Valcore, Jace; Rodgers, Jess; Asquith, Nicole --- "We Will Build a Great Wall': Domination, Criminalization, and Expatriation in Trump Campaign and Rally Speeches" [2021] IntJlCrimJustSocDem 10; (2021) 10(1) International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 143

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“We Will Build a Great Wall”: Domination, Criminalization, and Expatriation in Trump Campaign and Rally Speeches

Abstract

Given the import and impact of political campaign promises, this study systematically analyzed Donald Trump’s campaign and rally speeches using a typology of verbal-textual hostility (V.T.H.) developed by Asquith (2013) from criminal hate incidents in the United Kingdom. Trump used all forms of V.T.H. previously identified by Asquith, except for sexualization, and new forms that may be specific to the political context. Analysis of speeches from 2015–2018 revealed that expatriation, criminalization, and domination were the most frequently used forms of V.T.H. deployed by Trump, which we consider in relation to the historical, social, and political context and consequences.

Keywords

Nationalist populism; campaign rhetoric; hate speech; Trump; verbal-textual hostility.

Valcore J, Rodgers J and Asquith NL (2021) “We will build a great wall”: Domination, criminalization, and expatriation in Trump campaign and rally speeches. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 10(1): 143-158. https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.1647

Introduction

The importance of the rhetoric used by the 45th president of the United States and its negative impact upon public discourse, policy, and the lives of countless individuals, not exclusive to American citizens or society, is basically accepted as fact. Several studies have examined Donald Trump’s speech and rhetoric and identified common themes or patterns, or have attempted to connect that speech to increases in hate crimes in the United States (U.S.) and specific acts of bias-motivated violence around the globe (Müller and Schwarz 2019; Rowland 2019). The link between hate speech and hate crime is readily recognized in the legal codes of numerous countries but not the U.S. This is even though hate crimes are commonly described as message crimes by scholars and observers because of their intent to intimidate, dominate, and exclude the targeted victim and their social group from society (Gerstenfeld 2018; Perry 2001). Empirical studies have not yet provided a clear analysis or understanding of Trump’s political speech as hate speech in the U.S. context. This study contributes to the literature by explicitly using a typology of verbal-textual hostility (V.T.H.) based upon criminal hate incidents to analyze political speech.

Important environmental factors surrounded and defined Trump’s first campaign and election, including the Global Financial Crisis, which had long-lasting and widespread economic impacts for middle- and working-class Americans (Mukunda 2018; Schularick 2018). Additionally, overt racist opposition to a Black president, which had originally found a home in the reactionary, right-wing Tea Party movement, was directly inflamed by Trump’s racist “birtherism”^[1] (Parker and Barreto 2014). A cycle of progress and conservative pushback or conservatism and progressive pushback is not unusual (Edgar 1981; Schlesinger 1987), but the right-wing politics that developed in reaction to the presidency of Barack Obama was a form of paranoid style politics (Hofstadter 2008[1965]), akin to the politics of the Ku Klux Klan and the German Nazi Party in the first half of the twentieth century (Parker and Barreto 2014).

Two intertwined themes emerge from the literature discussing the role of race in political campaigns across Europe, Australia and the U.S. since the early 1900s: economics and nationalism. Inequitable allocation of resources and experiences of marginalization are commonly linked with an increase in support of politicians with racist political campaigns (Casmir 1968; McIlwain and Caliendo 2014; Perera and Pugliese 1997; Schmidt 2017) and are accompanied by experiences of middle-class discontent and a lack of employment opportunities (Bessel 2004; Gupta and Virdee 2018). For instance, one study found that living in an area with an increasing Latinx^[2] population correlated with support for Trump, but only after his acts of V.T.H. toward Mexican immigrants (Newman, Shah and Collingwood 2018). Additionally, Anglo heritage (Cohn 2016), racial resentment (Schaffner 2018; Sides and Tesler 2016), and ethnocentrism were identified as factors aligned with support for Trump during his campaign (Kalkan 2016).

Border management (Charteris-Black 2006; McIlwain and Caliendo 2011), reinforcement of national identity (Gupta and Virdee 2018), and disparagement of global governance are common platforms for politicians aligned with racist political campaigns (Perera 1999; Schmidt 2017). For example, reinforcement of a sense of national identity could be observed in the campaign of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s where German-ness was juxtaposed with Jewishness (Jones 2012), and in the Brexit campaign where a sense of traditional Englishness was posited against a broader European-ness (Kenny 2016). This type of national identity construction was also present in Australia in the late 1990s in discussions of immigration and the posited threat of Asian migrants—the shoring up of what is and what is not Australian was captured by the term “un-Australian” (Perera and Pugliese 1997). In any country, the “other” is always that which the nationalist self is defined against.

