“I’m the victim!” Donald Trump
self-victimisation during the 2016 United
States presidential
election campaign
By Joosep Värk 12846872
Master’s Thesis
University of Amsterdam - Graduate School of Communication Master’s program Erasmus Mundus Journalism
Supervisor: Dr. Alessandro Nai May 29, 2020
Abstract
Donald Trump’s rhetoric and behaviour as the presidential candidate and the President of the United States of America has filled the headlines for almost five years. During this period, he has repeatedly expressed the feelings of being treated in the most unfair way in the US political history. This victimising rhetoric plays along with the white victimhood feelings among his voters and is amplified on Trump’s social media account by the hyperbolic populist language dividing people to “us” and “them” (or “the people” and “the establishment”).
A quantitative content analysis on the presence of Trump’s victimising claims in 13 broadcast interviews, debates and rally speeches showed that his self-victimising rhetoric and the media antagonisation have a strong association. It also describes how Trump identifies other
politicians and foreigners as the victimisers of the people. This follows the results of similar studies made on Trump’s claims, but identifies more precisely, who in Trump’s eyes are the culprits of the people and who is the culprit of Trump.
Keywords: victimisation, populism, political communication
Introduction
In professional sport games a phenomenon of flopping has been known for decades. It is an act where a player during the game situation behaves to be hurt or hurt more than he or she really is for strategic purposes in order to receive an advantage over their opponent: if the referee is convinced then he or she will be awarded a free kick and the opposing player might be punished (Sabag, Lidor, Morgulev, Amon, Azar & Bar-Eli, 2020). And even if the latter video replay reveals the deception, such a behaviour is still practised by the most well-known
athletes all over the world. This behaviour is called victim playing, playing the victim-card or self-victimisation and is not inherent only to football, but happens also in the ordinary life situations when people blame others for their own deeds (Kets de Vries, 2014).
A study on the rhetoric of the most well-known politician in the world, 45th President of the Unite States, Donald Trump has concluded that he uses “victimising verbiage of victimhood to galvanize support for his presidency while enacting himself as the saviour” (Aswad, 2019, p.67). Victimising comments towards himself have also been noted to be a part of his
rhetoric: “Look at the way I’ve been treated lately, especially by the media. [--] No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.”
(Gambino & McCharty, 2017) Trump said it less than hundred days after his inauguration, in a speech in the Coast Guard academy. He repeated similar thought in the beginning of May, this year. “I am greeted with a hostile press the likes of which no president has ever seen.” (Neumann, 2020). These two statements exemplify Trump playing the victim-card during his presidency. But why does he make such self-victimising claims?
Trump’s publicly perceived persona has been evaluated by experts to score very high in narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism, if compared to Hillary Clinton (Nai & Maier, 2018). Notably, the contributing factor to his high narcissism score is the seek for attention, and for Machiavellianism, the possibility of manipulating with others to succeed. These two factors associate with Viano’s (1989, p. 10) description of victims seeking attention and benefits. In some cases the attention itself is the benefit (Kets de Vries, 2014), specially for narcissistic people (Campbell, Bosson, Goheen, Lakey, & Kernis, 2007), how Trump was perceived to be (Nai & Maier, 2018)
In HEXACO analysis on Trump’s public persona, psychologists evaluated the strongly contributing factor to his low agreeableness being the non-existent forgiveness and
contributing to his high extraversion being his social self-esteem (Visser, Book & Volk, 2017). The latter associates with Schneiker assertion to Trump’s leadership concept of being the superhero in the crisis (Schneiker, 2020). It could be argued that this self-presentation contradicts the idea of self-victimisation presence in his rhetoric, but Schneiker also asserts that this rhetorical tool of victimhood is a part of Trump’s crisis propagating rhetoric aimed at the elite (p. 10) to gain the attention of his voters. Subsequently, I will describe how Trump’s base is connected to his victimising rhetoric.
White victimhood
The sense of victimhood among white male Americans was described already in 2000 by Mitch Berbrier. In his study, focused on white supremacists and white separatists, he asserts that the white supremacist movement ‘has become an adjunct to the more fluid nonlinear movement of the “angry white male” (p.187). He describes the victim ideology serving as a strategy that gives meaning and purpose to feelings of anger. Furthermore, such feelings in this cohort have also been described by Michael Kimmel: “white men’s anger comes from the potent fusion of two sentiments —entitlement and a sense of victimisation.” (Kimmel, 2017, p.x) Anger has also been found present in Trump’s rhetoric (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2018).
These descriptions show that the sense of victimisation and popularisation of right-wing populist ideas can be associated with the demographic group (white Americans) among whom Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by 20 percent points, according to exit polls. (Abramowitz & McCoy, 2018, p. 140). His victory among white working-class males was even more dramatic - 71 percent to 23 and this made possible his narrow victories in key-states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (Abramowitz & McCoy, 2018, p. 140). Such notions of white counter-mobilisation in opposing to electing Obama and to his policies in favour of the minorities were also associated with the emergence of Tea Party movement.
(Abramowitz & McCoy, 2018). Gest asserts that even his slogan “Make America Great Again” appeals on the feeling that US was better back in the days when the white male demographic group had more power (2016).
