Donald Trump's Rhetorical Analysis

Besides posing himself as the ideal outsider in a world burdened by growing distrust and precarious politics, Donald Trump’s also utilizes misleading rhetoric that ironically increases trust among his supporters. While Trump’s arguments are filled with logical fallacies from ad hominem attacks, ambiguity, and false syllogisms, Trump is noted for his excessive use of hyperbole. Although Trump’s hyperbolic statements that “nobody has more respect for women than I do”, Obama is “the worst president in the history of the United Sates”, that “NAFTA is the ‘single worst trade deal ever approved’” or “some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber” come across ridiculous and over-the-top, to his supporters his use of hyperbole

American satire often picks up on the ultimate American joke through the “critical, often ironic, strain that highlights the incongruity between the rhetoric that promises equality, wealth, and prosperity in American culture and the failure of America to fulfill those promises” (Ezell 2). This incongruity underlining American society as the basis for satirical critique manifests politically and the failure of established institutions to provide the “equality, wealth, and prosperity” promised by the concept of “America” is picked up on by Donald Trump, notably with his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again”. In this way, political satire and Trump both offer an alternative to the failing of American society to live up to its promise. While both stem from similar veins of discontentedness, and a disdain for the inauthenticity, scandal, and corruption of American politics, Trump’s near satirical reality makes him a popular target for late-night comedy shows (Tryon 10). He is almost too easy of a target as his rhetoric and vocabulary are poor, “He often speaks in long, run-on sentences, with frequent asides. He pauses after subordinate clauses. He frequently quotes people saying things that aren’t actual quotes. And he repeats words and phrases, sometimes with slight variations, in the same sentence”, not to mention his over the top appearance (Lakoff). Although Trump is nearly “too buffoonish to caricature, with political opinions too unsettling to make light of”, his rhetorical style is so inaccurate it practically begs to be parodied, at least in the period when him getting elected President of the United States seemed impossible (Czajkowski). In this period, the humor utilized in mocking Donald Trump is