Nationalist discourses focus on the threat to employment and resources from the other. This focus could be observed in Brexit campaigning and other British election campaigns (Charteris-Black 2006; Schmidt 2017) and in the U.S. 2006 midterm elections, where Mexican migrants were described as a threat to jobs and resources (McIlwain and Caliendo 2011). Anti-globalization and anti–free trade are further links between the economy, nationalism, and racism, such as: the Nazi Party’s policy for German protectionism (Anheier 1997); in Brexit campaigning (Wilson 2017); and in the speeches of Trump. Rowland detailed the nationalist populism, which continued to define Trump, noting that Trump’s campaign was effective because it was affective (Rowland 2019). Right-wing national populism is ruled by emotions: rage at the establishment and the elites, fear and hatred of the other, and praise of the “charismatic outsider” uniting them against a perceived common enemy.

Most democratic nations have legal barriers to the incitement to violence, threats of violence, and defamation. However, the U.S. remains one of only a handful of nations that fails to regulate V.T.H. directed at individuals or communities based on their race/ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, or other protected categories. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is often deployed as the primary argument against the regulation of V.T.H., despite the existence of other restrictions on speech and the recognition that some speech is more appropriately considered as action (Gerstenfeld 2018).

It is uncontested that politicians and other policy entrepreneurs influence public opinion and shape public attitudes about social groups that are targeted for policy intervention (Flores 2018; Mendelberg 2001). Governments and policymakers exploit preexisting fears or belief systems to justify the exclusion or denigration of some groups and the deservedness of others (Schneider and Ingram 2005). This intentional framing is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in presidential campaigns. Flores (2018) found that Trump’s labeling of Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “criminals” had a negative effect on public opinion toward immigrants, though it had to be repeated to maintain the effect. He also found that only negative messages were consequential for shaping public attitudes, albeit in the short term (Flores 2018). Studies have also shown that U.S. presidents keep most of their campaign promises (Fishel 1985; Krukones 1984); roughly two-thirds of campaign pledges made by U.S. presidential candidates resulted in action or legislation. Marion and Farmer (2004) specifically examined crime-control related campaign promises and found that, on average, U.S. presidents kept 79% of their systemic crime promises (i.e., vague statements about freedom from fear) but only 42% of their institutional crime pledges (specific plans of action). So while voters or the media may have shrugged off as simply rhetoric Trump’s plans to build a wall or ban Muslim immigrants, the actions of the Trump administration to build the wall and ban Muslim immigrants clearly illustrated the link between speech and action and that these speech acts were not “just words.”

Similarly, threats and slurs uttered before or during the commission of a crime often signal the intent of the offender. Through her analysis of 27,164 cases reported to the London Metropolitan Police Service in 2003 and 2007, Asquith (2013) identified eight types of V.T.H. used in hate crime incidents:

In that research, Asquith (2013) found that the most dominant themes of V.T.H. deployed by perpetrators were: interpellation (81%), terrorization (21%), expatriation (16%), sexualization (15%), and demonization (13%). However, the prevalence of these themes varied considerably between victim groups, such that, for example, criminalization was more common in antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents, and expatriation was more common in racist and faith-based hate crime.^[4] In deploying this typology to Trump’s campaign speeches, we sought to test the veracity of this framework for political speech and to consider the link between “everyday exterminabilities” (Hage 2006) experienced by hate crime victims and the exceptional institutionalized speech acts of political candidates and leaders.

