The Racist Pulpit:Donald Trump, Whiteness, and the Restoration of the Mythical America

William NowlingCOM 7250 / K. Jakes

Seminar PaperDecember 16, 2015

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Donald Trump has had an enigmatic rise to the top of the contenders’ heap for the

Republican Party’s nomination for president of the United States. This ascent has come despite

having never held public office and among a field of candidates for whom their collective

political lineage is impressive. In many respects, Trump’s ability to build and maintain his lead

runs counter to the prevailing notion among political observers and commentators in the popular

media who predict—even if by persistently missing the mark—his imminent demise, and it

stands in stark contrast to the more mainstream attributes manifested by his opponents. Trump is

a paradox. Where other candidates have eschewed the coarse language embraced by hyper-

partisan social media denizens, Trump has found a prism through which to focus his braggadocio

style. While Republican presidential candidates have cozied up to the conservative-leaning FOX

News Channel, Trump has gone to war with it and its most popular news anchor. When the

Republican Party and its adherents struggle against accusations of waging a war on women,

Trump tacks hard against that prevailing wind, running neither from his misogynistic comments

of the past nor his inclination toward female invective as evidenced in his comments against

fellow Republican Carly Fiorina or his presumptive Democratic opponent Hillary Rodham

Clinton. But nothing epitomizes this dichotomy more than Trump’s white-hot statements about

Mexican immigrants: at a time when senators such as Ted Cruz, a Hispanic American, and

Marco Rubio, a Cubano, struggle to connect with the fastest-growing group of ethnic voters,

Trump is building physical and metaphorical walls around Hispanic and Latino Americans. Any

one of these positions is enough to scuttle the best-managed national campaign, yet Trump

continues to endure, which begs a simple question: why?

It is too easy to dismiss Trump as a political anomaly and many observers have. They

argue that his personal wealth, which Trump himself boasts is nearly $9 billion, (Trump, 2015,

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lns. 413-414), is a crutch he uses to avoid having to raise campaign contributions from wealthy

donors and special interest groups, thereby eliminating a necessity to moderate his views to

attract and sustain financial interest. Critics point to his ostentatious lifestyle of opulent jets with

gold-plated safety belts festooned with his family crest (Solotaroff, p. 42), his decades-long

courtship for popular media attention, and his multiple marriages as derivative of a culture that is

always on, always plugged in and always looking for vicarious ways in which to be entertained.

True as these appraisals might be, they still beg a deeper critique. In this paper, I examine

Trump’s speech announcing the launch of his campaign seeking the Republican nomination for

president of the United States. I will argue Trump, rather than being a ranting demagogue whose

flame will begin to soon flicker, is a sophisticated rhetor whose words and actions are skillfully

chosen to connect with a broad subsection of the Republican primary voting population that fears

a loss of standing and power in contemporary American society. This sense of loss is manifested

in the demographically changing political landscape that challenges the social and ideological

center of these primary voters’ perception of gender dominance and privilege, or “whiteness,”

which Trump seizes upon in his framing of Mexican immigration and the emasculation of United

States as a world economic Superpower to personify of this loss of power. While Trump’s logic

many be tortured, his intent is clear: strong, external forces have seduced America, taking its jobs

and prowess while a corrupt political class has allowed it to happen, if not directly abetting those

forces. From there, I argue Trump’s rhetoric can be seen in light of a Burkean pentad where he

positions himself as the candidate strong enough and smart enough to vanquish the external

threat, thus restoring integrity from within. I conclude that Trump employs dramatic techniques

to create an audience that exists simultaneously on the precipice of the America’s decline and the

beginning of a quest to restore the mythical America. As a coda to this essay, I compare my

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analysis of Trump with Burke’s critique of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf to show that society’s

tendency toward establishing a dominant political world view is based on racial identity,

privilege, and perceived right of the dominant racial power. They are the unifying sources of the

Republican’s success as a rhetor.

