Prominent linguist, George Lakoff, using critical discourse analysis, goes through how Trump uses rhetorical tools to manipulate your thought processes.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/understanding-trump_b_11144938.html
Sample:
"4. Grammar: Radical Islamic terrorists: “Radical” puts Muslims on a linear scale and “terrorists” imposes a frame on the scale, suggesting that terrorism is built into the religion itself. The grammar suggests that there is something about Islam that has terrorism inherent in it. Imagine calling the Charleston gunman a “radical Republican terrorist.”
Trump is aware this to at least some extent. As he said to Tony Schwartz, the ghost-writer who wrote The Art of the Deal for him, “I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and it’s a very effective form of promotion.”
I call bullsh**t (on Lakoff, not you). Radical and Islamic are both adjectives modifying 'terrorists'. That's it. If Republicans want to use the term to dog-whistle against all Muslim's, that them being scummy xenophobes, not any technical grammatical problem with the phrase.
Calling Roof (the Charleston gunman) a radical Republican terrorist would be inaccurate, because he had no real connection with the Republican Party, and because he himself was motivated by
racism (and because he's really a lone nut rather than part of any sort of movement for change). When we see organized bands of Trumpshirts threatening and attacking minorities "to bring back America" that
will be radical Republican terrorism.
And Tony Schwartz makes it clear that
he invented the phrase 'truthful hyperbole', and that Trump wouldn't have come up with such an idea in a million years, something that appears almost certain to be accurate after watching Trump speak (far too much).
In other words, while Trump is indeed full of BS, so is Lakoff. And for the record, I don't think Trump is some sort of genius master manipulator of language. He's just a psychopath who's good at telling people what they want to hear. I think so many intellectuals on the left are trying to come up with complicated explanations for Trump's success because they don't like the simple ones: that a lot of people have been left out and are doing poorly in modern America, and a lot of people (with some overlap with the first group) either hold or are willing to entertain some pretty despicable ideas (and are either ignorant, desperate or stupid too boot).
