The Voice of the People: Populism and Donald Trump’s Use of Informal Voice

The 45th president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump, was a politically divisive figure before his win in the 2016 presidential election and remained one when, on November 15 of 2022, he announced his candidacy for the 2024 election. His supporters see him as a man of the people. As one of them stated in an interview for The New York Times, “I don’t really look at him as a politician … I look at him as just one of us. He doesn’t act like he’s above you, as a person” (Haberman, 2018). Trump’s critics tend to interpret his popular appeal as a populist bid to rally the masses behind a self-serving and divisive political agenda: He rails against the political establishment, the media, and the progressive intelligentsia; he professes to be the voice of all true Americans; he stokes nationalistic and nativist sentiments; he promises simple, “common sense” solutions to complex social problems; and he tries, by his folksiness of demeanor and informality of expression, to convince the average Joe that he is just like him and therefore understanding of his hopes and fears in a way that the Washington elites could never be.

Regardless of what one thinks of Trump’s actual political proposals, there are good reasons to characterize his political communication as populist.¹ Rhetorically, at least, he divides the United States into a good, honest, hard-working people and a dishonest, ineffectual, uncaring political establishment. For example, on a single page of his campaign manifesto, Crippled America, Trump (2015a) defines his own political platform against that of the “career diplomats,” “pinstriped bureaucrats,” “so-called leaders,” and “insiders within the Washington ruling class” (p. 31). What unites these political adversaries, as the reader is repeatedly informed, is that they are neither motivated nor competent to help the American people through difficult times.

There has long been a tendency in American politics and presidents toward a more informal and simple communication style (Conway & Zubrod, 2022; Kowal et al., 1997; Lim, 2012; see also Schneider & Eitelmann, 2020, pp. 4–5). Recent presidents, such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, have increasingly been comfortable addressing the public in plain language, a colloquial register, and an unceremonious tone of voice. This may have been to their benefit, as a simple and informal communication style retrodicts the successful re-election of former United States presidents (Thoemmes & Conway III, 2007). Trump’s communication is certainly informal in this sense, which may be one way in which he means to project a “‘normal guy’ ethos” (Partington & Taylor, 2017, p. 190) and thereby effect a plebeian appeal. But there is also another, more specific sense in which Trump’s communication may be said to be informal. His direct verbal attacks on his opponents and the “establishment,” as well as his brash, boastful, and obscenity-laden rhetoric, represent a significant break with traditional forms of political communication in the United States (e.g., Stuckey, 2020). This style is often perceived as an insult to official decorum and political correctness, which may help Trump cement his status as an outsider who, unlike the trained career politicians, “isn’t afraid to tell it as it is” (Trump, 2016b). Thus, Trump’s rhetoric is also informal in a specifically political sense.

I will argue that Trump’s use of voice is informal in precisely these two senses. His prosodic dynamism and articulatory laxness express a conversational and unmonitored informality. In conjunction with the verbal contents that they modulate, these vocal measures can come to convey an unvarnished and relatable folksiness. At the same time, Trump employs his voice in ways that express a specifically political informality, or impropriety. Key to this function are his mocking vocal impersonations and aggressive shouting and interrupting. By these means, Trump performs a transgression of the formally and respectfully “presidential” mode of oratory. Thus, Trump’s use of voice symbolically aligns him with an aggrieved, straight-talkin’ folk and against a self-censoring, reactionary, and condescending elite.

My argument has three parts. I will start by defining populism before describing the ways in which researchers have used that concept to analyze and explain various facets of Trump’s communication. I will then analyze how Trump’s informal use of voice complements his populist rhetoric. This analysis will integrate empirical findings about the actual characteristics and patterning of Trump’s use of voice. Its target will mainly be the “Trump rallies” that helped secure his nomination in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries and subsequent win in the 2016 United States presidential election, but other materials will also be examined. My concluding discussion will argue that Trump’s informal use of voice may solve for him a problem with which many populist leaders have had to contend: He is not at all like the common man with whom he claims to identify.

Recent debates about the meaning and significance of populism have tended to revolve around what aspect of political life—ideational, social, historical, economic, personal, or communicative—the term may best be used to describe (e.g., Laclau, 2005; Mudde, 2004; Weyland, 2001; see also Ionescu & Gellner, 1969). Most political theorists view populism as an ideology² with a closely associated communication style (e.g., Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2008; Freeden, 2017; Mudde, 2004; Stanley, 2008).³ This ideology makes three defining claims about society. First is the claim that society is divided into a univocal “people,” which is often represented as the true inheritors of a romanticized “heartland” (Taggart, 2000, Chapter 8), and a ruling “elite.” Right-wing populist movements tend to identify this elite with an idle and corrupt political establishment, while left-wing populists are more concerned with the economic elites—with Wall Street as opposed to Washington, say (Gandesha, 2018). In all versions, however, the two opposing classes are simplistic idealizations, or even “fiction[s]” (Müller, 2016, p. 19), that fail to capture their diversity. Second is the claim that the people are hardworking, patriotic, honest, or otherwise virtuous, and that the elites are dishonest, corrupt, exploitative, or otherwise immoral, wherefore the former must be moralistically mobilized against the latter. Third, populist leaders insist that “they, and only they, represent the people” (Müller, 2016, p. 20, emphasis in original), such that their political opposition will always and everywhere be illegitimate. Populism is therefore an anti-pluralistic ideology (Galston et al., 2018; Hawkins, 2009; Müller, 2016).