Since 2008, the conservative base has shifted further to the right while the voters in the

United States have become increasingly progressive. Political observers have attributed this shift

in the Republican Party to increased anger and skepticism of government power and the

established political class. I argue in this paper that the explanation for this shift is based upon

white, lower middle-class male voters’ fear of loss of whiteness and political hegemony in the

face of a diverse non-white America quickly becoming the majority. Rather than being a new

development, it is the result of calculated actions embraced by conservatives in the wake of Civil

Rights victories of the latter half of the twentieth century. Trump, in his announcement speech,

is but the inheritor of that ideological tradition. He stokes these sentiments as he frames the

current political situation; his connection with voters is one of racial identity (white) which is

implied by his rhetoric. Racial identity in Trump’s announcement speech is the glue that binds

the conservative Right to his candidacy and explains why he continues to lead in the polls despite

general, mainstream disapproval of his character as a candidate and the means by which he

campaigns.

Analysis of Trump’s announcement speech is a proper text for my criticism because it

offers a timely examination of the rhetoric of the conservative Right, especially amongst its Tea

Party and more radical adherents. Like presidents themselves, presidential candidates command

media attention from around globe. Their campaigns are relentlessly covered by the popular

media and their speeches can have impact far beyond the audiences that heard them. Bostdorff

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(1994) argues that presidents are the most influential speakers in society whose words have the

ability to “shape what matters and what does not” and to give political reality or identity for

events and issues (p. 3). In a similar way, presidential candidates help “shape what matters” for

their supporters and undecided voters. Trump, by extension, is defining the political reality for

his supporters in a way that presidents do for an entire country. Providing a critical analysis of

Trump’s announcement speech offers a glimpse into an important audience to see the issues at

work and, by so doing, helps further scholarship by answering the “why” questions about his

strength in the polls and within a key base of the Conservative Right.

I walk with Burke in holding that the role of the critic, generally, and the aim of my

criticism here, is to perfect society, to offer analysis and explanation as to the why and how a

discourse works for the speaker who gives it and the audience(s) who hear and are affected by it.

I also think the critic owes his audience a disclosure of bias and predetermination. Specifically

to the task as hand, I offer my criticism from the perspective of a white male who has, at

different times over the years of my professional endeavors, helped create the very kind of

rhetoric under scrutiny here. It is a fair question, indeed, for the reader to ask whether my

scholarship is blemished at the outset. I am also cognizant that in addressing issues of whiteness

as a white male requires deference to and careful attention of any positions of privilege on my

part. Readers are right to ask what influence whiteness has on my perspectives and arguments.

My aim is to offer an analysis as free of such encumbrances as possible but I admit it is

impossible to escape entirely the central pull of whiteness. Yet I strongly believe, perhaps more

so as also a one-time conservative, I have obligation to ask these questions and offer this critique

if only to assuage my own biases and angst over why I once thought as those who follow Trump.

Trump the candidate says much about the society in which with live, and the vicarious pleasure

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many take in following the exploits of popular media mavens famous for, well, being famous. If

Barack Obama cracked the racial ceiling as the first post-modern, non-white American president,

Donald Trump could very well be the harbinger of the new era of reality entertainment where the

focus of reflexive interludes are no longer about the difficulties of being a beauty pageant parent

or the dangers of living off the grid in the wilds of Alaska, but reflections on what it takes to best

this strange survivor’s island where the prize for being the last one standing is the highest office

in the land.

Presidential candidates choose carefully the words and places of their campaign launch

addresses, mindful of history’s ever-present gaze. Senator John F. Kennedy began his bid for

“the most powerful office in the Free World” (Kennedy, 1960, para. 2) by recounting his service

to his county in wartime and peace which had taken him to the four winds only to return him,

again, to an America whose destiny rests “in fulfilling a noble and historic role as a defender of

freedom in time of maxim peril—and of the American people as confident, courageous and

persevering” (para. 7). Former Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton stood at the steps of the Old

State House in Little Rock “on the threshold of a new era, a new millennium” (Clinton, 1991,

para. 22) as someone who would stand up for “families [who] are crying out desperately for

someone who believes the promise of America is to help them with their struggle to get ahead, to

offer them a green light instead of a pink slip” (para. 24). Both men, and many others who

preceded and followed them, used their words to frame the beginnings of their campaigns, giving

shape and depth to their ideas and a glimpse of the way in which they would govern if elected.