Norris and Inglehart (2019) argue that Trump’s “campaign rhetoric appeals directly to social conservatives concerned with their declining position. He addressed this group’s concern by raising their moral status, describing “hard-working” Americans as victims of globalisation, voicing concern about elites, drawing strong moral boundaries toward undocumented immigrants, refugees, and Muslims, and stressing the traditional role of men as protectors of wives, mothers, and daughters.”(p. 339). They affirm it with the numbers that clearly show whom Trump voters see as the victims of discrimination: men, white and the Christians (p.341). These trends are not surprising because Munt positions the “wronged white man” victim trope to the centre of the Western cultures belief system (Munt, 2017) which have been predominantly Christian. “Christians can value this symbolic power of victims, and through them, acquire a bit of reflected holiness.” (p.870)
Victimisation
In the following, I will describe the factors in victimisation that might be used by Trump for political purposes. In psychology the victimisation is a well-defined concept:
“The individual’s self-perception of having been the target, either momentarily or over time, to harmful actions emanating from one or more other persons. [..] a victim is anyone who experiences injury, loss, or misfortune as a result of some event or series of events” (Aquino and Byron, 2002, p. 71).
As said in the quote, victimisation is the person’s self-perception. In victimology it has a clause of being injured (also mentally) by an identifiable agent (Aquino & Byron, 2002). But the process of deciding what makes victimisation is very subjective (Schafer, 1968; Garkawe,
2004). Convincing others of one’s victimisation is a part of Viano’s (1989) model of
perceived victimisation. It describes how some people, who perceive themselves as victims, seek social validation by persuading their family, friends or others, that they have been harmed and if “some of the individuals receive validation of their claim to victim status, become “official” victims, and possibly benefit from various types of support.” (Viano, 1989, p. 10). This is basically the reason why the deceptive victimisation is used in football.
But just as people can experience the self-perceived victimisation, it can be assigned by collectives and ethnic groups (Bar-Tal, Chernyak-Hai, Schori & Ayelet Gundarthat; 2009). Collectively self-perceived victimhood can reflect the societal beliefs, attitudes and emotions (Bar-Tal et al., 2009), which are ordinarily negative towards the perpetrator (out-group) and positive towards the in-group. The self-perceived victimhood can also function as a source for motivating patriotism, mobilisation (Bar-Tal & Staub, 1997) and be used by politicians as a source of political power (Bar-Tal et al, 2009) in speeches to strengthen the collective victimhood. This strongly supports the idea of Trump’s victimising rhetoric as a tool to mobilise his voters by motivating the feelings of victimhood. The connecting node between victimhood and Trump’s rhetoric is the division which is created by the in-group
denomination “us” and the out-group denomination “them” (Abbas, 2019; Homolar & Scholz, 2019). As mentioned before, in the US this division is strongly felt among the working-class voters. (Kimmel, 2017)
Mudde has put in the international context by stating that ‘Brexit and Trump in 2016 [..]saw an outpouring of understanding for “working-class voters” that was often frame within an outright populist narrative’ (2019, p.170). Mudde has defined populism as “an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into to homogenous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”” (Mudde, 2004, p. 543). This confrontation can be simplified to “us” vs. “them”. Various studies conducted on Trump’s language in speeches
and public appearances show simplistic characteristics are present in his rhetoric. In
comparison to other candidates his language is simpler (Kayam, 2018); it includes hyberbolic statements (Vasile, 2017); negative emotions (Morreale & Shockley-Zalabak, 2018); and he has a strong emphasis on “us” vs. “them” distinction (Abbas, 2019).
In the campaign speeches, he divided the “The culprits of “Crisis America”” to two groups: “(1) the weak, self-serving and detached “establishment”; and (2) foreigners who either flow into the country or lead countries that want to exploit the US for economic and security reasons” (Homolar & Scholz, 2019, p.351). The establishment was often identified as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. In opposition to “them”, Trump appealed to “us” or “we” as the white working-class Americans that he claimed truly to care about (Lamont, Park & Ayala-Hurtado, 2017). But there is no study that would focus on Trump’s self-victimisation as a rhetoric to gain the attention of his self-victimised voters and build up the “us” vs “them narrative. Aswad (2019) has mentioned this rhetoric towards voters as on the side note, but what if this is the attention seeking technique to gain the sympathy of his voters and build up the “us” vs “them” rhetoric. This leads me to the question: to what extent is victimisation present in Trump’s rhetoric across different mediums?
Theoretical Framework
To answer the question set up above, I will start by explaining why it is important for Trump not only to portray his voters as the victims, but also portray himself as the victim. Castells (2007) argues that the narratives for politicians are important to construct and play the
characters in the media and through that embody their values to the voters. Similar ideas have been expressed by Moffitt, who describes the leader to be central of populist movement and that all “the people’s” opposition becomes represented by the leader with whom they identity becomes shared (2016). For a populist political leader, it is important to position themselves
close to or within the victimised group because populist politicians’ identification with the ordinary citizens is crucial for citizens to accept their message (Hameleers & Schmuck, 2017). In political branding literature the “brand persona” – who Trump is - is described to be attempting to create a particular brand image in the eyes of the targeted voters. Such
positioning process will seek to highlight attributes that are particularly valued by these target voters and to moderate any attributes that are seen as negatives. (Speed, Butler & Collins, 2015, p.142) For Trump the moderated negative attribute might be the fact that he is not among the working class.