The communication style that associates to these ideological commitments is one of binary oppositions. There is always an “us” and a “them,” and there is always moralistic, anti-establishment fervor (Hawkins, 2009; Kazin, 1995). Another characteristic is a continuous focus on threats and crises with which only the populist leader is able to contend (Hall, 2021; Moffitt, 2015; Weyland, 2001). Populist leaders, moreover, tend to present themselves as political outsiders who look, act, and communicate differently from those they identify as the elite. They will often cultivate an image of folksiness, such as by speaking plainly or dressing casually. They tend to be colorfully emotional, transgressive, and charismatic, as well as dominantly overweening (Aiolfi, 2022; Heinisch, 2003, pp. 94–95; Kazin, 1995; Ostiguy, 2020). These traits are very visible in the “folksy, colorful, self-consciously crude, and corporeally demonstrative” style of contemporary right-wing populism in the United States (Lowndes, 2017, p. 236).

Much academic research has investigated how the basic claims of populism pervade Trump’s political communication, including his speeches and debating style (e.g., Bucy et al., 2020; Kellner, 2016; Nai & Maier, 2018). As the frequent focus of this research, Trump’s 2015 and 2016 campaigning made evident his unprecedented disregard for official propriety, which has been analyzed as a populist stance—a way of “sticking it to the man” (e.g., Bucy et al., 2020; Winberg, 2017). Prior to his 2017 inauguration, some commentators predicted that Trump’s populist rhetoric would abate if he were to take office. With a few notable exceptions,⁴ however, President Trump mostly stayed the course (Hall, 2021; Ross & Caldwell, 2020; Hawkins & Littvay, 2019; Stopfner, 2021).

Other studies have examined how Trump’s particular brand of populism, which is variously described as “nativist” (Inglehart & Norris, 2016, p. 6), “nationalist” (Gusterson, 2017), and “authoritarian” (Kellner, 2016), frames key political issues. Concerning immigration, Trump falls in with other right-wing populist movements (Goethals, 2018; Greven, 2016; Mondon & Winter, 2019). He sees the true Americans as being economically and culturally squeezed by an emerging class of outsiders—Mexicans and others—that has been unfairly privileged by the political establishment. It takes a real leader, in the form of a “strong, proud conservative” (Trump, 2015a, p. 100), to push back. Another key issue is foreign policy and international relations, regarding which Trump’s “America first” rhetoric has been interpreted as a return of Jacksonian unilateralism (Clarke & Ricketts, 2017; Löfflmann, 2022). Trump, moreover, perceives international, “globalist” institutions as in many ways continuous with the “unpatriotic” national political establishment: “Today we import nearly 800 billion more in goods than we export. Can’t continue to do that … It’s a political and politician-made disaster … It is the consequence of a leadership class that worships globalism over Americanism” (2016g, 7:28).

Trump’s expressive personal style overlaps with that of other populist leaders, and the generalizations that have been made about them have also been targeted at him. He is “emotional” (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2018), “transgressive” (Bucy et al., 2020), “charismatic” (Joosse, 2018), and “dominant” (McAdams, 2017). One particularly common way of characterizing Trump’s populist communication is to call it “angry.” Wahl-Jorgensen (2018) suggests that Trump’s angry rhetoric is directed against “the political establishment and other cultural and economic elites, women, migrants, ethnic minorities and anyone perceived as a threat to American interests” (p. 771). It may be “a way of dramatising grievances” (p. 744) that invites sympathetic audiences to feel with their leader and against his illegitimate, all-bad enemies (see also Gonawela et al., 2018). Trump’s anger fuels his catastrophizing, fear-inducing, and oftentimes false claims about the status quo (Bucy et al., 2020; Homolar & Scholz, 2019; Wojczewski, 2020). Such negative political rhetoric is typical of populist leaders, who tend to benefit from real or merely imagined crises (Moffitt, 2015; Roberts, 1995).