For Kennedy, he was someone who had seen wonders and the dangers of the world and was

more resolute in his belief that America had a duty to protect and project the freedoms all people

possess. Clinton spoke of a “new covenant” for Americans empowering government “to create

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more opportunity…” so that its people can “make the most of it” (para. 26). To reinforce a

notion of America as defender of the rights and privileges of all free people, Kennedy spoke

from the Senate Caucus Room of the U.S. Capitol, the seat and symbol of a government

chartered and empowered by its citizens. Clinton chose the streets of Little Rock—which had

only a generation before served as the backdrop for America’s struggle to reconcile its own

history of sanctioned racism, terror, and exclusion—as the point from which to reframe the

aspirations of a new generation Americans yearning not to be left behind. Trump chose with

equal intention the words and venue for his commencement address: he rode an escalator down

five flights, in full view of an international media corps and on live television, to speak to an

audience that filled the glass and steel atrium of a Manhattan tower bearing his name. Among

his opening statement are comments about the quality of air conditioning in his building

(Solotaroff, p. 44; Trump, 2016, lns. 5-6).

Like Kennedy and Clinton, Trump seeks to use his speech to frame a moment for his

audience. Where the former presidents spoke of an idyllic America as protector of freedoms and

restorer of hope, Trump fames America as used up and powerless. Less than thirty seconds into

his remarks, Trump launches into a trio of condemnations of the current state of the country:

Our country is in serious trouble. We don’t have victories anymore. We used to

have victories, but we don’t have them. When was the last time anyone saw us

beating, let’s say, China in trade deal? They kill us…When did we beat Japan at

anything? They send their cars over by the millions, and what do we do? When

was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn’t exist, folks. They beat

us all the time…When do we beat Mexico at the border? They are a laughing at

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us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our

friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically (Trump, lns. 8-21).

For Trump, America is not so much an ideal than an example of what has failed it. If it is not

globalization, then it is “Islamic terrorism…eating up large portions of the Middle East” (ln. 35).

Or, it’s healthcare reform which he calls “a disaster” and a “big lie” (ln. 78). Trump’s anemic

America frame provides the scene against which the drama he is attempting to create in his

discourse can play out.

Creating a scene is not to imply that Trump is an especially gifted orator or that the

discourse is exceptionally well crafted. In numerous ways and examples throughout the speech

he and it are not. Trump’s announcement rambles and moves from topic to topic; it is more

disjointed talking points than a work of continuity (Solotaroff, p. 43). One such example of this

—and there are many from which to choose in this text—comes early on when Trump is

discussing America’s ineffectiveness in the Middle East:

Islamic terrorism is eating up large portions of the Middle East. They’ve become

rich. I’m in competition with them. They’ve just built a hotel in Syria. Can you

believe this? They built a hotel. When I build a hotel, I pay interest. They don’t

have to pay interest, because they took the oil that, when we left Iraq, I said we

should’ve taken (lns. 35-39).

This would be a sufficient place in which to stop though allowing Trump to finish his thought

lets us see that it is not just a slip of concentration but, rather, the full throttle of his ability as an

orator:

So, now, ISIS has the oil, and what they don’t have is, Iran has. And in 19—and I

will tell you this, and I said very strongly, years ago, I said—and I love the

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military, and I want to have the strongest military that we’ve every had, and we

need it more than ever. But I said, “Don’t hit Iraq,” because you’re going to

totally destabilize the Middle East. Iran is going to take over the Middle East,

Iran and somebody else will get oil, and it turned out that Iran is now taking over

Iraq. Think of it. Iran is taking over Iraq, and they are taking over big league

(lns. 40-45).