All the “human brands”, whom politicians are, require authenticity to have value as brands. (Speed, et al, 2015, p. 143). And the Trump’s authenticity for his voters comes to play in his rejection of “political correctness” (Norris and Inglehart, 2019), in the use of informal style (Nai & Maier, 2018) and the anger (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2018) that was also inherent for the white male voters (Berbrier, 2000; Kimmel, 2017). Therefore, I argue that if Trump
victimises himself, then his voters perceive that he embodies themselves being marginalised and victimised by “them” - the establishment, the media and other out-group-s present in Trump’s rhetoric (Abbas, 2019). The only distinction is that Trump, who wants to present himself as to the superhero (Schneiker, 2020) against the elite, portrays himself being victimised by the media and not by the other politicians. Populist politicians antagonise rhetoric towards media have been noted by several scholars (Salgado & Stanyer, 2019; Engesser, Ernst, Esser & Büchel, 2016). Mazzoleni has asserted that populist leaders “have regularly proved able to exploit the media’s proclivity towards anything that “breaks the routine” in political arenas, by resorting to communication strategies that ensure media coverage.” (2008, p. 50). This means that self-victimisation in relation to media as an attention-seeking device could be Trump’s way to get the media coverage. To measure the presence of self-victimisation in his agenda, the first hypothesis of this study is:
H1a. When Trump uses self-victimising claims, he mostly identifies media as the culprit.
And to test another example of his hyperbolic statements: Trump’s audience-oriented victimisation (Aswad, 2019) as a part of his crisis rhetoric to blame the other politicians (Schneiker, 2020; Homolar & Scholz, 2019), the second hypothesis of this study is:
H1b. When Trump claims the people to be the victims, he mostly identifies the other politicians as the culprits
Comparing formats
To analyse Trump’s victimisation claims, I will follow the contemporary understanding of how the issue-framing (Entman, 2010) should be studied. Traditionally this concept in media studies have been approached from the legacy media perspective (McCombs & Shaw, 1972; Entman, 2010), but lately the scholars have stressed that in the times of disrupted public spheres, the concept must be revised (Bennet & Pfetsch, 2018). Bennet & Pfetsch assert that both framing (p. 248) and agenda-setting (p.249) should be measured beyond the legacy media or traditional media because the issue framing has become “quite independent of, the voice of the traditional media, official institutional spokespersons, and professional
journalism” (Neuman, Guggenheim, Mo Jang, & Bae, 2014, p. 211). Such processes have influenced the mediatisation which centred the media at core of “public sphere” construction (Blumler & Kavanagh, 1999, p.211), but lately media scholars have stressed that politicians are less constrained to media logic thanks to new digital opportunities (Brants & van Braag, 2017, p.401). Strömbäck and Esser describe this change from “media-centric” to “actor-centric” mediatisation (2014, p.227). This means that in order to analyse Trump’s
victimisation rhetoric, I should not only include the parts of his rhetoric that are mediated, but also the ones where he can set the issue-framing himself. That is why I will compare his victimising rhetoric across different formats.
The formats that have been scrutinised in the longitudinal campaign messages analysis are debates, acceptance addresses and TV-ads (Benoit, 2004). Other political discourse studies have focused on the broadcast interviews and speeches (Bull, 2019; Bull, 2003). Another form of communication are party manifestations, press releases (Trescha, Lefevereb & Walgravec, 2018) and social media posts. Due to fact that scholars have stressed the key importance of authentic behaviour in the populist leaders and “brand personas” perception by the audiences (Speed, et. al, 2015, p. 147; Street, 2019, p.10), this study will use the longer audio-visual formats (debates, rally speeches and broadcast interviews), where Trump is able to develop his rhetoric and his behaviour can be seen and heard by the audience. The
behaviour itself is not important for this study, but as mentioned before, seeming authentic in the eyes of the audience is a key factor for the populist leaders. Followingly, I will compare and give an overview of the three formats.
As can be seen from Table 1, the debate and interview formats share most of the
characteristics. Their main channel is TV, they both have mainstream audiences and they are likely to include attacks on Trump. But the issue-framing in the debate is more diverse than in the interview setting. Meanwhile rally speech differs from them almost across all the characteristics.
Broadcast interview
If compared to other formats, in the broadcast interview, Trump is most constrained by the mediation of the journalist and her/his agenda setting (Kranert & Horan, 2018) because the questions are exclusive opportunities for interviewer to set the agenda (Ekström, 2009). The interview setting is meant to question the politician’s agenda (Gnisci & Bonaiuto, 2003) and modern political interviews are even compared to courtroom examinations (Ekström, 2009).
Table 1. Formats comparison in different dimensions
Interview Debate Rally speech
Major medium TV and social media TV social media Live and social media
Audience Mainstream Mainstream Partisan
Who is framing? Journalist Journalists and
political actors
Political actor
Attacks on Trump Likely Likely Unlikely
This might affect negatively Trump’s chances to express the victimising agenda. But recently scholars have noted that the journalist centric format is contested by politicians with
questions as counterarguments (Gialabouki & Pavlidou, 2019) which create adversarial relationship between the journalist and the politician (Craig, 2016). This might stem from the fact that although the politician talks to the journalist, his/her behaviour and answers are still oriented towards the audience (Johannson, 2002) and this, retaliatory behaviour, might be a side product of the shift from the media-centric logic to the actor-centric logic and is an opportunity for Trump to express the self-victimising claims.
Debate
In the debate format, the agenda is set by both, the moderators and candidates (Boydstun, Glazier, Pietyrka, 2013, p.257). This means that the politician’s agenda is not only competing with the journalists but also with other politician’s agendas. The TV debates are described ‘as mediatised politics and as a media genre that mixes elements of discussion show, political interview, hustings and political/parliamentary debate’ and where the logics of them all clash (Schroeter, 2018, p. 365). Scholars assert that the unexpected questions or criticism can give
a more candid overview of the candidates, as do the other formats (Nuolijärvi & Tiittula, 2011). An integral part of the debates are the attacks between the candidates (Benoit & Hartcock, 1999). These might be aimed at the opponent’s undesirable character or policies, to make the opponent seem worse in the eyes of the audience (Benoit & Hartcock, 1999, p. 343). Responses to this behaviour are defences which can restore the candidate’s desirability after the attack (Benoit & Hartcock, 1999, p. 343). As this setting is the purest contest in the eyes of the audience and Trump promotes the superhero rhetoric (Schneiker, 2020), it is likely that he will enhance the victimising rhetoric.