Trump’s expressive and aggressive personal style comes through on social media, especially Twitter.⁵ Before his January 2021 ban from the platform, he used Twitter to play up threats against “the people” and American popular sovereignty while lashing out against his opponents, especially other (“crooked,” “corrupt,” “lazy,” etc.) politicians and the fourth estate of the (“fake news”) media (Kissas, 2020; Ross & Caldwell, 2020). His highly informal and offensive communication on the platform has been analyzed as a “strategic instrument” of self-presentation (Kreis, 2017, p. 607). Schneiker (2019) goes so far as to characterize Trump’s self-branding on Twitter as that of an “anti-politician”: He “others” the political establishment and underscores his outsider status by, for example, using the word politician “as a synonym for someone who is incompetent, not able to solve problems and untrustworthy” (p. 219). While such rhetoric strikes many as unhinged and unprofessional, to others it suggests the authenticity of a true reformer who is not afraid to speak his mind (Kissas, 2020; Kreis, 2017). Trump’s use of Twitter has therefore been interpreted as one of the main ways in which he intimates a close connection to his supporters, who sense—in the virulence of his attacks, the immediacy of his responses to concurrent events, and the ungrammaticality of his sentences—that they are dealing with the man himself and not with a censoring mouthpiece.⁶ Trump is aware of this fact. He exploits the democratic aura of social media in claiming that they allow him to speak directly to the American people without the “dishonest” intermediacy of the press (Gerbaudo, 2018, 2014; see also Schubert, 2020). As he put the point in a Fox News interview, “I think that maybe I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Twitter” (quoted in Demata, 2018, p. 67).

Studies that have adopted linguistic methods of analysis have drawn attention to the vernacular plainness of Trump’s spoken communication. He talks very simply, preferring short, unspecific words and simple or even telegraphic sentences (Ahmadian et al., 2017; Egbert & Biber, 2020; Kayam, 2018; Ronan & Schneider, 2020). As Schneider and Eitelmann (2020) document, “his speech style is variously characterized as that of a third-, fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-grader” (p. 3).⁷ The syntactic structure of his Tweets tends also to be very simple (Kreis, 2017; Ross & Rivers, 2020). In his oral communication, moreover, Trump relies heavily on constructed dialogues (“I said … and then she said …”) to build an informal, “conversational” rapport between himself and his audiences (Sclafani, 2018, Chapter 3; see also Egbert & Biber, 2020), which may also be strengthened by his highly anecdotal argumentation (Reicher & Haslam, 2017). Bischof and Senninger (2018) spell out a possible rationale behind Trump’s linguistic plainness:

By employing simple language, populists can denounce mainstream politics as unnecessarily complex and as mostly relying on technical jargon which tends to correlate with complex language. Thus, linguistic simplicity is a valuable tool for exhibiting the aloofness of the remaining political elite and fosters the impression of a strong bond between the populist and ordinary people. Thereby, simple language should suggest that populists understand the struggle and problems of “ordinary” people’s everyday life. (p. 476)

Trump uses many linguistic devices to mark his political status as an outsider and to suggest to his followers that he has little in common with the Washington establishment.⁸ He draws “a firm rhetorical line between ‘us’ and ‘them’” (Homolar & Scholz, 2019, p. 353), where “them” is often used synonymously with the political establishment, or otherwise with an “intransigent collective” of oppositional voices (Stopfner, 2021, p. 318). More broadly, he adopts a “discourse of dualities” (Jamieson & Taussig, 2017, p. 625) and often uses Manichaean, hyperbolic, and metaphorical language to describe political and other parties as either for the people and therefore wholly good, or else against the people and therefore wholly bad (Abbas, 2019; Çinar et al., 2020; Koth, 2020). Content analyses of his 2015 and 2016 campaign speeches further indicate that Trump “employs a rhetoric that is distinctive in its simplicity, anti-elitism, and collectivism” (Oliver & Rahn, 2016, p. 189; see also Liu & Lei, 2018).

Populism, then, may be a useful conceptual lens through which to bring different aspects of Trump’s political communication into synoptic focus (see Singh, 2017, for critical discussion). By using that lens to analyze his 2015 and 2016 political campaigning, I will now go on to argue that Trump’s informal voice, just as his words, serves to align him with a beleaguered “people” and against a corrupt, incompetent, and uncaring “elite.”

As an aspect of his voice that many audiences will be able to intuit, Trump’s New York accent might seem politically ill-advised. In analyzing the political significance of that accent, a Washington Post article (Guo, 2016) suggests, with input from several linguists, that “people do not perceive the New York style of speaking as particularly attractive or high-status” (see Preston, 1996, for empirical evidence). However, the same article also notes that the accent “has been a noteworthy element of Trump’s populist image.” It helps him “summon the stereotype of the blunt, no-nonsense New Yorker,” and people do “associate it with competence, aggressiveness and directness,” which he certainly wants to project. And then there is the suggestion that though Trump “is stratospherically wealthy, his average-Joe way of speaking makes him sound a little more down to earth.” This cogent analysis of Trump’s accent is one of only a few ways in which his actual use of voice has been analyzed as a part of his populist platform. It highlights several themes that run through my own findings in what follows.

