Donald Trump: Now, if I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath.

Brooke Gladstone: Trump's comments at an Ohio rally set the stage for a 'did he or didn't he' debate in the press.

Jennifer Mercieca: He is often giving the wink-wink nod that denies the thing that he says that he's saying.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Also on the show, the Kremlin is likely cooking up fake journalists to spread fake stories about corruption in Ukraine.

Steven Lee Myers: The Russians have this idea that if you just flood the zone with this stuff, it doesn't matter if it's true, it's just to create noise that can drown out the truth.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, a glimpse into an occupied region of Ukraine where voting in Russia's so-called presidential election often involved-

Shaun Walker: Election officials coming into people's homes with a ballot box and accompanied by a soldier carrying a machine gun.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

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Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media, I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. At a rally in Ohio last weekend, Donald Trump made some threats and promises with regard to the state of the auto industry, or did he?

Donald Trump: If you're listening, President Xi, those big monster car manufacturing plants that you're building in Mexico right now, we're going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line and you're not going to be able to sell those cars if I get elected. Now if I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath. That's going to be the least of it. It's going to be a bloodbath for the country. That'll be the least of it.

Brooke Gladstone: The Biden campaign immediately condemned Trump for inciting political violence. Trump responded that he was merely referring to the economy. For days, the discourse was consumed with the, 'it's a blue dress, no, it's a gold dress-like' quarrel.

Jennifer Mercieca: He was obviously talking about the auto sector. The mainstream media took the remarks out of context.

?Speaker 3: What I heard was a continuation of the same rhetoric, the same endorsement of political violence that we've seen from Donald Trump.

?Speaker 4: I think what he was saying at the rally reflects what most of the American people understand and believe, a bloodbath in the auto industry.

?Speaker 5: This is violence, violence, violence.

Brooke Gladstone: While you may be tempted to ignore the latest viral moment, there will be plenty more till November, we think now is as good a time as any to review our notes from the last eight years of watching Trump do politics. Because not only do we need to hear what he's saying, we need to remember how to listen to him. Jennifer Mercieca is a scholar of rhetoric and professor of communications at Texas A&M University and the author of the book Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump. "Lately," she says, "his language has intensified."

Jennifer Mercieca: It's a disjointed speech. He's moving from topic to topic, stream-of-consciousness style. It's difficult as an audience member to know if he's threatening the US as a whole, the auto industry, the economy. In the end, I think it doesn't matter because, in all instances, it's anti-democratic. You don't run for political power by making threats.

Brooke Gladstone: In a recent interview with Aaron Rupar in Public Notice, you said that Trump's used many of the same strategies for years. In your book, you analyze half a dozen of them. Can we start with a tactic you call reification?

Jennifer Mercieca: Sure. Reification is treating people as objects. It comes from the Latin word for res, which means thing. You reify when you treat people as dangerous objects that have less rights than real people do.

Brooke Gladstone: In 2016, Trump called immigrants 'snakes.'

Jennifer Mercieca: They were objects. They were reified as less than human. What he's done this time is he calls them vermin. Vermin are not just animals, they are objects of disgust. Crossing the line from treating people as objects to objects of disgust is noteworthy in the history of genocidal rhetoric. The classic example is, of course, Hitler calling Jews vermin. In Rwanda, we saw the same kind of reification leading to genocide.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's move on to some of the other strategies you've analyzed. There's Ad Populum, and there's also American exceptionalism. You say they work in tandem to explain his appeal to his followers.

Jennifer Mercieca: Ad Populum is appealing to the wisdom of the crowd, his crowd. Donald Trump constantly praises them.

Donald Trump: Now we have some special people here. You know who the special people are? All of you. That's who the special-

Brooke Gladstone: Ad Populum fundamentally boils down to praising the people who love you.

Jennifer Mercieca: That's right.

Brooke Gladstone: American exceptionalism is something that he claims to have and that he shares with his followers.

Jennifer Mercieca: American exceptionalism, historians and political scientists would tell you that America is just different. We have a certain set of values and ways of being that just make us fundamentally different from other nations. American exceptionalism can be seen as a goal. Reagan's City on a Hill is a classic example of American exceptionalism. When Donald Trump uses it, it's very different. He uses it to speak about himself personally. He says-

Donald Trump: On June 14th, Flag Day, my birthday.

Jennifer Mercieca: -as the apotheosis of American exceptionalism, he is a winner. He boils down American exceptionalism to the question of winning or losing.

Brooke Gladstone: We're going to be unpacking that a bit more in a couple of minutes. First, I want to hit another strategy, one of our favorites, paralipsis.

Jennifer Mercieca: It is colloquially understood as, 'I'm not saying, I'm just saying.' The translation in ancient Greek is 'to leave to the side.' It's a way to say two things at once.

Brooke Gladstone: For instance, we'll just leave to the side the criticisms we might lodge against my opponent for being an alcoholic. It's not saying the thing that he's actually saying. How does Trump use it?

Jennifer Mercieca: He gave a speech in Ohio where he had the Governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, come up on stage. She said a couple of nice things about Trump. Then after she left the stage, Trump said-

Donald Trump: You're not allowed to say it, so I will not. You're not allowed to say she's beautiful so I'm not going to say that. I will not say it.

Jennifer Mercieca: That works for Trump in a couple of ways. One, it's funny and his audience loves to laugh. Two, it makes it appear as though he is a real truth teller because he's telling you this obvious truth, even though he knows that's not politically correct. If he's willing to say this, then, of course, he will say all kinds of other truths. It also lets you feel connected to him. It feels like you know the real Trump but he uses that same strategy when he incites violence, when he circulates rumor, conspiracy.