To test the factors that might explain Trump’s behaviour across the three different formats, I will measure the attacks that Trump receives in the debate and interview formats. These could be conducted by the journalists or other politicians who Trump categorises as “them”.
H2. Trump uses victimising claims more if he is attacked.
Rally speeches
As mentioned before, the modern communication studies should also consider the
independent issue framing by the political actors. The rally speech format gives an excellent opportunity to do that because it is organised by the campaign organisation and leaves the candidate with an opportunity to set the agenda freely without mediation. The rally speech format is described as the politician being in “the real world,” and talking to “real people” (Denton, Trent & Friedenberg, 2019, p.164). Studies have shown that political rally speeches prove to be a successful tool to re-contextualise controversial issues and to explain different decision or choices (Fetzer & Bull, 2012) which follows the line of not being mediated. Besides the content, in this format the politician must also focus on the way they present their ideas because the rally speeches are the way to build the charisma in the eyes of the audience (Gardner, 2003; Holladay & Coombs, 1993). In Trump’s case, my hunch is that this is the
way for him to enhance the “wronged white man” (Munt, 2017) myth to his voters because he is free to speak his mind. And therefore, the fourth hypothesis of this study is:
H3. Donald Trump’s victimising claims are most present in the rally speech format in comparison to debates and interviews.
Methods
To compare Donald Trump’s (self-)victimising communicative behaviour across three different formats - debates, rally speeches and broadcast interviews – I conducted a
quantitative content analysis on N=1800 Trump’s quasi-sentences said during the presidential election campaign to measure hypothesis H1a, H1b and H3. For the H3, I will measure the victimisation on the format level.
Sample
The sample of this study is confined with 2016 US presidential elections because this is the forefront of the modern political campaigns (Strömbäck & Kiousis, 2014). The sample contains 13 transcripts of Donald Trump’s appearances in the presidential election campaign - 3 rally speeches, 5 debate appearances and 5 broadcast interviews (Table 2). The rally speech corpus is smaller for two reasons. Firstly, the other two formats have different
participants (journalists and politicians) across the transcripts and diversity helps to moderate others effect on Trump’s agenda. Secondly, in the rally speech format Trump’s own content is much longer than in the other formats and to be reflective of their substance, the rally speech format coding sections are larger.
From these transcripts the sample of N=1800 quasi-sentences were chosen. Each of the formats contain n=600 quasi-sentences. The Table 2 shows how the quasi-sentences are
distributed between the formats. The whole population for all the sentences1 in the transcripts was 5964.
Table 2. Sample division and descriptions across formats Interview s
Debates Rally speeches
Primaries 16.06.2015-19.07.2016 (13 months) 4 3 1 General campaign 19.07.2016-09.11.2016 (4 months) 1 2 2 Total 5 5 3
Quasi-sentences per transcript 120 120 200
Quasi-sentences total 600 600 600
The data selection was confined to presidential election campaign period. This means that the period for selection was from the announcement of Trump campaign on June 16, 2015 to the Election day November 8, 2016. This period is divided to two parts: Republican primaries and general election campaigns. The transition from one to another happened on the 19th of July 2016 when Trump became the official nominee for the Republican party.
The transcripts of the debates and rally speeches were retrieved from The American Presidency Project website which is devoted to store all the US presidential information (UCSB, n.d). All the interviews were derived through Lexis Nexis or Google searches with
1 All sentences in the corpus were not transformed to quasi-sentences. Only the ones which were selected into
the searching terms “trump” and “interview”. All the transcripts were made publicly available by the respective news organisation.
In the sample creation process, several possible influencing factors were considered to enhance the generalisability of the results. It represents the divide between the primaries and general election campaign, covers the time period, moderates the media bias which might originate from news organisations different political leanings and balance the differences of dynamics and communicational styles in within three different formats.
As mentioned before, the sample is created to reflect the election campaign features. For example, out of 13 transcripts, eight originate from the Republican primaries campaign and five from the general election campaign. That represents the timespan of two periods (13 months vs. 4 months), but also the number of different events that took place - Republican primaries featured 12 debates in comparison to 3 in presidential campaign. The overall division of quasi-sentences between two campaigns is 57.8 percent for primaries (n=1040) and 42.2 percent for presidential election (n=760).
Transcripts
Debate
I selected five debates, three for Republican primaries campaign and two for general election campaign. I chose them to be apart of each other as much as possible for different dynamics derived from the number of contestants to be considered. From each debate 120 sentences were coded. Due to fact that all the transcripts were longer than 120
quasi-sentences, I used random number generator to choose the first quasi-sentence for coding. The same procedure for coding section selection was used for rally speeches and interviews too.
The rally speech text corpus consists of three transcripts. One speech from primaries and two from presidential campaign. Presidential campaign is over-represented because in the
interview format the primaries campaign is over-represented, and this imbalance could not be removed. Thus, more rally speeches should help to balance the sample. From each rally speech 200 quasi-sentences were coded. The rally speeches took place in South Carolina, North-Carolina and Florida. These states have a different recent electoral history: since 1980 South Carolina has always voted for Republican on General elections, North Carolina has also voted for Democratic candidate and Florida has been a swing-vote and was also considered one of the key states to win for Trump (Mahtesian, 2016).
