The Voice of the People: Populism and Donald Trump’s Use of Informal Voice

TY - JOUR

T1 - The Voice of the People

T2 - Populism and Donald Trump’s Use of Informal Voice

AU - Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Jens

PY - 2024/6

Y1 - 2024/6

N2 - Many studies have examined characteristic verbal aspects of Donald J. Trump’s political communication, from his authoritarian rhetoric to his preference for short words and simple sentences, as expressions of his populism. This article focuses on his use of non-verbal voice quality. In analyzing the “Trump rallies” and other materials from his successful campaigning before the 2016 United States presidential election, I argue that Trump’s evocative and meaningful uses of pitch, amplitude, speech rate, rhythm, and other vocal measures combine to make his paralanguage exceptionally and counter-normatively informal, and that this informality amplifies his explicitly populist messaging. I conclude by suggesting that Trump’s informal voice solves an important problem for him: It allows him to express his populism with a deeply personal undertone, and thereby potentially to make his claims to popular identification ring intuitively true.

AB - Many studies have examined characteristic verbal aspects of Donald J. Trump’s political communication, from his authoritarian rhetoric to his preference for short words and simple sentences, as expressions of his populism. This article focuses on his use of non-verbal voice quality. In analyzing the “Trump rallies” and other materials from his successful campaigning before the 2016 United States presidential election, I argue that Trump’s evocative and meaningful uses of pitch, amplitude, speech rate, rhythm, and other vocal measures combine to make his paralanguage exceptionally and counter-normatively informal, and that this informality amplifies his explicitly populist messaging. I conclude by suggesting that Trump’s informal voice solves an important problem for him: It allows him to express his populism with a deeply personal undertone, and thereby potentially to make his claims to popular identification ring intuitively true.

KW - Trump

KW - populism

KW - voice

KW - Prosody

KW - Donald Trump

KW - Populism

KW - Voice

KW - Communication

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85186898532&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/s12115-024-00969-7

DO - 10.1007/s12115-024-00969-7

M3 - Journal article

SN - 0147-2011

VL - 61

SP - 289

EP - 302

JO - Society

JF - Society

IS - 3

ER -