It searches texts for the words contained in the designated dictionaries and then calculates the number of words from each dictionary that would be present in a typical 500-word sample. Diction contains 33 separate dictionaries tailored to political speech. We ran these speeches through a specialized computerized content analysis program called Diction. We compared these bodies of speech to each other and to a separate database of postwar presidential speech that one of us had collected, using these same criteria, for a recently published book.
We ended up with 74 campaign speeches, representing more than 230,000 words, and 56 presidential addresses, which included more than 122,000 words. We scraped from the website of the American Presidency Project all of Trump’s campaign speeches and presidential addresses through July 1 that met these criteria. Our analysis is based on Trump’s more substantial speeches – which we somewhat arbitrarily define as those longer than 500 words – which were directed primarily at domestic audiences. Here’s what we found – and why Obama and Trump have more in common than you would think. Yet, when we set aside the presidents’ speaking styles and looked more carefully at the specific words Trump employed in his first months in office, we were surprised to discover that, in certain ways, these two presidents are remarkably like each other and unlike their predecessors. The differences between Trump’s and Obama’s rhetorical styles seem stark. He shows so little regard for the facts that some say he’s the exemplar of a “ bullshit artist.” And he does not promote informed, reasoned dialogue. Donald Trump is inarticulate and brusque.
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