Trump leaves it up to the audience to determine with whom he shared this insight or whether he

is benefiting from a convenient form of hindsight. But none of this matters for Trump. His goal

is to set a scene of America weak abroad and then conflate that with an America weak at home.

In order to do this, he must provide a unifying agent.

Burke suggested that nothing unites as much as a shared foe. Trump seeks to create a

movement that will attract adherents by orientating them toward a single point, allowing “for

each man to get there in his own way” but one which nonetheless provides a “unifying center of

reference for all” (Burke, 1941, p. 239). Trump’s foe around which he calls us to rally is the

“Others”, those from outside who personify this threat to America. In perhaps the most

controversial part of Trump’s address he draws out Mexican immigrants from the center and

holds them up for derision and identifying them so that the American people can heap their

collective sin and guilt upon them: “When Mexico sends its people, they are not sending their

best. They’re not sending you” (Trump, lns 24-25, emphasis added). Trump is drawing a circle

and placing Americans at its center while putting Mexicans on its outer rim. When Trump

followed those remarks with even more incendiary language by referring to these same

Mexican’s as criminals and rapists (ln. 27), he was identifying his audience of supporters by

giving them examples of what they are not: deviant criminals. This is the external threat Trump

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is extolling his supporters to rally against. That he added similar broadsides against people of

Chinese and Arab descent only serves to underscore the discursive identity he is forging for his

supporters—and for Americans, by extension—by providing an unifying force of external

“otherness” from which he and his kith are bound against.

The popular media pounced on Trump’s comments and pundits from all political spectra,

along with his fellow Republican candidates, denounced him and proceeded to distance

themselves from his campaign. Yet through all of this, Trump has surged in national polls of

likely Republican presidential primary and caucus voters. In the RealClearPolitics.com indexed

average of national polling, Trump secured a clean lead from the GOP pack of candidates shortly

after delivering his announcement speech in June 2015 and continues to pull away to this day.

His next closet opponent trails him by nearly ten percentage points while most of the remaining

candidates are finding it hard to differentiate themselves and garner support

(RealClearPolitics.com, 2015). Trump’s stamina as the leader of the Republican pack suggests a

different vein of sentiment to which he has tapped into amongst his supporters and other likely

Republican leaning voters. By examining whiteness as a coalescing power of identity among the

Right, we have an effective way to see how Trump is using his racially charged rhetoric to build

a viable national candidacy that flies defiantly in the face of near ubiquitous negative coverage in

the popular media.

Whiteness as a defining characteristic of political polarization in the United States

predates the Civil Rights era and it has been used effectively as an ideological framing tool by

rhetors long before Trump seized upon it 2015. Nakayama & Krizek (1995) identify whiteness

as a strategic rhetorical device influencing those who are defined by it and those who take

another identity excluded by it. In classical analysis, the “rhetor [is] always already assumed to

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be a member of the center” (Nakayama & Krizek, pp. 292-293). In U.S. social culture,

whiteness assumes a central position that creates its own definition through which it is known.

Unlike someone who is black, where his or her racial identity, to a certain extent, is observable,

white implies a status that exists above racial classification: it is political (p. 294). As a result,

whiteness positons itself always in the center, making it that from which other races and

identities are predicated (p. 295). Because it is strategic, it always seeks to reestablish the center

as the place for itself, without the requirement of knowing who imparts it. Whiteness simply

exists everywhere and all the time (p. 298).”

