Trump identifies his target as Islamic, whereas Obama avoids this. Obama’s statement has eight verbs and includes coordinated, projected and embedded clauses. It consists of two clauses (verbs underlined) linked by ‘which’. Trump’s statement is shorter and simpler. Trump: unite the civilised world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the earth. Obama: And for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken - you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you. To illustrate the difference between them, we can consider the sections of each speech that deal with terrorism. Both target education and industry as key concerns, though only Obama singles out healthcare and the environment. Both signal a new start after past failures. It is remarkable, looking at Obama’s and Trump’s speeches together, how many of the same themes they draw upon. The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homesĪnd then redistributed all across the world While the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon While America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay We have spent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas While allowing for the very sad depletion of our military We have subsidised the armies of other countries This section of the speech uses the positive-negative parallelism noted above, making an overt causal link between US actions overseas and a reduction in standards of living at home: We have enriched foreign industry He is different too in assigning volition and responsibility, not only to a failing school system and to gangs and drugs, but to a general American ‘we’: ‘we’ is the subject of verbs that construe actions benefitting other countries and penalising the US. Where Trump’s language is different is his use of the imagery of personalised violence and theft, with the ordinary citizen cast as the victim of these acts: people are ‘trapped in poverty’, children ‘deprived of all knowledge’ crimes have ‘stolen too many lives’ and ‘robbed our country of … potential’ wealth ‘has been ripped’ from homes, the whole being summarised as ‘this American carnage’. He also, however, uses the more distinctive positive-negative pattern:Īs is the case with Obama’s inaugural speech, Trump identifies problems with America’s institutions and infrastructure: ‘shuttered factories’, ‘dissipated’ wealth and confidence, ‘depletion’ of the military and ‘disrepair and decay’ of infrastructure. This is sometimes straightforward repetition: Together The simplicity of Trump’s grammar lends itself to that hallmark of the political speech: parallelism. (7) What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world duties that we do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task. In Obama’s speech there is an average of 1.92 verbs per finite clause, the higher number accounted for by sentences such as (verbs underlined): As a consequence, there is an average of only 1.28 verbs per finite clause in Trump’s speech. (6) What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the peopleīut these are very much in the minority. Or sentences beginning with ‘what’ that contain multiple verbs: (5) We’ve defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own’ (4)…to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before He does occasionally make his utterances more complex by using relative clauses: The explanation for these differences is that most of Trump’s sentences are straightforward in their structure, consisting of either one clause or simple linked clauses, such as Trump uses 184 verbs (5.7% of the total word count) while Obama used 329 (13.6%). Trump’s clauses are shorter with the average number of words per finite clause at 10.28 for Trump and 14.08 for Obama. Trump’s speech has 143 (non-embedded) finite clauses against Obama’s 171. The speech is 1471 words long, compared with 2404 words for Barack Obama’s inaugural speech in 2009. President Trump’s inaugural speech is short and grammatically simple.

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