One way to appreciate how Trump uses his voice quality for communicative effect is to examine it by contrast to his mocking caricatures of his opponents’ voices. During his 2015 and 2016 campaign rallies, Trump would attack political rivals and other disagreeable people by impersonating them and adopting for them a weak and submissive or otherwise unflattering tone of voice. For example, at a rally in Dubuque, Iowa, Trump (2015b) pretended to be former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who ran against him in the Republican primaries. In speaking on the topic of illegal immigration, Trump-as-Bush dramatically lowers the volume of his voice, producing a soft murmur as he scolds himself for using a politically incorrect term: “Yes. Oh yes. The anchor baby. Oh, I shouldn’t say anchor baby” (13:11). More frequently, Trump would use his voice to mock what he viewed as the stiff inauthenticity of all those “career politicians” from whom he sought to distance himself. Hillary Clinton was a frequent target. At one rally, when criticizing her use of teleprompters, Trump (2016h) tightens his posture and awkwardly pouts his mouth before reciting the following words in a mock-official, overarticulating voice: “And whether you go [orients mechanically to pretended teleprompter to his left] … north and south [orients right] … or east and west [orients left] … Donald Trump is a bad person [orients right]” (42:30). In so impersonating Clinton, Trump speaks with a rigidly formal cadence such that each of the four spoken segments terminates in a pause that coincides with his pretended turning toward the next teleprompter. Together with his hyperarticulation,⁹ this overstructured delivery gives the impression of someone whose concerns are not about what they are saying but only how they are saying it.

Trump (2016a) did another version of the same act at a previous rally in Rock Hill, South Carolina, in which Clinton’s tele-prompted speech is reduced to meaningless babbling: “[squints toward pretended teleprompter on his left] ba-ba-ba-ba … [squints to his right] ba-ba-ba-ba-ba … [squints to his left] ba-ba” (45:52). (All other political candidates got a similar treatment at a different rally, but here the syllable of choice was “di” [2015b, 50:58].) Each babbling utterance again follows a regular meter, but this time the mock-official tone is replaced by a flatly robotic delivery. In portraying Clinton’s use of voice in this way, Trump makes several implicit suggestions about her. Her flat tone betrays a personal enervation; there is no energy and motivation in the voice of this “all talk, no action” politician. But there is also again the suggestion of inauthenticity: Unfeelingly and unthinkingly, Clinton just parrots back what she reads on a screen—and who knows who wrote that?¹⁰ By contrast, Trump immediately goes on to announce that he needs no script or teleprompter because “I speak from the heart.”¹¹

What does such heartfelt speech sound like? As against the formal rigidity or robotic monotonicity of “the politicians,” Trump employs a dynamic prosody that evokes an excitedly informal, conversational tone. The pitch of his voice is particularly variable and at times even erratic, such that he shifts rapidly and frequently between a higher and a deeper voice. Ahmadian et al. (2017) analyzed the speech, including voice pitch, of the nine most prominent Republican candidates for the 2016 election and found that Trump’s pitch was the most variable of all. The objects of study were the announcement speeches of these presidential candidates, but Trump’s pitch during his many rallies tended to be even more dynamic (see also Signorello et al., 2020). Especially noteworthy may be the frequency and intensity with which Trump places stress on specific words by means of screeching pitch accents, that is, extreme momentary rises in the fundamental frequency of his speech sounds. Their most salient use may be to express the absurdity of disagreeable propositions, such as Democratic Party candidate Bernie Sanders’s alleged intention to “raise your taxes to ninety percent—ninety percent!” (2015f, 17:28).

Trump’s use of pitch is only one aspect of his dynamic and irregular use of prosody. By investigations into amplitude modulations, Bosker (2021) showed that Trump’s speech during the 2016 presidential debates was much less prosodically rhythmic—less characterized by a consistent syllabic patterning—than Clinton’s. In line with the argument of this article, Bosker speculated that “the lack of rhythmic amplitude modulations in Trump’s speech may indicate a level of spontaneity in his speech production, with little attempt to pre-plan certain utterances” (p. 178). D’Errico et al. (2019) also found that, during interviews, Trump’s speech is highly emotionally expressive, with a dynamic use of pitch and a fast rate of speech being key indicators. Similarly, the audience perception study of Bucy et al. (2020) found that Trump’s voice in debates is highly expressive of emotions such as anger, fear, and happiness, which are often conveyed by means of voice quality variation and pitch dynamics. Such disorganized and emotive prosodic dynamism is typical of informal, unscripted modes of speech (Beckman, 1997; Murray & Arnott, 1993; Winter & Grawunder, 2012). By an almost definitional contrast, formal communication tends to be structured and emotionally restricted.

