.
Donald Trump has made tens of thousands of false or misleading claims, including during his first and second terms as President of the United States. Fact-checkers at The Washington Post documented 30,573 false or misleading claims during his presidential term, an average of about 21 per day. The Toronto Star tallied 5,276 false claims from January 2017 to June 2019, an average of six per day. Commentators and fact-checkers have described Trump's mendacity as unprecedented in American politics, and the consistency of falsehoods a distinctive part of his business and political identities. Scholarly analysis of Trump's tweets found significant evidence of an intent to deceive.
Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 5, 2024. The Republican Party's ticket—Donald Trump, who was the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021, and JD Vance, the junior U.S. senator from Ohio—defeated the Democratic Party's ticket—Kamala Harris, the incumbent vice president, and Tim Walz, the 41st governor of Minnesota. Trump and Vance were inaugurated as the 47th president and the 50th vice president on January 20, 2025.
Daniel Dale is a Canadian journalist known for rebutting a large number of false claims made by United States President Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign and presidency. Dale credits an encounter with Toronto Mayor Rob Ford while covering the mayor and his brother Doug for the Toronto Star as the inspiration for developing his brand of adversarial journalism.
A peaceful transition or transfer of power is a concept important to democratic governments in which the leadership of a government peacefully hands over control of government to a newly-elected leadership. This may be after elections or during the transition from a different kind of political regime, such as the post-communist period after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of false allegations that Joe Biden, while he was vice president of the United States, improperly withheld a loan guarantee and took a bribe to pressure Ukraine into firing prosecutor general Viktor Shokin to prevent a corruption investigation of Ukrainian gas company Burisma and to protect his son, Hunter Biden, who was on the Burisma board. As part of efforts by Donald Trump and his campaign in the Trump–Ukraine scandal, which led to Trump's first impeachment, these falsehoods were spread in an attempt to damage Joe Biden's reputation and chances during the 2020 presidential campaign, and later in an effort to impeach him.
Donald Trump, who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021, announced his campaign for the 2024 U.S. presidential election on November 15, 2022. After he won a landslide victory in the 2024 Iowa Republican presidential caucuses, Trump was generally described as being the Republican Party's presumptive nominee. He was officially nominated on July 15, 2024, at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, when he also announced JD Vance, a junior U.S. Senator from Ohio, as the nominee for vice president. The two initially faced off against the presumptive Democraic Party ticket of incumbent President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. However, on July 21, 2024, Biden withdrew from the race, and Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate.
After Democratic nominee Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election, Republican nominee and then-incumbent president Donald Trump pursued an unprecedented effort to overturn the election, with support from his campaign, proxies, political allies, and many of his supporters. These efforts culminated in the January 6 Capitol attack by Trump supporters in an attempted self-coup d'état. Trump and his allies used the "big lie" propaganda technique to promote claims that had been proven false and conspiracy theories asserting the election was stolen by means of rigged voting machines, electoral fraud and an international conspiracy. Trump pressed Department of Justice leaders to challenge the results and publicly state the election was corrupt. However, the attorney general, director of National Intelligence, and director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – as well as some Trump campaign staff – dismissed these claims. State and federal judges, election officials, and state governors also determined the claims were baseless.
Donald Trump, having previously served as the 45th president and currently as the 47th, has elicited highly polarized public perceptions about his performance as a head of state and largely controversial opinions about his temperament and personal conduct while in office.
In the aftermath of the January 6 United States Capitol attack, after drawing widespread condemnation from the U.S. Congress, members of his administration, and the media, 45th U.S. President Donald Trump released a video-taped statement on January 7, reportedly to stop the resignations of his staff and the threats of impeachment or removal from office. In the statement, he condemned the violence at the U.S. Capitol, saying that "a new administration will be inaugurated", which was widely seen as a concession, and his "focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly, and seamless transition of power" to the Joe Biden administration. Vanity Fair reported that Trump was at least partially convinced to make the statement by U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who told Trump a sufficient number of Senate Republicans would support removing him from office unless he conceded. Kayleigh McEnany, the White House Press Secretary, had attempted to distance the administration from the rioters' behavior in a televised statement earlier in the day. On January 9, The New York Times reported that Trump had told White House aides he regretted committing to an orderly transition of power and would never resign from office. In a March 25 interview on Fox News, Trump defended the Capitol attackers, saying they were patriots who posed "zero threat", and he criticized law enforcement for "persecuting" the rioters.
There has been significant academic and political debate over whether Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th president of the United States, can be considered a fascist, especially during his 2024 presidential campaign. Critics of Trump have drawn comparisons between him and fascist leaders over authoritarian actions and rhetoric, while others have argued that Trump is not fascist but an authoritarian populist, or have accused critics of using the term as an insult rather than making legitimate comparisons.
