Quantifying the Uniqueness of Donald Trump in Presidential Discourse
Karen Zhou Alexander A. Meitus Milo Chase Grace Wang Anne Mykland William Howell Chenhao Tan
Does Donald Trump speak differently from other presidents? If so, in what
ways? Are these differences confined to any single medium of communication? To
investigate these questions, this paper introduces a novel metric of uniqueness
based on large language models, develops a new lexicon for divisive speech, and
presents a framework for comparing the lexical features of political opponents.
Applying these tools to a variety of corpora of presidential speeches, we find
considerable evidence that Trump's speech patterns diverge from those of all
major party nominees for the presidency in recent history. Some notable
findings include Trump's employment of particularly divisive and antagonistic
language targeting of his political opponents and his patterns of repetition
for emphasis. Furthermore, Trump is significantly more distinctive than his
fellow Republicans, whose uniqueness values are comparably closer to those of
the Democrats. These differences hold across a variety of measurement
strategies, arise on both the campaign trail and in official presidential
addresses, and do not appear to be an artifact of secular time trends.