Brooke Gladstone: In Louisville was at a rally and he said-

Donald Trump: Don't hurt him. Don't hurt him. See if I say, go get him, I get in trouble with the press, the most dishonest human beings in the world.

Brooke Gladstone: The rally attendees beat up the protesters. The protesters filed lawsuits against Trump. The judge allowed the case, but when it was decided, they used the transcript of what Trump said. He said, don't hurt them, even though he clearly didn't mean it so the case was dismissed.

Jennifer Mercieca: That's how plausible deniability works. There's ambiguity and that perhaps he didn't mean what it appears that he meant. Going back to the question of bloodbath, did he really mean that there would be a bloodbath if he's not elected or was he using language metaphorically?

Brooke Gladstone: As he did in the speech prior to the January 6th insurrection, you suggest that this use of paralipsis actually kind of reveals his whole rhetorical strategy?

Jennifer Mercieca: It does. To me, it's just such a great example because he tells you that he knows he's doing it. Donald Trump is often saying two things at once. He is often giving the wink-wink nod that denies the thing that he says that he's saying.

Brooke Gladstone: Now I want to return to this business of being a winner or a loser. It's in the context of Biden's rhetoric. In Virginia this past February at a retreat for House Democrats, Biden called Trump a loser, "In 2023, we won every close race. When voters had a choice between what we stand for and what Trump and MAGA Republicans stand for, we win." He's been repeating that over and over.

Joe Biden: The legal path just took Trump back to the truth, that I'd won the election and he was a loser. The only loser I see is Donald Trump. He's a loser.

[applause]

Brooke Gladstone: You said you were actually waiting for the day when Biden finally would call Trump a loser.

Jennifer Mercieca: Autocrats seize power over nations by telling the nation that there is massive chaos and that they alone can fix it. They are strong. It's an act. So Donald Trump is constantly trying to show the nation how strong he is, constantly building himself up as a winner.

Brooke Gladstone: He has a long track record of losing, but he's convinced his followers he's an authentic winner.

Jennifer Mercieca: That's right.

Brooke Gladstone: Being a winner is important to those followers.

Jennifer Mercieca: What scholars in political psychology have found is that Donald Trump supporters uniquely have what's called a right-wing authoritarian personality. They've been studying right-wing authoritarianism as a personality since World War II. What they found is that those folks are very defensive of group norms, very attached to hierarchy, do not like change. They want things to be simplified, black and white, and look to a strong leader.

When Biden points out, actually, Donald Trump is pretty weak. He's not very healthy. He can't run a marathon. He can't lift weights. It seems childish to point out that he's a loser. In decorous, people wouldn't normally do that in American politics, but this isn't a normal moment in American politics.

Brooke Gladstone: How many people in the electorate actually have right-wing authoritarian tendencies?

Jennifer Mercieca: Scholars estimate that about 40%. Not all of the 40% are actively using that to make decisions, but that their tendencies can be activated as a response to threat, status threat, hierarchy threat, group norm threat. You wonder, "Why are we doing this culture war stuff? Who cares if a transgender person endorses a beer product? Is that really a thing?" It is a thing for activating right-wing authoritarianism because it's destabilizing for how they understand the world.

Brooke Gladstone: Aside from pointing out that Trump is a loser, what would Biden's most effective rhetorical strategies be?

Jennifer Mercieca: For Biden voters, the argument is that Donald Trump was a calamitous failure of a president. He said, "I don't want to be presidential. That's boring. I want to be modern-day presidential," is what he called it. He wanted to be outrageous, to attract our attention, to polarize us so that we were always arguing about him. That was all that mattered to Trump, was that we were talking about him.

Brooke Gladstone: He constantly offered a hero narrative, steeped himself in the language of exceptionalism and us versus them, and so on.

Jennifer Mercieca: All presidents use a hero narrative. They all say that the world is in crisis, and I'm the right hero for the moment. Joe Biden has an opportunity to be another leader like that. When he took office, he promised, in his inaugural address, to defend the constitution and defend democracy. He used the word democracy 11 times in that speech. That's a heroic moment.

Brooke Gladstone: You observed that Joe Biden has framed this election as democracy versus autocracy, and Trump has had to reckon with that which you say is really unusual.

Jennifer Mercieca: He's a master at controlling the frames that we use to talk about things. He's being investigated, it's a witch hunt. He frames his opposition, "They're crooked." He's excellent at frame warfare. Joe Biden has, since 2020, defined his whole motive for running for president as his goal is to save democracy from autocracy. Donald Trump has stepped into that frame and is arguing within it now.

At first, he's saying democracy is not important. He said, "The role of the president is to defend the border, not democracy, not the Constitution." Then, he gets criticism for that. Now he's agreeing with the frame that says that it's democracy versus autocracy, that fascism is a threat in America, but he says that Joe Biden is actually the threat.

Donald Trump: They're willing to violate the US Constitution at levels never seen before. Joe Biden is a threat to democracy.

Brooke Gladstone: Which was classic Trump.

Jennifer Mercieca: It is. Accusing the accuser, it's a figure of speech called tu quoque. It's an appeal to hypocrisy saying, "You have no standing to enter this debate. You are not a credible source. In fact, anything you accuse me of doing is actually what you do."

Brooke Gladstone: Final words in this rhetorical arena, we've gone through a bunch of Trump's strategies. What can be Biden's response?

Jennifer Mercieca: I would say, framing this as a moment of choosing democracy versus autocracy and then not holding back from pointing out that Donald Trump's a loser.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Thank you so much.

Jennifer Mercieca: It's been my pleasure. Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Jennifer Mercieca is a scholar of rhetoric and a professor of communication at Texas A&M University, and author of the book Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, the fake journalists employed in Putin's propaganda war.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.