Dyer (1997) sees race and whiteness as social constructions of power that determine

identity for non-whites while allowing whites to exist without reference to any identifying

characteristics. It is this lack of racial identification that places white “at the center of the frame

of reference” (p. 9). And, yet, it is this center reference point that allows, Dyer argues, white

people to reference themselves with attributes of racial identity without seeing white as a racial

identifier. Dyer offers us a paradox of white where “whiteness as a race resides in visible

properties and whiteness as power is maintained by the unseen” (p. 45): white is color (raced)

and non-color (unraced) simultaneously. It is this paradoxical construction that empowers

whites to ascribe race to themselves without being confined by it, to argue being white provides

no distinct advantage over non-whites, and gives license to position whites as victims of a

society that favors people of color (p. 10). When whites perceive this position of power under

attack from external forces, their understanding of race where they are the center allows them to

ascribe the victimization traits of which Dyer speakes. It is precisely this polarizing of race that

Trump seizes upon to forge an identity for his supporters and other Republican voters.

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Olson (2008) pins the polarization of the political landscape in terms of the threat the

Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s posed to hegemonic whiteness pervasive in

American culture. This threat created anxiety and resentment over the perceived loss of power

(Olson, p. 704). The Republican Party effectively seized upon this resentment to recast political

identification away from geographic and ethnic delineation to more ideological lines that

emphasized cultural and moral issues such as abortion rights and same-sex marriage, a move that

forced each party to see the other as its antithesis (p. 705). The victories of the Civil Rights

movement succeeded in disrupting whiteness as a social power, moving it from the dominant

social status reinforced by law toward a power that “reproduces white advantage despite legal

equality” (p. 709). It is this shift, Olson argues, that forces whites to grow anxious because they

are no longer assured their privilege and power of their whiteness will hold. By recasting the

political identification along racial lines and with racially laced themes, the Right rode a tide fear

of loss of whiteness, harnessing it into an effective–and defining–organizational tool that has

since framed political discourse. By raising his voice to highlight the plight of his middle class

American audience, an audience that is predominantly male and overwhelmingly white, Trump

is picking up the baton of whiteness and privilege that has defined conservative Right political

identity for nearly half century.

Trump uses race and “otherness” as means to his end of creating a new center around

restoring America’s lost power. The clearest example of comes at the end of the speech when he

declares “the American dream is dead” (Trump, Ln. 525). It is a grating statement and designed

to jolt a flaccid listener, but it is one that fits consistently with the ideological narrative Trump,

as rhetor, is weaving. Trump is both agent and agency here to woo an emasculated America

pubic beaten down by an external evil force—be it Mexican immigrants who are “rapists” and

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criminals or Chinese bureaucrats arbitraging their dominance in the global financial markets—

and in need of a strong leader who “literally will take this country and make it great again” (Lns.

148-149). Not only is Trump stealing a line from President Reagan’s 1980 presidential

campaign, he is amplifying the frustration and resentment of his predominantly white, male

audience that both fears and is anxious of the loss of hegemonic whiteness of which Olson

argued (p. 709). Trump does not mention racial identity; it is implied in his use of the

nationalistic words “Mexican”, “South and Latin American”, “Chinese”, and ISIL Islamists

(Trump, Lns. 27, 96, & 40). These external forces are defined by Trump by what is visual and

implied by what they are: non-white, external, and on the periphery of white-dominated society.

This positioning from within to without is Nakayama and Krizek’s definition of whiteness (pp.

292-293) and Trump’s rhetorical foil why the American dream is dead.

For Trump the rise of the external foe is a situation created by the failure and corruption

of the American ruling and economic classes that are powerless to keep American strong and

afraid to reclaim its former greatness. Speaking midway through his address, Trump identifies

the real problem:

So I’ve watched the politicians. I’ve dealt with them all my life. If you can’t make a

good deal with a politician, then there’s something wrong with you. You’re certainly

not very good. And that’s what we have representing us. They will never make

America great again. They don’t even have a chance. They’re controlled fully —

they’re controlled fully by the lobbyists, by the donors, and by the special interests,

fully. Yes, they control them. Hey, I have lobbyists. I have to tell you. I have lobbyists

that can produce anything for me. They’re great. But you know what? It won’t happen.

It won’t happen. Because we have to stop doing things for some people, but for [sic.]