Over 65 years ago, Austin (1980 [1955]) proposed that there are three forms of speech: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. Of most importance to the study of V.T.H., illocutionary speech acts have force and a specific goal, such as ordering, warning, and informing, while perlocutionary speech acts hope to achieve something in the saying, such as convincing, persuading, or misleading. In her analysis of V.T.H. in hate crime, Asquith (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2013) proposed that much of what is classed as “hate speech” is illocutionary, in that it achieves its goal—of warning, threatening, silencing—in the saying, not necessarily or solely as a consequence of the saying. To bypass the seemingly straight-forward proclamation that “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech,” Asquith and others have refigured illocutions as action, not pure speech (e.g., see Butler 1997; Langton 1993; Matsuda et al. 1993). This reconfiguration is especially the case with what Austin (1980 [1955]) classed as verdictives (exercise of judgement) and exercitives (exercise of power), of which Langton (1993) reclassified both as authoritative illocutions. In V.T.H., verdictives aim to interpellate the addressee within a hierarchy of subject positions according to their proximity to dominant representations of the body and identity. Exercitives aim to warn, order, advise, and command. Unlike verdictives, exercitives require an authorized force to be effective, and “where[as] verdictives are temporally present or an assessment of the past, exercitives are statements about how the future should look: an advocacy or threat of things to come” (Asquith 2009, 164). Consequently, exercitives issued by an authorized delegate, such as the president of the U.S., are capable of influencing addressees in more ways than verdictives.

Bourdieu (1991) posited that social power is invested in all speech acts prior to their utterance, meaning that efficacy is not determined by the power of specific words or usages, but the social context of speaking. The justifications for whose speech counts, who is allowed to speak, and who is silenced, are found in the social and political authorization to do so. V.T.H. is a social artefact that is socially authorized. Speaking authoritatively necessitates social recognition of the speaker’s legitimacy as well as the legitimacy of the topic of discussion (Langton 1993). Too often, this social authorization is withheld from the targets of V.T.H. and reserved for those who use words to wound. It is through a closer analysis of the harms generated from illocutionary speech acts that we demarcate between those words that wound in their saying (and are therefore actions), and those that do so as a consequence of their saying. Importantly, as Asquith suggested, “understanding the consequential—or perlocutionary—effects enables us to understand the process of incitement and the power of infecting others’ minds—and perhaps their actions” (Asquith 2010, 102). The critical race theory that informed Matsuda et al.’s (1993) collection, Words that Wound, as well as the linguistic theory developed by Austin (1980 [1955]), Bourdieu (1991), Butler (1997), and Langton (1993), provide the theoretical framework necessary for accounting for the individual harms of V.T.H., while also recognizing that this hatred is both institutionally bound and socially contingent. Thus, we addressed these research questions: What forms, if any, of V.T.H. were used in the Trump campaign and rally speeches? Is the form and function of political speech aligned with the form and function of interpersonal V.T.H.? Can a typology of this type capture the power and intent of campaign speeches?

This study utilized critical discourse analysis to analyze V.T.H. in political speeches given by Trump as a candidate and President of the United States (van Dijk 1997; Wodak 2001). Building on the framework provided by van Dijk’s (1997) work on racism and prejudice, this study of Trump’s campaign and political speeches analyzed words in context, to account for sociohistorical roots, institutional factors, social and political context, as well as the effects of prejudiced speech.

Transcripts of all of Trump’s campaign and rally speeches from the time of the announcement of his candidacy for president until the 2018 midterm elections (June 16, 2015–June 20, 2018) were collected and downloaded from The American Presidency Project (Woolley and Peters, n.d.), a nonprofit and nonpartisan database of presidential documents hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara. A total of 90 speeches were collected, with a corpus of 364,810 words.

The coding framework was refined through multiple stages of coding, discussion, and inter-rater reliability testing. To begin, each author coded a sample of three articles using the revised V.T.H. typology developed by Asquith (2013). This first round of coding revealed that there were hostile speech acts used in the political context that did not fit in the preexisting framework and required an expanded categorization, including:

Another round of coding was conducted in which each author coded three more speeches, totaling six per author, representing 10% of the total sample word count. The inter-rater agreement for each theme using the refined and expanded typology was 97%. The second author then coded the remainder of the sample. Finally, each author engaged in a thorough analysis of one of the three dominant themes, including the identification of subthemes.

Coding and analysis were completed using NVivo software. After the speeches were coded, quantitative analyses automatically calculated by NVivo revealed the most common or frequently used forms of speech. Queries and Node (Theme) Matrices were run around specific dates and locations, such as the date of presidential candidate nomination and election and between red states/blue states (based on the 2012 election), to identify if there were significant patterns or changes in V.T.H. around these parameters. No significant patterns were identified. Simple descriptive statistics are provided in Table 1. These were calculated based on the speech acts clustered during the identification of themes, the number of individual speech acts relating to each theme and subtheme, the number of speeches each V.T.H. category appeared in, and their percentage of all identified V.T.H. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations were attributable to Donald J. Trump.

