Donald Trump and the Paranoid Style in the 2020 Presidential Campaign

I began writing this essay the day after Donald John Trump turned a crowd in Washington, DC, into a mob. Trump told his listeners they were special people who had been savaged by the electoral fates. He decried “weak and pathetic Republicans” and detailed alleged “gimmicks” and “setups” orchestrated by Democrats behind the people’s backs. Trump’s speech made his audience angry—his favorite emotion—so they quickly departed for an afternoon of mayhem and expiation. One police officer died doing his duty resisting the rioters, a martyr before the altar of Donald Trump’s ego.

I write not as a psychohistorian but as one friendly with that enterprise. My training is in communication and rhetorical studies, yet I have been a member of the International Society of Political Psychology for 40 years, having had the honor of serving on convention panels with Stanley Renshon, Vamık Volkan, Bruce Mazlish, Jerrold Post, and others associated with this journal. In terms of research, I have spent much of my time doing formal content analysis, which has brought me to the intersection of history and human psychology. I have found the work of Louis Gottschalk, Phillip Tetlock, Peter Suedfeld, Douglas Biber, and David Winter to be especially enriching.

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I did not intend to write a book about Donald Trump, but I did because I could not explain why 63 million Americans voted for him. Trump and Us: What He Says and Why People Listen (2020) explores Trump’s emotional orchestration of almost half the nation. The book argues that Trump made people feel passionate instead of listless, clear-headed rather than foggy, vital instead of resigned. Other politicians, especially populists, had used these strategies before, but none more adroitly or with a better delivery system (Twitter) than Trump.

Trump and Us uses computerized language analysis to examine Trump’s linguistic choices. The book examines over 1,000 of Trump’s statements produced during the 2016 presidential campaign—speeches, ads, debates, and press interviews—comparing them to what Hillary Clinton said in 2016 and to the rhetoric contained in some 50,000 documents produced during presidential elections from 1948 to 2012 by major party candidates.

One of the book’s main arguments draws on the work of Richard Hofstadter, who brilliantly described what he called “the paranoid style,” a mode of argument that captures “the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” that made populists influential (“The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s Magazine, 1964). In this brief definition, one senses Donald Trump’s presence. For Hofstadter, the paranoid style was on display during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s histrionic crusades in the 1950s as he sought to evict Communist infiltrators from the government, academia, and arts.

Paranoid personality disorder is, of course, a serious illness affecting some 4.4% of the U.S. population (see my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases). Hofstadter had something less debilitating in mind, a way of operating in the world that mimics some of that disease’s characteristics. For example, the paranoid style is at once explanatory and compensatory. It tells us why things have gone wrong (i.e., malicious forces surrounding us) and how they can be ameliorated (i.e., by deepening our attachments to a pre-set axiology or highly valued person).

Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood report that roughly half the U.S. citizenry embraces “magical thinking” of this sort because it provides them with “compelling explanations for otherwise confusing or ambiguous events” (“Conspiracy Theories and the Paranoid Style(s) of Mass Opinion,” American Journal of Political Science,

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Vol. 58, No. 4, 2014, 964). In 2015, Donald Trump sensed a roiling in American society that was leading to a loss of felt identity among rural, blue-collar, and evangelical Americans. Trump exploited these feelings on his way to the White House.

Although Richard Hofstadter described the general characteristics of the paranoid style he did not operationalize it. I did so by using DICTION (dictionsoftware.com), a software program employed in some 700 studies in the humanities and social sciences. DICTION examines a text with 10,000 search words housed in 35 dictionaries and then links these word lists into five master variables: certainty, realism, optimism, activity, and commonality. These indices are especially helpful for probing political discourse, drawing as they do on the work of Charles Osgood, James David Barber, John Dewey, and Robert Bellah.

In measuring the paranoid style, I posited three distinct dimensions: one, a sense of isolation—language of exclusion and subversion, of being disconnected from other people and familiar places; two, a sense of affliction—language emphasizing hardship and aggression, of being denied one’s rights or of being unjustly accused; and three, a sense of indignation—language asserting that one has been personally injured and treated in immoral ways. These axes are distinct from one another (i.e., they have low intercorrelations) but, when combined, tell this story: I have been cast adrift, beset by dark and malign forces, and am outraged this has happened.