A qualitative assessment of Trump’s prosodic vivacity reveals that it communicates more than basic emotions. He also frequently uses very different voices—distinctive vocal configurations with an appreciable attitudinal tenor—to express his feelings on a current topic. For example, in discussing the “dishonest” press’s suggestion that he “erupted” during a Republican primary debate, Trump (2015d) lowers his brow, raises the corners of his mouth, and asserts, in a breathy, high-pitched, low-volume voice, “I never erupted” (8:38). He would often use that voice to mark the unfairness or silliness of attacks made against him—to say, in effect, what are you talking about? Another of his many voices can be heard at a rally in Anderson, South Carolina, when Trump (2015g) discusses how “the right messenger” would have been able to secure better deals than the sitting president in tough negotiations with unfriendly countries. He stops himself mid-utterance to assure his audience, in a voice that suddenly drops an octave, that “I’m the right messenger. Believe me. I’m the right messenger” (54:17). The deep, self-assured voice that results suggests that Trump means business, and that he will be able to succeed where others have failed. Moreover, as with his identifiable political adversaries, Trump would frequently perform the speech of unspecific critics (“somebody said …”) or collectives (“they said …”), adopting for them various kinds of generic voices: stupid, weak, up-tight, excited, angry, etc. Such voices, many of which he uses at a rally in Worcester, Massachusetts (2015i), may be heard as the oral equivalent of frowning, sneering, or otherwise expressive emoticons.

Another way in which Trump’s voice is out of tune with a formal, statesmanlike style of political communication is in terms of his error-prone and disfluent speech delivery. Whereas his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton is known to produce highly articulate speech with few errors and redundancies, Trump stumbles, mumbles, and frequently repeats himself (e.g., Leith, 2017; Ronan & Schneider, 2020). A single quotation from a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, will serve as a representative example. Trump (2015l) gets on the topic of Ford’s decision to construct a new car plant in Mexico rather than in the United States:

So, Ford: Good company, I like Ford. In fact, the president [of Ford] wrote me a beautiful letter talking about, well, you know, it’s—wasn’t that bad but he hardly mentioned what he was doing—he said, you know, how well the company—he didn’t want to mention this. So, Ford spending two and a half billion dollars—that’s the biggest plant—can you imagine a one-story plant—two and a half billion—that’s a lot—that’s a big plant, right? (25:18–25:36)

The above transcription renders Trump’s speech in standardized written English. A quasi-phonetic transcription of the segment, which is more suggestive of his actual stream of speech sounds, might look as follows:

So Ford. Good company I like Ford nfact the presiden wrote me a beautiful letter talkin’ abou—well y’know it’s—wasn’t that ba—but he hardly mentioned what he was doing—hesed y’know how well the compa—he di wanna mention this [pauses, inhales, and slows down]. So Ford spending two and a half [inhales deeply and loudly enunciates:] billion dollars [suddenly squints and speeds up again]—asse bigges plank—an you imagine-e one story plan—two’n’a half bill—at’s a lo—that’s a big plan, right?

Much of Trump’s speech is marked by muttering hypo- and co-articulation. Especially when talking fast, which he tends to do in short but frequent intervals, he will elide word endings (“didn’t” becomes “di”; “plant” becomes “plan”) and assimilate speech sounds between separate words (“plant” assimilates to “can” and becomes “plank”). His speech is also characterized by a frequent abandonment of incomplete utterances (“a beautiful letter talking about, well, you know”; “how well the company—he didn’t want to mention this”). In addition, Trump makes heavy use of repetition (“two and a half billion”) and occasional use of utterance repairs (“that’s a lot—that’s a big plant, right?”).

Such articulatory shortcuts and disfluencies are characteristic of informal, spontaneous speech, in which the speaker is unlikely to be consciously monitoring the correctness and fluidity of his or her speech, as opposed to formal, pre-planned speeches (Brown, 1990; Shriberg, 2005). The sudden abandonment of incomplete utterances is especially typical of Trump, which contributes to the sense that he speaks in “sentence fragments” (Levin, 2017), and which explains his designation as the “em-dash candidate” by the national political correspondent of The Washington Post (Libit, 2016). (The em dash can be used to signal a sudden communicative interruption, as in the above transcriptions.)

A graphic representation of even just a few seconds of Trump’s use of voice (Fig. 1) can serve to illustrate the acoustic realization of some of its dynamic and disfluent characteristics. Trump claims that the press reported “that I erupted.” He comments on that report by asserting, in a breathy, high-pitched, low-amplitude voice that is distinctively different from his neutral voice, “I never erupt[ed],” omitting the final syllable. He then suddenly switches back to a more neutral voice in quickly elaborating: “I never even raised my voice,” before immediately raising his voice and pitch in introducing a new thought, which he signals with a discourse marker: “In fact …” He then pauses.