Criminalization, domination, and expatriation were identified as the most common forms of V.T.H. in Trump’s political speeches.^[7] Unlike the victimization that occurs in interpersonal hate crimes, Trump was primarily dog-whistling; his speech acts were an incitement to hate rather than (solely) about enlivening his own hatred. Unlike hate crimes, where there is often no bystander or witness to be incited by authoritative illocutions, Trump was provoking his audience into action, including violence. The dominant themes of criminalization, domination, and expatriation (discussed below) were also the most likely to be exercitives requiring an authorized force to be efficacious. Although an individual may demand that a victim “fuck off, go home,” which might frighten the victim into restricting their movements (Asquith 2013), it is only the state that can expatriate an individual to their home or transit country. Similarly, whereas individuals may claim another is a liar or cheat, it is only the state that can formally criminalize and incarcerate an individual. While domination can be effectively deployed by individuals, in its nativist form (discussed below), it is paramount that there is an authorized force, such as the state, to enact and transmit supremacist ideology in law, policy, and practice. We discuss criminalization, domination and expatriation independently, albeit with an understanding that these types of V.T.H. are interdependent and bleed into each other, which is illustrated by the multiple times that Trump deployed all three in a single speech act. It is also important to note that a core theme found in V.T.H., sexualization, was not present in the words used by Trump in his speeches; although, at times, his proclamations about Hillary Clinton were sexist, they did not sexualize in the same ways as were present in interpersonal V.T.H.

*Theme/Subtheme***	Number of speeches within theme (n=90)	Number of speech acts within theme (n=2498)	Percentage of all VTH
Criminalization *Liars* *Cheaters* *Crime/Criminals*	86 65 74 79	1091 195 441 392	44% 8% 18% 16%
Deprecation	74	686	27%
Domination *Nationalist populism* *Racist nativism*	82 76 53	396 179 122	16% 7% 5%
Expatriation *Get them out* *Keep them out*	52 29 59	158 70 72	6% 3% 3%
Pathologization	21	55	2%
Denigration	19	55	2%
Interpellation	18	21	<1%
Demonization	12	18	<1%
Terrorization	10	15	<1%

Criminalization was the primary form of V.T.H. deployed by Trump. As noted by Asquith (2007, 2008, 2010, 2013), criminalization is a common theme in hate crime incidents, and its lineage as a form of V.T.H. dates back to early colonization, reaching its zenith during the Shoah and Holocaust. The Third Reich criminalized Jews and other marginalized groups as part of a dehumanizing process that justified their actions in eliminating European Jewry. In its original framing through hate crime incidents, criminalization presented in two main forms: “liars” and “cheats.” Primarily deployed by Holocaust deniers and negationists, criminalization “reflects the logic that if someone is right, then another must be wrong, and therefore a liar. Therefore, whoever gets to be right will have the ability to define who is wrong and so, who is lying or cheating” (Asquith 2008, 229). However, in the political campaign speeches of Trump, the theme of criminalization was deepened and extended. In addition to the subthemes of liars and cheats, Trump also framed his antagonists—Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, immigrants, gangs, and the media—as “criminals.”

A dominant subtheme of criminalization deployed by Trump in his campaign speeches was liars. Most of the liars subtheme was initially directed at his opponent, Hillary Clinton—and most commonly in relation to emails deleted from her private server—but later, peaking near the end of the campaign and the beginning of his presidency, directed at the media and “fake news.”

The liars subtheme of criminalization was epitomized in Trump’s speech at the “Make America Great Again” rally in Nashville, Tennessee (March 15, 2017). At that rally, he framed the media’s claims about his capacity to build a wall across the U.S.–Mexico border as disingenuous, stating “Fake news. It’s fake, fake news. Fake news, folks, a lot of fake.” However, beyond his conniptions against “fake news” and Clinton being “a world class liar,” this subtheme was applied to many others, including Muslim communities, political opponents, and the media:

If someone is lying—according to Trump—then it is likely they are doing so to cheat the system. While this theme was largely absent from the early speeches during the nomination process, his use of the subtheme cheating increased immediately after the email scandal hit the press (with the first mention on June 22, 2016), and he began using the phrase “crooked Hillary” (Clinton) from July 11, 2016 until June 20, 2018. Importantly, the subtheme of cheating almost disappeared from his speech repertoire after his election on November 7, 2016. This pattern illustrates his use of cheating as a strategy or preemption of what he and others in his campaign team assumed would be a Clinton landslide in the 2016 election. In eight of his campaign speeches before the election, Trump made explicit reference to the “rigged system. It is a rigged, rigged system” (October 12, 2016; repeated November 7, 2016), yet this phrase disappeared from his lexicon after November 7, 2016. This shift away from the attribution of cheating was perhaps to avoid attracting attention to his earlier comments on this matter but also to deflect attention from his own possible rigging of the system:

The new subtheme of crimes/criminals was developed to account for the large number of speech acts that sought to leverage political gain from crime rates, criminal activities, and the criminalization of some populations—most notably Muslims, and Central and South Americans. Deploying tropes of crime and criminal activity is not unique to Trump’s campaign. Since the start of the war on drugs in the 1970s, crime, law, and order have been key political devices used to elicit fear in the voting public and to justify increasingly draconian criminal justice policies (Beckett 1997; Wenzelburger 2015). Since 1996, with the ratification of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in the U.S., these politics of law and order have also framed asylum-seeking and undocumented migration as matters of law and order (Macías-Rojas 2018).

The theme of criminalization was initially developed by Asquith to account for the individual hate experienced by primary victims of hate crime, which elides their subjectivity with criminality. However, when the audience of this speech changes from a single victim (and/or their communities) to the generalized hate shared with addressees of political speeches, the subtheme of crime and criminals morphs into and aligns with the rhetoric often deployed by politicians of any political persuasion in election campaigns. Throughout the period under study here, Trump unceasingly deployed the rhetoric of crimes/criminals. Some speeches (e.g., October 4, 2016, and October 29, 2016) were simply a laundry list of individual cases of U.S. citizens victimized by “illegal immigrants” or “illegal aliens,” which are discussed more under the theme of expatriation below. As with other aspects of the criminalization theme, there appears to be a logic threading through the attribution of lying and cheating and, thus, logic to the framing of Trump’s antagonists as criminals that require elimination or expatriation:

Domination was the third most common form of V.T.H. used by Trump. This is a unique category that falls outside the existing V.T.H. typology developed by Asquith (2013). The label of domination was applied to the racist dog-whistles and nativist rhetoric that inspired fear and incited violence in listeners. The language used, in this case, was not directed at the subject but at the audience about the subject. This category included clear expressions of nationalist populism and racist nativism, which Trump regularly used when discussing the supposed restoration of the country, immigration, and border security. In all coded instances of domination, white American supremacy and the subordination and/or criminalization of non-white immigrants were being expressed.

Domination speech was consistently used by Trump as a candidate, Republican nominee, and elected president. It was most frequently used when he was the Republican nominee for the president (July 19, 2016 to November 7, 2016). Many of the statements coded as domination involved talk about securing borders and building a wall; Trump stated 88 times that “we will build the/a wall.” Two significant and connected subthemes were found within the category of domination: nationalist populism and racist nativism.

Nationalist populism is also referred to as right-wing populism, authoritarian populism, cultural nationalism, and several other similar terms (Gusterson 2017). Nationalist populist movements have several characteristics in common: hostility toward immigrants, attacks on established government institutions and transnational organizations, disparagement of the elite, claims of concern for the working classes, and calls for a return to (imagined or invented) traditions and heritage (Gusterson 2017; Rowland 2019). Trump frequently promoted nationalist populism, including the use of the phrase “America First” and claims that he would put the needs of American workers first suggesting that others had not done so and would not do so, to the social and economic detriment of the country:

“America First” was proclaimed by Trump 75 times in the speeches analyzed. It is recognizable as a phrase used by the Ku Klux Klan, the oldest and most well-known white supremacist hate group in the U.S. (Selepak and Sutherland 2012). The Klan was founded in Tennessee immediately after the end of the Civil War by former Confederate soldiers to promote white supremacy and harass newly freed slaves. Today’s Klan is made up of several separate chapters across the country with varying ideologies, but religious belief in racial segregation and separation is universally held. The Klan supports and advocates for several right-wing ideologies, such as isolationism, anti-immigration policies, the elimination of affirmative action programs, and the denial of equal rights to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals (Selepak and Sutherland 2012).