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Figure 1: Use of the Paranoid Style in Campaign Speeches over Time

In 2016, Donald Trump deployed this style four times more often than his predecessors (see Figure 1). Amazingly, he increased his use even more in 2020 when running against Joe Biden and when attacking the nation’s press. He took on the press because it is so popular, regularly commanding audiences that Trump himself wanted to command. The media are also relentless, available 24/7 to all who have eyeballs. Like Trump himself, the media try to master each and every moment to dominate people’s sensibilities. It is therefore a perfect foil for Trump, letting him play the man-against-the-house.

When describing the press in one speech, for example, Trump says “if you disagree with them, they try to humiliate you, smear you, and cancel you… they purge newsrooms of reporters who do not swear allegiance to their false narratives” (Trump speech in Newtown, Pennsylvania, October 31, 2020). Here, Trump posits a tortured world where nothing makes sense. The media come at you for no good reason, producing false narratives that people somehow believe. The press produces nothing of material value, says Trump, but somehow retains power even when its ratings are lousy. The world of media is a world of appearances and, therefore, a world that a cynic like Donald Trump can fully understand.

When speaking, Trump’s fragile self is always on display. Large crowds of adoring fans give him an opportunity for displacement and for staving off serious introspection. Trump loves his

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fans because they bear witness to a self that has not changed a whit since the age of 15. Trump tells his audiences he is wonderful on the off-chance that they will find him adequate. So, for example, he tells them, “I’m good at fundraising. I could be the greatest fundraiser in history… I could raise more money than anybody in the history of politics. But I don’t want to call these people and say, ‘Do me a favor, the head of Goldman Sachs’” (Trump speech in Janesville, Wisconsin, October 17, 2020).

As we see here, the paranoid style exposes a strangely bifurcated ego: Trump is the world’s best fundraiser even though, he later admits, Joe Biden has raised more campaign money. Trump, in contrast, has lost billions in unrequested donations but still has his integrity. Trump revels in his hold on power even while admitting that “fake news” has countered his every move. Throughout his public statements, the feckless Trump and the omnipotent Trump are on stage together.

Given Donald Trump’s peculiarities, it is tempting to read his soul through his rhetoric. Books by Bandy Lee (The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, 2017), Allen Francis (Twilight of American Sanity, 2017), and others have put Trump on the therapist’s couch to describe a range of pathologies: extreme present hedonism, blocked empathy, antisocial personality disorder, and run-of-the-mill cognitive impairments, sociopathy, and anxiety syndromes. However, Donald Trump’s use of the paranoid style may also be connected to certain societal changes that have grown apace over the last half-century, attesting to Trump’s ability to reproduce what the average American is thinking. In short, Donald Trump may be more similar to us than we might like to admit.

To get a sense of how voters understand U.S. politics, I have spent considerable time over the years analyzing some 12,000 letters to the editor written in 12 small American cities during presidential campaigns between 1948 and the present (see Roderick P. Hart’s Civic Hope: How Ordinary Americans Keep Democracy Alive, 2018). People who write letters to the editor are a special breed, but my surveys show them to be quite similar to their friends and neighbors with three exceptions. They are slightly older, have lived in town a little longer, and care much more about civic affairs. Otherwise, the letters I studied provide a broad understanding of how voters conceptualize American democracy.

My studies show that letter writers have made increasing

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use of the paranoid style over the years (although Donald Trump still outdoes them two-to-one). More and more, the writers report being hounded by life, less at home in their cities. They say too many people are moving to town and too few of the old mores are being observed. Global forces are changing their lives, such as where they work, the kind of food at the grocery store, and what their children are learning in school. They also report a hollowing-out of the traditions that nurtured them, forcing unwanted compromises upon them and their families. The letters increasingly contain Trump-style themes of isolation, affliction, and indignation, suggesting that Trump may be boththe recipient and the producer of the paranoid style.

As of this writing, Donald Trump has come and gone. He used the paranoid style to become president but it only had a shelf-life of four years. Because that style is portable, however, we must be on the lookout for others who would use it to sow seeds of hate. We must also worry about ourselves and how easy it is to introduce paranoid themes into our everyday conversations. All of us can spot an enemy that others cannot see, feel persecuted for having a bad night’s sleep, and reject Americans who are not like us. All these things are possible because the paranoid style is an obliging creature. For countless reasons, we must not oblige it.

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