While some commentators perceive Trump’s disfluent and self-interrupting speech to be “sloppy” and “spasmodic” (Libit, 2016), Trump himself prefers a different interpretation. As he explains in addressing such attacks on him at a rally in Anderson, South Carolina, he is so energized by his message that he jumps from incomplete sentence to incomplete sentence because his audience will be smart enough to “know what the end of the sentence is gonna be” (2015g, 31:30). His speech is about what is said rather than how it is said, whereas his mocking impersonations of his political opponents make it clear that they prioritize form—stiff officialism and political correctness—over meaningful content. Similarly, Trump’s muttering hypoarticulation is interpretable by the contrast to what he represents as the overlearned hyperarticulation of the “politicians.” He would also on occasion turn or walk away from the microphone during continuous speech (e.g., 2015h, 24:28), making his voice momentarily inaudible or almost inaudible to his audience. Whatever else one might say about such lapses, they certainly give the impression that Trump’s speeches have not been carefully planned and rehearsed.

At least to some ears, then, Trump may succeed by his disorderly and disfluent speech to present himself as someone who is communicating, unguardedly and extemporaneously, exactly what comes to his mind. His sheer prosodic dynamism adds to this impression by conveying bluff enthusiasm and conversational informality. So, ironically, may be the effect of the conspicuous absence of one type of disfluency in Trump’s speech, which is that of filled pauses such as erm, uh, and um. Whether at his rallies, in interviews, or in debates, Trump almost never uses such fillers, or “hesitation markers,” which allow the speaker the time to translate his or her thoughts into a fluent, correct, and contextually appropriate stream of words (Corley & Stewart, 2008; Rochester, 1973)—as well as to signal to others that one is experiencing difficulties on these points (Bortfeld et al., 2001). Filled pauses are therefore especially common in spontaneous speech that is effortfully processed to observe demands of formality, politeness, and precision (e.g., Winter & Grawunder, 2012). By avoiding this kind of disfluency in particular, Trump conveys in his speech a sense of conversational ease: an indifference to formal expectations and a casual willingness to make verbal errors. Sclafani (2018) notes an analogous trend in his use of discourse markers, such as well, you know, and believe me (Chapter 2). Trump makes frequent use of discourse markers that signal conversational informality, such as you know and right, but infrequent use of the discourse marker well, which signals considered hesitation.

Trump’s informal use of voice echoes his informal use of words. It does much to present him as folksy and conversationally spontaneous. But Trump’s manner of speaking is also informal in the specifically political sense that it flouts established forms of civility and official propriety. These two senses of formality are related and in some ways continuous: For example, Trump’s speedy mumbling, like his simple and oftentimes careless choice of words, is not exactly statesmanlike; as the linguist John McWhorter (2018) has put it, “He is the first president who, rather than striding forward and speaking, just gets up and talks” (p. 74). More than that, however, Trump uses his voice in ways that are fully politically counter-normative in the same sense that his disrespectful and unfiltered rhetoric has often been so. Like that explicit rhetoric, these non-verbal means of communication allow him to project a near-total disregard for the constraining demands and decorum of officialdom. I have already discussed one example of this in the form of Trump’s vocal impersonations of disliked others, and especially of political adversaries, which serve to attack their character, personality, or political style. These impersonations are the prosodic equivalent of his frequent name-calling, which often took aim at the same people (e.g., “Crooked Hillary,” “Sleepy Joe,” “Low Energy Jeb”). Another petulant mode of attack by Trump has been to ridicule the “unpronounceable” or otherwise notable names of his political opponents by means of mocking pronunciations. A list of targets would include the Republican John Kasich before the 2016 presidential election (2016e, 22:29), the Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg before the 2020 presidential election (2019, 34:43), and current vice president Kamala Harris before the 2020 presidential election (2020, 1:44:22). Such vulgar modes of disparagement would be off-limits for most political actors, but not for Trump. Of course, to say that something is politically improper is not necessarily to say that it is aggressive. At a rally in Tucson, Arizona, Trump (2016d) proclaims his love for Latino Americans. He spots a group of “Latinas” in the audience, shouts them out, and blows two audibly sloppy air-kisses their way (51:30).

