Table of Contents
Subject Analysis Details
- Speech: Donald Trump’s January 6th Speech
- Date of speech: 01/06/2021
- Speech Length: 1 hour and 13 minutes
- Speech Text: Here
Rhetorical Analysis Scope
In this rhetorical data analysis I will be focusing on the line of reasoning and argument claims made within Trump’s January 6th speech to investigate claims by the House of Representatives and members of the Judicial Branch regarding the speech’s intention to incite an insurrection. I didn’t perform my usual rhetorical modeling steps for 2 reasons:
- Trump’s rhetorical speech style is unique and not one that I would care to model/copy
- To listeners, Trump’s statements are perceived as appeals to pathos in that they often elicit an unreasonable emotional response
Therefore, I focused only on the line of reasoning and the argument claims (fact/policy/value) within each line of reasoning.
Existing January 6th Claims of Insurrection
I did find a number of existing rhetorical analysis of the January 6th speech from academia. They all concluded that Trump’s motivation was to incite a riot on January 6th. Not too shocking. This was a motivator to perform my own, objective analysis. The three claims I decide to focus on exploring were:
- U.S. House of Representatives: Article of Impeachment – Incitement of Insurrection
- “He also willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged—and foreseeably resulted in—lawless action at the Capitol, such as: “if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore”. Thus incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed, in an attempt to, among other objectives, interfere with the Joint Session’s solemn constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 Presidential election, unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress, the Vice President, and Congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive, and seditious acts.
- Sarah B. Wallace – Colorado State District Court Judge
- An understanding had developed between Trump and some of his most extreme supporters that his encouragement, for example, to ‘fight’ was not metaphorical, referring to a political ‘fight,’ but rather as a literal ‘call to violence’ against those working to ensure the transfer of Presidential power. While Trump’s Ellipse speech did mention ‘peaceful’ conduct in his command to march to the Capitol, the overall tenor was that to save the democracy and the country the attendees needed to fight.
- Jack Smith – Special Counsel for the Department of Justice
- Although Mr. Trump at one point also told his supporters to “peacefully and patriotically make [their] voices heard,” he used the word “fight” more than ten times in the speech before concluding by directing his supporters to march to the Capitol to give allied Members of Congress “the kind of pride and boldness they need to take back our country.” He also told the angry crowd that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Throughout the speech, Mr. Trump gave his supporters false hope that through such action, they could cause Mr. Pence to overturn the election results, even improvising new lines directed at Mr. Pence as the speech went on.
January 6th Line of Reasoning
I leveraged the line of reasoning from the four phases of a U.S. political campaign. These phases are identified in the book An Introduction to Political Communication by Brian McNair.
| # | Line of Reasoning | Argument Claim |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Establish Identity | I made a lot of progress to make America great again as president |
| 2 | Identify Issues | Weak Republicans are allowing the Democrats and the media to steal the election |
| 3 | Present Policy | We must take action to stop the steal now and forever |
| 4 | Connect Values | We are the movement to make America great again |
Rhetorical Data Analysis
- Use the Full Screen icon in the bottom right to expand the dashboard
- Use the dropdowns, bar, or pie charts to filter the dashboard
Here are some of the observations and data insights I thought were worth noting from the data analysis:
| # | Data Analysis | Data Inference |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Identify Issues line of reasoning has the highest statement count at 110 and Connect Values only at 21 | If this speech was intended to inspire an insurrection one would expect to see more Connect Values statements and fewer Identify Issues statements. |
| 2 | Fact claims make up 60% for the claims with value claims at 27% | Similar to the first inferences, the speech should have more Value claims and fewer Fact claims if it was intended to inspire an insurrection. |
| 3 | The empirical fact claims are much greater at 70% than the theoretical fact claims at 30% | The empirical fact claims represent a large amount of evidence that is provided to support the theoretical arguments in the speech. A speech intended to inspire action like an insurrection would not typically contain a high percentage of evidentiary facts. |
| 4 | Trump states to his audience that he “…doesn’t want to bore them…” 3 times within his speech | Related to inference #3, Trump states that he doesn’t want to bore his audience because he is aware that is speech is intrinsically boring due to the high amount of empirical fact claims. |
| 5 | Trump uses the word “fight” in 9 distinct statements | Trump’s usage of the word fight is used to convey an argument or to struggle/campaign against the Democratic Party and it’s allies. |
Conclusion
Contrary to three documented examples that claim that Trump’s January 6th usage of the word “fight” was used as a call to violence to incite an insurrection, I didn’t find any evidence to support those claims. Here is the list of opposing evidence that I found to disprove the three claims:
- The word “fight” was used in nine speech statements. Here is the summary of how “fight” was used:
- 8 instances = to struggle or campaign against something
- 1 instances = to quarrel or argue
- 0 instances = to engage in violent struggle
- The large majority of the claims used in the speech were fact claims rather than value claims. This indicates that this speech was presented to inform the audience rather than inspire the audience. This makes the speech rhetorically and essentially quite boring.
Like MLK Jr. once said: I have a dream. I’ll try to keep it short though because I don’t want to bore you.
Thanks for reading.