The Rhetoric of Donald Trump

Throughout this election cycle, Trump has become infamous for many things (his hair, his strange relationship with his daughter, his odd undying love for Putin), but above all for his taglines - "make American great again", "build a wall and make Mexico pay for it", "I love women", and so forth. Curious as to just how radical his rhetoric has been, I did a bit of analysis on both word frequency and average grade level, comparing a collection of his speeches with past presidential speeches. The difference was stark. Trump's speeches are on average less than half the average grade level (that is, the number of years of education needed to understand a text) than average presidential speech.

Even more telling, however, were the most frequently used words. I removed a standard list of stop words (that is, the most common words in the English language) from the results to improve the data. Normally, words such as "I", "we", and "you" are included in this list. However, Trump's usage of "I" represented such a high percentage in comparison to even the second most used word ("you") that I felt it statistically significant and worth retaining. By comparison, in past presidential speeches "our" is the most common word.