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Its leaders shamelessly propagated former President Donald Trump's "Big Lie"
Even if his racially-charged fear-mongering fails to deliver victory, the party image it conveys will not soon fade
Trump's support is thus uniquely tied to animus toward minority groups. Our findings provide insights into the social divisions underlying American politics and the role of elite rhetoric in translating animus into political support.
In the penultimate year before Trump's reelection campaign, the strongest predictors of supporting Trump, in order of magnitude, were political party, xenophobia, identifying as African American (negative), political ideology, Christian nationalism, and Islamophobia.
At the heart of today's eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him. He has long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threatening to shoot looters and undocumented migrants, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker and suggesting that a general he deemed disloyal be executed.
Analysts and strategists see Mr. Trump's pivot toward the far right as a tactic to re-create political momentum ... Mr. Trump has long flirted with the fringes of American society as no other modern president has, openly appealing to prejudice based on race, religion, national origin and sexual orientation, among others ... Mr. Trump's expanding embrace of extremism has left Republicans once again struggling to figure out how to distance themselves from him.
Trump has amplified social media accounts that promote QAnon, which grew from the far-right fringes of the internet to become a fixture of mainstream Republican politics ... In his 2024 campaign, Trump has ramped up his combative rhetoric with talk of retribution against his enemies. He recently joked about the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi and suggested that retired Gen. Mark Milley, a former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, should be executed for treason.
While speaking of Laken Riley – a 22-year-old nursing student from Georgia allegedly murdered by a Venezuelan immigrant in the country illegally – Trump said some immigrants were sub-human. "The Democrats say, 'Please don't call them animals. They're humans.' I said, 'No, they're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals,'" said Trump, president from 2017 to 2021.
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: CS1 maint: url-status (link)Recently, however, his celebrations of the Capitol riot and those who took part in it have become more public as he has promoted a revisionist history of the attack and placed it at the heart of his 2024 presidential campaign.
President Donald Trump has suggested that far-right militias such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers may have a role to play in public life. Trump was asked during a press conference in the Roosevelt Room on Tuesday if there's room for the leaders of such groups in the political conversation. "We'll have to see," said Trump, according to Politico.
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: CS1 maint: url-status (link)President Donald Trump on his first full day in office Tuesday defended his decision to grant clemency to people convicted of assaulting police officers during the 2021 attack on the Capitol and suggested there could be a place in American politics for the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, extremist groups whose leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy against the U.S.
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: CS1 maint: url-status (link)Since the start of his U.S. presidential campaign in 2016, former president Donald Trump has frequently used language that encourages violence or threats of violence against a wide range of persons, groups, and communities ... One of the most cited examples of stochastic terrorism is then president Trump's news conferences, public speeches, and social-media communications in the weeks leading up to the January 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol.
Does Trump mean it more than any of the others? His defenders say no, it's just the rhetorical style of someone trained outside professional politics. But people know it only takes one person to interpret things literally. And the past few years have offered a lot more than one example.
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)The people who administer U.S. elections – from poll workers and ballot counters to county clerks and secretaries of state – have endured a year of terroristic threats from supporters of former President Donald Trump, inspired by his false assertions of widespread fraud in the 2020 vote. The result, as Reuters chronicled in this agenda-setting series of reports, has been a campaign of intimidation that is stressing the foundation of American democracy.
Election officials and their families are living with threats of hanging, firing squads, torture and bomb blasts, interviews and documents reveal. The campaign of fear, sparked by Trump's voter-fraud falsehoods, threatens the U.S. electoral system.
Battling in a tight race, the Trump-Vance team is sharpening the anti-immigrant nativism that fueled the former president's initial rise to power in 2016, seizing on scare tactics, falsehoods and racial stereotypes.
Fear-mongering, and demagoguing on the issue of immigrants, has been Mr. Trump's preferred speed since he announced his first candidacy for the presidency in June 2015, and he has often found a receptive audience for it.
It's been understood for some time that there is no limit on the fearmongering Donald Trump will deploy when it comes to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Most politicians court voters by offering them an optimistic vision, peddling hope and promises of change. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is seeking to sweep away Trump's somber picture of America in crisis by invoking joy and a new kind of "opportunity economy." Trump, however, mostly dishes out fear and threats.
It has long been a truism that politicians lie, but with the entry of Donald Trump into the U.S. political domain, the frequency, degree, and impact of lying in politics are now unprecedented [...] Donald Trump is different. By all metrics and counting schemes, his lies are off the charts. We simply have not seen such an accomplished and effective liar before in U.S. politics.
... a president who is delivering untruths on an unprecedented scale. Mr Trump did this both while running for president, and he has continued to do so in office. There is no precedent for this amount of untruths in the US
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