A Rhetorical Analysis Of Hillary Clinton

Scandals, insults, and embarrassing are three words that can accurately define the 2016 election. Politicians have been using anything possible to edge out their opponents, publicizing every mistake in the form of commercials, photos, and social media. Arguably one of the biggest mistakes Hillary Clinton made is the scandal of her personal email and over 31,830 deleted messages. Leaders and politicians argue that Clinton put the country’s national security in danger by sending and receiving classified information over an easily hackable personal email address, and lying about it. Donald Trump, the republican candidate, has been using this scandal to exploit Hillary’s negative attributes and the potential effects that can arise having her

The ad exposes these words in big white fonts, making it very hard to miss, as seen in Figure 1. The white font contrasts with the dark backgrounds so the word is easy to discriminate from. Along with the big font, the narrator also speaks the word in a very deep voice as the caption pops up. While this serves to place emphasis on the words he believes describes Clinton, it also adds to an unnecessary over dramatic tone. Also the words he chooses to exemplify are not very positive alone. The ad captions pictures of Clinton with the words Liar, Crooked, Careless, and Reckless. The words all have a negative connotation, persuading the watchers and voters that Clinton is not only an unfavorable choice for president, but a bad person. Without the use of these captions the advertisement would lack emphases and emotional appeal. Trump utilizes and illustrates these captions in such a way to successfully create a sense of fear and disgust for Clinton and what it would be like if she were

The ad begins with news clips quickly coming in and panning out of famous news channels all talking about the illegal activities pertaining to Clinton’s email scandal. Due to the fact Trump needs to keep the commercial short, he had to choose very short parts of the videos to include in his ad. For this reason Trump picks parts with only negative quotes about Clinton from the newscasters. For example, “extremely careless” and “gross negligence” were bits of two news clips Trump used. Deciding which parts of the videos to clip into the ad was critical for Trump to successfully help support the purpose of the whole ad: Hillary Clinton is an unfit choice for president due to her illegal scandals and lies. However, the way the ad had to arrange and cut the clips also leads to a downfall with his ad. The ad cut clips too short, to the point where some of the videos were taken out of context and important information was blatantly left out. At the end of the video the ad inserts a clip of Clinton’s speech regarding her email scandal. The ad takes the part where she was admitting to leaving some information out about her emails but then suddenly and abruptly cut the clip right before she was about to apologize. Although Trump supports his claim that Hillary Clinton lied to the American people, he