Trump’s proclivity for interrupting the speech of his political rivals during debates may be the most remarked-upon way in which his use of voice is politically counter-normative. During his three debates with Hillary Clinton before the 2016 election, for example, Trump interrupted her replies to the host’s questions much more frequently than vice versa (Bucy et al., 2020; Grebelsky-Lichtman & Katz, 2019; Jacobsen, 2019), and a similar pattern describes at least his first presidential debate with Joe Biden before the 2020 election (Stahl, 2020). As Bucy et al. (2020) suggest, such interruptions “represent violations of debate decorum and incursions on the opposing candidate’s speaking rights; as such, they constitute another element of the populist’s transgressive mien” (p. 641). Trump also frequently interrupts his interviewers (Sclafani, 2018, Chapter 3), which may carry much the same symbolic meaning. The ideology of populism can easily be made to justify such behavior because Trump, as a political outsider, needs to assert himself against attempts by the liberal order to keep him out.¹² As he puts it in Crippled America, “I manage to blast through the ridiculous liberal bias of the media and speak right to the hearts of the people—or at least I try” (2015a, p. 80). In turn, provocative vocal displays help Trump build his ethos as a populist leader by demonstrating his willingness to transgress against the standards and pieties of the political system. An example of this was his frequent criticism of former president Barack Obama’s unwillingness to use the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism.” Having denounced this fact in his speeches, Trump would often go on to utter the phrase emphatically, with all three words marked by stress-borne prosodic beats and separated from each other by dramatic pauses (e.g., 2015c, 1:53). The very fact that there are “political” reasons not to utter those words becomes a reason for Trump to do so with insistent emphasis (see also Conway et al., 2017).

Finally, shouting is often seen as inappropriate to official communication for much the same reason that interrupting is seen to be so, and certainly Trump’s debates with political adversaries have been frequently described as entirely inappropriate “shouting matches” (e.g., Flegenheimer & Haberman, 2020). However, shouting can also be seen as appropriate to political and official communication when what is shouted is meant to be inspiring or uplifting rather than aggressive. Therefore, a key difference between the shouting of Trump and that of many of his political opponents may be qualitative rather than quantitative.¹³

Consider Hillary Clinton’s (2016) heartening cry, near the end of a Grand Rapids, Michigan, rally, to “get this country and everybody in it back up, on our feet, moving forward, together!” (34:25). In uttering these words, Clinton raises her voice crescentically—together with the applause of her audience—to a full-throated shout. By contrast, Trump’s shouting during his rallies was often aggressive: He would yell, for example, for the forceful removal of protesters (2016c, 39:35), against the alleged illegal activities of Hillary Clinton (2016h, 47:30), against the alleged dishonesty of Texas Senator Ted Cruz (2016e, 11:42), against American companies that relocate to foreign countries (2015e, 42:25), and to “attack” the “dumbass politicians” who would allow illegal immigrants to obtain birthright citizenship for their “anchor babies” (2015k, 41:14). Also, his shouting rarely displayed the plotted and measured intensification that was characteristic of Clinton’s shouting. It tended rather to be sudden and prosodically unanticipated. For example, at a rally in Anaheim, California, in discussing the necessity of building a wall between Mexico and the United States to keep out illegal immigrants, Trump (2016f) briefly pauses before suddenly roaring: “Who’s gonna pay for the wall!?” (25:01). (The audience shouts back: “Mexico!”) And in attacking the press at a rally in Tyngsborough, Massachusetts, his voice breaks into a mid-word shout in his accusation that “they are so dishonest!” (2015f, 1:06:24). There is in these cases no trace of climactic or otherwise formal integration of the shouting into the progression of the speech; it becomes yet another way in which Trump appears to speak spontaneously, emotionally, and unreservedly. Trump’s aggressive shouting thus amplifies his populist messaging: It emphasizes his aggressive attacks on the establishment while also breaking with formal expectations about how politicians should and should not use their voices during public speaking.

I consider myself in a certain way to be a blue-collar worker.

—Donald J. Trump (2016i, 42:41)

The extraordinary and oftentimes glamorous lifestyles of populist leaders can challenge their attempts to identify with common people and to disidentify with the political, cultural, or economic elites. Consequently, the popular appeal of Donald Trump has often been seen as something of a paradox (e.g., Tunderman, 2017). The famous real estate tycoon was born into a wealthy family, owns a 126-room, 62,500-square-foot mansion in Palm Beach County, has circulated the upper echelons of American society for decades, and has a history of courting powerful politicians of Republican and Democratic persuasions alike. Moreover, as Kissas (2020) remarks, Trump certainly “does not attempt to conceal or even downplay his high social-economic status and extraordinary lifestyle” (p. 273). How, then, could he claim to be the voice of ordinary Americans? I have already discussed and cited research that explores the demotic appeal of his political style, and my above analysis of Trump’s voice suggests that it is a part of that appeal. I will finally suggest that it may be an especially important part.