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this country, it’s destroying our country. We have to stop, and it has to stop now (lns.

123-131).

The reference to deal-making implies a power relationship where wealth or value are exchanged

but it also is a bridge allowing Trump to position himself as the antithesis and solution to this

corruption: “We need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal”, a reference to the book he

authored in 1987.

Having identified the external foes that a corrupt political and elite class have allowed to

rob American of its power, Trump shifts his position in the discourse from the self-referential “I”

to him as the “we” of all Americans, and American itself. When he speaks in the first-person,

singular, his subject are his personal attributes, of positive framing, and words of strength: “I will

be the greatest jobs president that God ever created” (ln. 172); and, “I will bring our jobs back

from China, from Mexico, from Japan, from so many places. I’ll bring back our jobs, and I’ll

bring back our money” (lns 174-175). When he speaks in the first-person, plural, it always with

reference to identifying lost power, the threat from external foes, and the corruption that allowed

it to happen:

We owe China $1.3 trillion. We owe Japan more than that. So, they come in, they take

our jobs, they take our money, and then they loan us back the money, and we pay them

in interest, and the dollar goes up so their deal’s even better. How stupid are our leaders?

How stupid are these politicians to allow this to happen? How stupid are they?” (lns. 176-

180, emphasis added).

Having firmly ensconced the external foe, Trump uses changes tense to lead his hearers and

supporters to the only conclusion possible, sealing the deal for them that only he is the candidate

who can “take this country and make it great again” (lns. 151-152).

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Sheading light onto Trump’s effectiveness and danger as rhetor is best accomplished

through a Burkean dramatist approach. Burke’s pentads of act, scene, agent, agency, and

purpose are useful tools to see how Trump frames his position and audience, personifies an

external evil threat that must be annihilated. He heaps contempt upon the actions of a corrupt

political class that allowed the political and economic emasculation of a mythic America all

while presenting himself as the new, strong, virile leader who will make this country great again.

For Trump, his scene is an America falling behind and losing its place as an exceptional example

to the world and placing economic hardships on ordinary Americans. These actors are beset by

an external force personified in Mexican immigrants, Chinese bureaucrats and Middle Eastern

terrorists whose agency is robbing American of its greatness. By conflating himself individually

with the collectiveness of the American people, Trump, too, becomes an actor in his dramatic

frame. Corrupt politicians and the economic elite provide the act against which the external

threat was given free run. It is only through selecting a strong and fearless president (Donald

Trump) that the purpose of restoration of a great America can begin. While Burke’s dramatist

analysis offers a lens through which we can see better what Trump is about, it is the

psychological underpinnings of his rhetoric, which such an approach allows, that make it

possible to move from the “how” of what he does to the “why”.

Understanding the psychological motives of the rhetor or the text and why it achieves its

particular effect is Burke’s contribution to modern criticism (Holland, 1955, p. 355). The

dramatist approach gives the critic the tools to uncover the parts of the speech or discursive text

while avoiding “the pitfalls of the classical method of the neo-Aristotelians, or falling into the

literary or historical critique of the nineteenth century” (p. 355). Holland argues that a Burkean

approach gives the critic a way to see the speaker in terms of his actions through his speech, and

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to gain greater insights into the “sociological and psychological factors that influence the

speaker” (pp. 356-357). The goal of all of this, Holland argues, is to understand the speaker’s

strategies to create a form of rhetorical criticism that allows the critic to make moral judgements

not only about the text but also the speaker himself (p. 358). The psychological attributes of fear

and anxiety play crucial roles in Burke’s dramatist critical approach and are key factors in

explaining the effectiveness of Trump’s announcement speech.