Interview
I have selected five interviews, four from primaries and one from presidential campaign. From each interview 120 quasi-sentences were coded. All the interviews were conducted by different television channels (CNN, NBC News, CBS News, ABC News and Fox News) journalists. According to Pew Research Centre, the former four networks audiences have a slightly liberal leaning from the average compared to Fox News considerably conservative lean in the audience ideological placement (Mitchell, Gottfried, Kiley & Matsa, 2014). These differences might impact the Trump’s behaviour in the interviews.
In terms of primaries vs. presidential election campaigns, there is an imbalance in the interviews text allocation – only one interview out of five is from the general election
campaign. This stems from Trump’s own timings to give interviews to different channels and from the condition that the interviews must be made in-person and in longer form. Trump gave numerous short interviews over the phone or via video to Fox News network but gave them scarcely to other networks. Therefore, a longer format interview where the journalist and Trump meet in person was a qualifying factor for this sub sample.
Besides all the major private networks represented in the sample, an interview to
non-profitable public broadcaster PBS was also desirable, but Trump did not have any interviews with PBS which would meet the conditions of longer format broadcast interview.
Codebook
The units of analysis of this study are the thee formats and quasi-sentences which is used to code statements or messages (Werner, Lacewell & Volkens, 2015). Quasi-sentences based unitising method is widely used by the political scientists (Alonso, Volkens & Gomez, 2012) to break down the political discourses. Advantage of using quasi-sentences in the analysis instead of sentences, lays in the attributes of orally expressed sentences, which might be partial or overarching from the argumentation measurement perspective. Thus, quasi-sentence is a way to capture and code an idea expressed in the text.
Some scholars (Werner, et al, 2015) have stressed that one sentence is minimally one quasi-sentence and two quasi-sentences cannot be one quasi-quasi-sentence. In addition, Werner, Lacewell & Volkens (2015) assert that one word cannot be a quasi-sentence. In this study I deviated from this approach due to the characteristics of Donald Trump’s communicative style. Werner, Lacewell & Volkens (2015) analysed party manifestos which are previously drafted and edited documents with full sentences, but Trump’s appearances in the formats contain mostly of improvised sentences. I will describe the quasi-sentence creation procedure followingly.
To aim the homogeneity in constituting the quasi-sentences, a set of rules were created. For example, a quasi-sentence can be just a reassuring response “That’s right” or “Yes!” to a journalist’s question if it implies reassuring a statement from the past. But it could also be two sentences where the first or the second sentence itself does not stand as a statement. For example, “Well, let me just tell you. I've been a really successful businessman for a long time.” In this quasi-sentence the first sentence is an introductory sentence to the following
self-praise. Another similar kind of two sentence quasi-sentence is “That's going to be a great term for a president, right? Boy, oh boy, what a mess.” The ironical first sentence is followed by the elaborating comment which coins the statement and clarifies the meaning of irony in the first sentence.
It is inherent to Trump speech to repeat the same or almost identical sentences few times and this created the need to create a rule for such quasi-sentences. If Trump said the same
sentence two times in a row, it constituted one quasi-sentence. If he said more times, the additional sentence or sentences were coded as separate quasi-sentences to stress the argument.
While the coding was applied only to Trump’s quasi-sentences, the context was also considered. This means that it was also important what the journalist’s or other politicians had said in prior to Trump’s quasi-sentences. This was accomplished by reading the full transcripts with all the other participants content.
Victimisation
To measure the presence of victimisation claims in Trump’s statements, the codebook included eight specific and one general code for victimising quasi-sentences (Table 3). As there was no codebook tailored to measure the victimisation in the politician’s rhetoric, I explored different coding schemes in studies which measured the victimisation in texts and different situations. The base coding scheme originates from the study on perceived
victimisation in the workplace (Aquino & Bradfield, 2000) which described fourteen behavioural items to assess self-perceived victimhood (p. 530). These items were used on Trump’s speeches and appearances which were not part of this study’s sample, to calibrate the scheme for political speech. Some of the items were removed from the coding scheme because they did not show up in any text. In addition to develop the coding scheme further, I
explored the codes that were used in other studies focused on the victim’s description and perception (Wilson & O’brien, 2016; Graham, Haidt & Nosek, 2009, Hilgemberg, 2018) and incorporated them to coding scheme which was then again tested and adjusted. All the sub codes can be seen from the Table 3.
Table 3. Victimisation sub codes
Codes used in the study
Victimisation Losing, discriminated, powerless, weak, treated unfairly, endangered
(dying or killed), lied to or about, stolen from, other disfavoured.
These categories were coded 1 if Trump used this type victimising description, verb or implied them in the quasi-sentence. All the victimising codes were later recoded to one variable “Victimisation”. An important condition for the coding was to assess if the wording implied that the in-group is innocent, blameless or not in power to change the negative situation they are exposed to. Second important clause for the coding was the victim’s presence and that the victim had to belong to the in-group. The victim may not have been mentioned but implied through the quasi-sentence in prior.
There were 21 sub codes for the in-group (Appendix 2) which were recoded to six general codes (Table 4).