The American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote that “the soul reveals itself in the voice only.” The human voice is indeed highly expressive of our inner lives: our moods and emotions, thoughts and intentions. Such subjective states echo through the rhythm, pitch, volume, and tenor with which we speak (Frick, 1985; Scherer, 1986), enabling perceptive others to diagnose them in us from without (Nygaard & Queen, 2008; Wilson & Wharton, 2006). A similarly revelatory view of the voice comes through in the familiar notion of a “shibboleth,” which names a way of pronouncing a word that identifies someone—with or against their will—as belonging to a particular social group (McNamara, 2005). Empirical research has shown how very prone people are to making deeply personal, social, and even moral assumptions about others based merely on how they talk (Allport & Cantril, 1934; Kinzler, 2020; Ko et al., 2006). Conversely, most people have had the experience of trying but failing to hide secret or private facts about themselves that nonetheless came through in their voice: their grief or insecurity, for example, or their cultural background (see Goldberg & Grandey, 2007; Scherer, 2000; Shennum & Bugental, 1982). There is then a pervasive sense not only that the human voice reveals a lot about its speaker, but that what it reveals may be especially deep or hidden truths about them.

Trump cannot legitimately claim to identify with common men and women in terms of his public lifestyle. He clearly is not, though he declares himself to be, “in the same boat” as most of the people who attended his rallies (2015j, 9:33). Yet he may still be able to inspire a deeper sense of personal sameness by means of his verbal and nonverbal communication. He can talk and behave in ways that signal “I am one of you” and not at all like the Washington elites (Berezin, 2017, p. 100). His use of voice in particular may allow him to do this without the suggestion of contradiction or dishonesty because it can be heard to echo something about him that is deeper and truer than his public image.

In invoking such a “deeper and truer” level of personality, I do not mean to refer to anything very mysterious. Whether right or wrong, the notion that people possess a “true,” “authentic,” “deep,” or “real” self, which might not be readily discernible in someone’s overt appearance, behavior, or reputation, is a widespread and psychologically deep-seated intuition (Strohminger et al., 2017). It explains the ready intelligibility of locutions such as “that is not who she really is” or “what you saw was not the real me,” and it resounds through Western culture in discourses of self-discovery, self-denial, self-expression, and self-actualization. Trump’s uses of voice may draw on such discourses and imaginaries to present him as truly a man of the people, or at least a certain symbolic representation of “the people.” As put by a female social worker and Trump supporter from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a few months prior to the 2016 presidential election, “I don’t care if he’s in a plane with 24 karat gold. He talks like us. He gets us. He’s a guy from Queens who’s not too big for his britches” (Colvin, 2016). In the view of this voter, at least, how Trump talks is heard to express his real self in a way that his extravagant lifestyle does not. He may then really be heard to be a “blue-collar billionaire,” as his son Donald Trump Jr. has labeled him (Showtime, 2016, 1:21).

Montgomery (2017) reaches a similar conclusion about the functions of much of Trump’s “unbuttoned and direct” campaign rhetoric (p. 627), suggesting that “a discourse of ‘authenticity’ rather than ‘truth’ provided a crucial cornerstone of Trump’s appeal to his electoral base” (p. 619). However, Montgomery does not hear the deep resonances between Trump’s particular version of populism and his communication style; the former president’s claim to authenticity is seen to rest simply on his casual orality and willingness to verbally offend. To be sure, that is a part of it: The “unbuttoned” style that Trump employs may be perceived as authentically sincere precisely because it is informal and unfiltered and in those two senses unconstrained by external demands on the self’s ability to self-express (see Johnstone, 1996, for general discussion). Formal communication, by contrast, is often seen to constrain or inhibit authentic self-expression: One is careful, watches what one says, and is in this way a “stiff,” as Trump likes to say. Or, as the conservative journalist Megyn Kelly (2015) stated in addressing a question to Trump during the first Republican primary debate of the 2016 election cycle, “one of the things people love about you is you speak your mind, and you don’t use a politician’s filter” (14:57).

What is missing from this analysis is that, when by his “informal, direct, and provoking communication style” (Kreis, 2017, p. 607) Trump expresses his self-avowed identification with the straight-talkin’ folk and disidentification with the self-censoring elites, he creates a sense of authentic alignment between his person and his politics. As one of his supporters stated in a representative response to a survey about Trump’s performance as president, “His pride and love of America and its people is genuine and comes through … he’s not a politician, but one of us” (Pew Research Center, 2017). The respondent saw nothing in Trump’s official persona that was not already there before, authentically and enduringly, in his personality. That is an impressive ethos, and one that may help to explain the finding, in the same survey, that Trump’s supporters are exceptionally likely to view his personality as his most important political asset.

All of this is to say that Trump’s informal voice solves an important problem for him. It allows him to express his populism with a deeply personal undertone, and thereby potentially to make his claims to popular identification ring intuitively true. If that is so, then Trump’s voice should be heard and investigated as an integral part of his political platform.