In framing an America as lost and powerless Trump is fueling the fears and anxieties of

lost privilege and whiteness identified by Olson. Trump’s continual references to these external

forces in racially identifying and charged terms of “Mexican immigrants”, “Chinese”, “Asian”,

and “Middle Eastern terrorists” echoing the argument put by forward by McMahon (2015) that

whiteness is seeded deep in the American psyche allowing it to function “as a psychological

copping mechanism” (p.42) By framing the American dream in such a manner, Trump is

antagonizing the fears at the heart of a white hegemony fearful of an ever more diversifying and,

in a racial sense, darkening of society. As more people of color enter the center of the racial

identity of America, the more white Americans will feel pushed to the perimeter. The racial

polarization of the political parties that followed the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and

1960s, now stands at the center of Trump’s attempt to build an identity for the movement he

intends to create. While he does not directly address race he nonetheless embraces its effect on

the American political landscape, adding fuel and oxygen to the smoldering embers of class and

racial hatred, masked as fear of a threat from without.

Trump’s rhetoric, his use of scapegoating along international and racial lines, and his

fearmongering speaks to the kind of totalitarian framing which Burke railed against more than

half a century ago. Burke called our attention to Hitler’s “Battle” whose rhetoric and framing had

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thrown the European continent into chaos. At the heart of it was what Burke referred to a

caricature of religious or natural law where only a pure, idealized race could restore the grandeur

and power of the German people in which a corrupt political class had allowed the external,

“international Jew” to steal (Burke, 1941, p. 240). Hitler creates dignity in identity, but only

through his “correct” way of thinking, which he defined along lines of racial purity where

historic and true bloodlines are not comingled with the external forces (p. 243). Hitler’s sinister

trick, Burke argues, is in his crude bastardization of religious thought, ascribing dignity to those

who lineage is unadulterated (Aryan) while “requiring the conquest of ‘inferior races’ ” (p. 243).

Trump’s rhetoric is no less incendiary and its potential effects are no less dangerous.

Whether intentionally or by happenstance, Trump employs the same conceit Burke railed

against in Hitler’s employ. Trump seeks to unify, but so did Hitler. The danger, however, lies in

the force that holds such unity together. For Hitler, unity came through an almost mystical

dignity created along national lines delineated by race. Trump, too, seeks to restore America’s

dignity on the world stage through his candidacy. And, again, Trump seeks to define that

restored dignity as something taken from external forces he identifies along racial and national

characteristics. In attempting “to take this country and make it great again” (Trump, lns. 151-

152), Trump is trying to convince his audience that the reason for the loss of power is external; it

is a trick that fits neatly into his construction of an America in need of the kind of leader who can

reestablish the proper order of American dominance—Donald Trump. One need not accuse

Trump of being a Hitlerite, but his rhetoric runs a curious and chilling parallel path to

nationalistic sentiments that saw similar solutions through the prisim glass of race.

The need for a national identity is natural, Burke argues, and can be harnessed effectively

and used to address societal needs, but only if it comes through honest and transparent means (p.

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257). Trump’s announcement address is a meandering ramble of non sequiturs, egoistic

aggrandizement and revisionist historical interpretations. As a document, Trump’s speech, like

most of his utterances, is a torturous read; to hear it—and I have—borders on the abusive. Yet,

there is a seductive draw to it that resonates among a large number of potential Republican

presidential primary voters who could very well put Trump one step away from what then-

Senator John F. Kennedy called “the most powerful office in the Free World”. But it is not the

structure of this speech that makes it morally corrupt, it is psychological play with which Trump

attempts to rally support. Playing off the fears of white, predominately male conservatives who

fear the loss of their societal privilege under the guise of restoring a strong American identity is a

trick that denies agency and determination to Americans who look and think differently as he

does. Burke calls this is a false identity, a “snakeoil” to make “such sinister unifying possible

within his own nation” (p. 239). The duty of the rhetorician, Burke trumpeted at the beginning

of the Second World War, “is to find all available ways of making the Hitlerite distortions of

religion apparent, in order that politicians of his kind in America be unable to perform a similar

swindle” (p. 251). That clarion call still rings in our ears today.

Nowling—Racist Pulpit 19

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