The third important clause for the victimisation was the culprit presence because the harm had to be caused by identifiable agent (Aquino & Byron, 2002). If victimisation was coded 1 then any of the culprit codes had to be coded too. If it was not possible to code the presence of the in-group or out-group, then the victimisation code could not be coded 1 either. Altogether there were 57 sub codes (Appendix 2) which were later recoded to eight culprit codes that can be seen in Table 3. All the codes representing in-group and culprit codes were
developed inductively and tested using Trump’s speeches, debate appearances and interviews that were not part of the sample.
Table 4. In-group and culprit codes
Category General codes
In-group Personal in-group, the people, national in-group, political in-group, international in-group, other in-group
Culprits Politicians, political groups, national institutions, establishment, foreigners, international institutions, the media, other
Subsequently I will give two examples of coding victimisation and culprit group.
Example 1
In the interview to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday on the 3rd April 2016 Trump describes how all the other countries NATO are taking advantage of US military spending and do not contribute and then says the sentence: “It's unfair to us as a country.” (Sample index 1605, interview timestamp: 4.49 (Factbase videos, 2020)) The sub codes applied in this case would be “treated unfairly” for victimisation, “National in-group” for the in-group and “Foreigners” for the culprit group. It must be specified that when Trump used “Foreigners” code, then it had to be explicit that he is distancing US from them, because there was also in-group code for “International in-in-group” which showed positive relationship between the countries.
Example 2
In the Republican primaries debate on the 10th of November, midway debate (sample index 828; debate timestamp: 1:17.55 (Factbase videos, 2017)) Trump is listening to Rand Paul
while Carly Fiorina tries to interrupt, and Trump says: “Why does she keep interrupting everybody?”. This was not coded as victimisation because in the context it was clear that this was an attack and marginalising joke to which the attendance also reacted with laugher and booing.
Attacks on Trump
To analyse Trump’s victimhood claims between the formats, attacks on him were also coded either 1 or 0. The attacks were operationalized by using simplified version of Benoit
description of policy attacks (2006) on leadership, policy and personality (Appendix 2). All of them were also coded either 1 or 0 and later recoded to “Attacks on Trump”. This variable was coded only if Trump’s opponent or a journalist in a debate or in the interview had attacked him immediately before his turn. The attack did not have to be in the last sentence, but during the opponents turn. The occasions in the debates when the opponent had attacked Trump in their turn and the journalist said something to let Trump respond, were also
included. If Trump was attacked, then the whole Trump’s answer was coded 1, otherwise 0.
Statistical tests
The coding was done entirely by me, but to check the intercoder reliability (Neuendorf, 2002), another coder was also used for 10 percent of the sample or 180 quasi-sentences. The second coder was thoroughly instructed beforehand, and all the sub codes meanings were explained and discussed. For the ICR calculation, Hayes macro was used on SPSS (Hayes & Krippendorff, 2007). Most of the alphas were in the sufficient range of above 0.67 (Appendix 1) which is considered the threshold (De Swert, 2012). The ICR for victimisation was 0.84, which is well above the threshold. Out-group codes “National institutions” (α=0.66) and “Political groups” (α=0.66) were below the verge of the threshold and their values will be interpreted with caution.
To compare the victimisation claims presence between variables I used Chi-squared test and to specify statistical differences between some groups I also did ANOVAs and post-hoc Bonferroni tests.
Results
Trump as the victim of the media
To analyse if Trump identifies mostly the media as his culprit, I conducted Chi-squared tests to compare the presence of personal victimisation and the presence of all out-group
categories. Trump victimised himself 47 times in 1800 quasi-sentences which means that it is present in 2.6 percent of cases. Out of those 47 times, the media accounted for 34 cases which is 72.3 percent out of all the personal victimisations ((1, N = 1800) = 965.734, p < .001). The association between those variables was both strong and significant (Phi=.73, p<.001).
The second most frequent culprit, if Trump victimised himself, were the other politicians, who were responsible for 12 victimisations out of 47 which makes 25.5 percent of all the cases (1, N=1800) = 72.273, p<.001). The association between them was weak but significant (Phi= .20, p< .001). The third culprit in Trump’s self-victimisation claims were national institutions with 1 mention (2,1 per cent), Chi squared (1, N=1800) = .978, p= .323. This result is statistically insignificant due to p-value over .05.
To exemplify the strong bond between the self-victimisation and the media, I also calculated the percentage that the self-victimisation made up of all the cases when the media was mentioned as the culprit. Out of all the 45 cases when media was mentioned as the culprit, Trump’s 34 self-victimising claims make up 75,6 percent of them, Chi-squared (1, N=1800) = 965.734, p< .001).
These results show that the first hypothesis is confirmed: Trump blames the media most for all the injustice he thinks he has received.
Americans as the victims of the politicians
For hypothesis H1b, I calculated the Chi-squares to measure whom did Trump portray as the victimisers of “the people”. Out of 64 times when Trump mentioned “the people”, 21 of them saw the other politicians as the culprits, which made up 32.8 percent of all the cases, Chi-squared (1, N=1800) = 175.47, p< .001. There was a significant and moderate association between the two variables (Phi=.31, p<.001). The second most present culprit, if the people were victimised, were the foreigners with 13 occasions, which made 20.3 percent of all the people victimisations, Chi-squared (1, N=1800) = 94.13, p< .001. The association between them was significant, but weak (Phi= .23, p< .001).
The position for third most present victimising culprit for the people was tied by two groups, which both made up for 8 occasions or 12.5 percent each. One of them were the international institutions, Chi-squared (1, N=1800) = 94.72, p< .001) and the other one was the media, Chi-squared (1, N=1800) = 27.22, p< .001. Although same amount of mentions, the
international institutions had stronger association with the people (Phi= .23, p< .001) than the media (Phi= .12, p< .001). The other four groups made up 21.9 percent of occasions when the people were victimised.
These results show that Donald Trump portrays the other politicians as the culprits of the people. Therefore, the second hypothesis is confirmed.
Attacked Trump
To measure Trump’s behaviour in cases he is attacked, I measured the victimisation presence in the debate and interview categories combined. Within those 1200 quasi-sentences, Trump
responded 432 quasi-sentences to attacks. If Trump was attacked, then he used victimisation 47 times or in 10.9 percent of the quasi-sentences. If Trump was not attacked, then he used victimisation in 72 times out of 768 quasi-sentences or in 9.4 percent of the cases, Chi-squared (1, N=1200) = 0.701, p= .403). These averages show that Trump did use victimisation more if he was attacked, but the results are statistically insignificant.
The statistical tests did not give any results which would have been statistically significant and therefore the null hypothesis cannot bet rejected.
Tump and the rally speeches
For the hypothesis H3, I calculated the victimisation presence Chi-squared for three different formats: rally speeches, debates and interviews. In the rally speech format, the victimisation claim was found in 88 quasi-sentences out of 600, which is 14.7 percent, Chi-squared (1, N=1800) = 8.67, p= .003. In the debate format, the victimisation claims were made 66 times out 600, which is 11 percent, but the result is not statistically significant, Chi-squared (1, N=1800) = .221, p= .638. In the interview format, Trump used the victimisation in 53 quasi-sentences, which is 8.8 percent, Chi-squared (1, N=1800) = 6.23, p= .012). This result is statistically significant. The averages show that in rally speech format Trump used
victimisation more than in other formats, but the result is statistically significantly different only from the interview format.
I explored the data also with other statistical tests to see if it is possible to tell the differences between three formats. ANOVA test between the formats F(2, 1797) = 5,146, p= .006 showed that there are statistically significant differences in victimisation presence between the formats, but the post-hoc Bonferroni correction showed that only the rally speech victimisation presence was significantly different from the interview format victimisation presence (Mdifference = 0.58, p= .005).
Therefore, I can say that results point into a direction that Trump uses victimisation more in the rally speeches, but it is not possible to say if it is statistically significantly different from the debates. That is why partly the null hypothesis cannot be rejected and partly the
hypothesis is confirmed.
Discussion
This study gave some results that were expected based on the literature (H1a, H1b), some results which showed that the hypothesis pointed at the right direction (H3) and results that did not show in any direction (H2). As exemplified in the introduction, Trump is keen to victimise himself in relation to media. In his rhetoric during the 2016 Presidential election campaign, there was a strong association between the self-victimising claims presence and the media. I wonder what the results would be if Trump’s rhetoric after the elections were analysed because Robert Mueller’s investigation and numerous reports about it in the media started only few months after his election which paved the way for terms like “Witch hunt” and other similar victimisations. A valuable conclusion from this study is that Trump engages with self-victimising behaviour when attacking the media. But it also showed that sometimes he tends to portray himself as the victim of the other politicians. That was a surprising result in the light of Schneiker’s (2020) description of his superhero leadership.
But when talking about the people, Trump does not hold back with the variety of culprits who victimise the “good people”. As expected, blaming the other politicians is the most used way for him to push himself up. But he also puts a lot of blame on the foreigners, international institutions and the media. The two external culprits’ existence under the people is somewhat surprising because I would have expected that these culprits emerge more if he is talking about the national in-group which gives better comparison between countries. I find it surprising that the establishment culprit group did not have a notable presence when
victimising the people because Homolar and Scholz had found that the culprits are “the weak, self-serving and detached “establishment”; and (2) foreigners who either flow into the
country or lead countries that want to exploit the US for economic and security reasons” (2019, p.351).
This study was designed to be comparative between different formats to analyse if Trump’s own issue-framing differs from the one that is mediated by the media and other politicians. The results give a glimpse that Trump’s issue-framing might differ from the situations when he is mediated. It can be said that it differs statistically significantly from the interview format where he is strongly mediated by the journalist. But it is not possible to tell if that is different from the debate format where he, as one of the participants, can influence the mediated picture. Therefore, it can be said that the victimisation presence in Trump own issue-framed format is higher than where he is fully mediated. I count it as the most valuable finding of this study, but I’m discontent that the results could not be fully interpreted.
The hypothesis H2 was meant to be an alternative explanation to Trump’s behaviour in different formats. I expected that this behaviour might influence the results, but the statistical tests showed clearly that based on this study it is not possible to tell if the attacks have any effect on Trump’s victimisation claims.
I find it important that the victimhood in politics, especially in identity politics, will be studied more thoroughly and extensively than it done this far. In his essay, Robert Horwitz has described the victim’s role becoming the most important position in the politics in the United States (2018). I think that the victim’s position creates the ‘untouchable’ notion among the politician’s voters and is therefore very beneficiary for their representative. The ‘untouchable’ aspect might come emerge because the voters identify with their favoured politicians and it creates sympathetic feelings towards them. The reason, why I think that
victimhood aspect in politics should be studied more, is that it has also implications to the international politics. As Bar-Tal, et al (1997) explain, the victimhood has a strong
nationalistic and mobilising effect on the people who perceive themselves as the victims. I argue that it is one of the factors why Hungary, Poland and other similar states in the Eastern Europe have ironically turned their back on democratic ideals.
Limitations
This analysis has several limitations. Some of them are already explained the discussion section, but there are several more. Firstly, to measure the victimisation in the rhetoric, the sub codes describing different types of victimising expressions should be developed even more. The measurement of victimisation became a bit vague which resulted in surprisingly large amount of victimising codes. This vagueness stems from synthesising different codebooks and could be avoided if choosing only one specific codebook used in the literature, for example Aquino & Bradfield (2000). This would give the results a stronger validity.
Secondly, the sample proved to be small to have conclusive results for all the hypothesis. Therefore, the next similar study should be conducted with significantly larger sample to measure the differences between formats and with that provide new valuable knowledge on the topic. The bigger sample could remove the statistical insignificances.
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Appendix 1
Intercoder Reliability calculations Krippendorff’s Alpha Victimisation 0.8386 Personal in-group 0.8864 The people 0.7978 National in-group 0.9588 Political in-group 1 International in-group 1 Other in-group 1 Politicians 0.9065 Political groups 0.6634 National institutions 0.6648 Establishment 1 Foreigners 0.9065 International institutions 1 The media out-group 0.8281
Other 1
Attack on Trump 0.9503 Personality 1 Leadership 0.9385 Policy 0.9854
Appendix 2
CODEBOOK DONALD TRUMP’S SELF-VICTIMISING
CLAIMS
GENERAL INFORMATION A.Index
Enter the quasi-sentence number
B. Transcription filename
Enter transcription filename
C. Sub sample index
Enter sub sample transcript index
D. Situation
Enter the situation number 1. Rally speech 2. Debate 3.Broadcast interview E. Unit of analysis Enter quasi-sentence F. Victimisation
Which victimisation code is present? 0. Not present
1. Losing – The in-group or in-group member is described losing, being at the losing end or not winning.
2. Discriminated - The in-group or in-group member is described discriminated, receiving unequal treatment or being treated worse than others.
3. Powerless - The in-group or in-group member is described disempowered, not in a position to change their destiny or helpless.
4. Weak - The in-group or in-group member is described as weak, fragile or other similar. 5. Treated unfairly - The in-group or in-group member is described being treated unfairly. The distinction between discrimination is that it doesn’t have to be unequal treatment. 6. Endangered (dying or killed) - The in-group or in-group member is described being endangered, killed, dying and hurt physically or mentally.
7. Lied to or about - The in-group or in-group member is described being lied to or to be told untruth. Also includes cases if the in-group member or in-group is being lied about.
8. Stolen from - The in-group or in-group member is described being stolen from or out-group being described as gaining from the in-out-group benefits.
9. Other disfavoured - The in-group or in-group member is described in a disfavoured position or other victimising way which has not been described above.
IN-GROUP CODES
G. Personal in-group
Which personal in-group code is present? 0. Not present 1.Himself 2. Family 3. Trump organization 4. Trump campaign H. The people
Which the people in-group is present? 0. Not present
1.The people (of United States) 2.The majority or "most people" 3.Undefined we
4.The unborn children
I.National in-group
Which national in-group is present? 0.Not present
1. The United States 2. American economy 3. American culture 4. The border 5. The Constitution
6. National symbols (eagle, flag etc.) 7. US Army
J.Political in-group
Which political in-group is present? 0.Not present 1. Republican Party 2. Trump supporters 3. Conservatives 4. Christians K. International in-group
0. Not present 1. Allies
L. Other in-group
Code if any other in-group is mentioned 0. Not present
1. Present
OUT-GROUP CODES
M. Politicians
Which out-group politician is present? 0.Not present 1. Hillary Clinton 2. Barack Obama 3. Jeb Bush 4. Marco Rubio 5. Ted Cruz 6. John Kasich 7. Ben Carson 8. Bill Clinton 9. Nancy Pelosi 10. Harry Reid 11. Chuck Schumer 12. Mitt Romney 13. John McCain
14. George W. Bush 15. Other politician
N. Political groups
Which political out-group is present? 0. Not present
1. Democratic Party
2. Democratic Party politicians
3. Democratic Party nominated or selected officials 4. The liberals
5. Feminists
6. Gun control groups 7. Obamacare
O. National institutions
Which national institution out-group is present? 0.Not present
1. Senate 2. Congress 3. Supreme Court
4. Intelligence agencies and community 5 Washington D.C
6. Other national institution
P.Establishment
Which establishment out-group is present? 0.Not present
1.Corrupt or rigged system 2. Establishment
3. The elite 4. "The Swamp" 5. The 1 %
6. Wall Street or big business
Q. Foreigners
Which foreign countries out-group is present? 0.Not present 1. The immigrants 2. China 3. Russia 4. Mexico 5. Other countries 6. ISIS/Al-Quaeda
7. Conflicts in Iraq, Afhganistan, Syria, Libya 8. Europe/European Union
9. Xi Jingping 10. Vladimir Putin 11. Enrique Peña Nieto 12. Other foreign
R. International institutions.
Which international institution out-group is present? 0.Not present
2. NATO 3. WTO 4. NAFTA
5. Trans-Pacific Partnership 6. Other trade
7. Other international institution
S. The media
Which media out-group is present? 0.Not present
1. The New York Times 2. CNN
3. The journalist(s) 4. The media
T. Other
Which other out-group is present? 0.Not present 1. Other out-group ATTACKS U. Trump is attacked Is Trump attacked? 0.No 1. Yes V. Who attacks
0. Trump is not attacked 1. Journalist 2. Republican politician 3. Democratic politician 4. Citizen 5. Other W. Attack What is attacked? 0.Trump is not attacked 1. Personality
2. Leadership 3. Policy 4. Other