Like Hitler, Trump assured his supporters that their problems were not their fault and that only he could restore them and their country to greatness (Casmir 1968). This assurance is most readily recognizable in the campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” uttered 95 times in the sample speeches. These statements implied a need to restore America to some previous state of assumed prosperity during which his white supporters were socially dominant and economically secure:

Racist nativism is an expression of racism that links race and immigration status and constructs all people of color as “non-native” (Pérez Huber 2016). Trump’s racist nativism involved the criminalization of immigrants and discussions of building a wall to keep out immigrants, who because of their racial and ethnic backgrounds, were assumed to pose a threat to (white) American prosperity (García Hernández 2013). As noted previously, this type of rhetoric often overlapped with the theme of criminalization. The statements coded in this study explicitly advocated for the criminalization of immigrants, the building of a border wall, and claims of restored national security and sovereignty:

Expatriation is the fourth most common form of V.T.H. expressed by Trump. Based on Asquith’s (2013) typology of V.T.H., expatriating speech acts seek to exile the addressee from the space of the speaker, whether this is the neighborhood or nation. Expatriation is pervasive in racist V.T.H. and can be summarized by the colloquial phrase, “fuck off, go home” (Asquith 2013). Trump consistently used expatriation to discuss immigrants, existing or potential, whether they be undocumented immigrants or asylum seekers. We have broadly categorized expatriation in Trump’s speech as “Get them out,” exiling from the space of the speaker, and “Keep them out,” maintaining that exile.

A key promise in the Trump campaign was the prompt removal of criminal immigrants:

Throughout Trump’s campaign, the discussion of dangerous immigrants was supported by stories of individuals who had been physically or sexually assaulted or murdered by immigrants. On September 17, 2016, Trump addressed the Remembrance Project, a designated hate group (Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d.), at a luncheon. In his speech at the luncheon (and in others throughout his campaign), Trump recounted gory, violent crimes, often with family members of the victim(s) present. McIlwain and Caliendo (2011) discussed how, in previous political campaigns, the “Mexican” represented the illegal immigrant and was juxtaposed against the vulnerable white American. Trump emphasized vulnerability, drawing on victims and their families, by juxtaposing the good with the evil:

Trump was clear about the perceived costs of not removing criminal immigrants. Bosworth and colleagues (2018) noted the pairing of criminal justice and administrative powers in the increase of detention and deportation of migrants in the Global North, where deportation and its threat were used as punishment and control for those whose citizenship status was insecure. Trump’s focus on the removal of criminal migrants was part of this mechanism, reminding his audience (and migrants) of the precarity of migrant’s belonging. The combined usage of “illegal immigrant” and “criminal alien” conflated the two to suggest that every immigrant is illegal and criminal. The focus then shifted from the criminal alien to the broader undocumented immigrant community, as we have observed with the current escalation in detention of immigrants in the U.S. (O’Maden 2019):

In Asquith’s (2013) analysis of V.T.H. in hate crimes in the United Kingdom (U.K.), she found that the speech act containing the threat of expatriation can quickly morph into a threat of violence and then violent acts. In political V.T.H., the policy can be viewed as the threat of violence, and the program can be viewed as the behavior following the threat. The removal of migrants turns the speech into action.

Whether criminal or otherwise, once immigrants are out, they must be kept out. In the sociopolitical context of the time, this specifically meant keeping out Central and South Americans, who were framed as criminals, and people from the Middle East, who were framed as terrorists. This is where Trump’s headlining policy, the wall, came into play:

Again, the line between offending and nonoffending immigrants became blurred; they must all be kept out (Pérez Huber 2016). McIlwain and Caliendo (2011, 2014) noted the lack of coded language in anti-immigration coverage in political campaigns. In their extensive analysis of race-based language in political campaigns, they observed that discussion of Black people and racist ideas targeting Black people were often coded with language around “welfare benefits” or “urban” areas (McIlwain and Caliendo 2011, 2014). However, as they observed and as we saw here, the undocumented immigrant was presented front and center as a dangerous, criminal threat that must be expelled. Critically, as Pérez Huber (2016) noted, expatriating undocumented migrants contributed to Trump’s goal of “making America great again.”

There was another group that was also to be kept out, the ominous “radical Islamic terrorist.” Like the criminal immigrant, the terrorist was presented as a great risk to the audience:

Trump’s “Radical Islamic Terrorist” label combined Muslims, refugees, and terrorists, which has been common in rhetoric concerning Muslims and refugees in the Western world since 9/11 (e.g., see Lafraie 2006; Rana 2007). The other, again, became criminalized in the name of protecting or preserving the dominance of one specific social group. Like the immigrant, the refugee and the Muslim were not discussed in coded language and were clearly presented as threats to U.S. safety and values (McIlwain and Caliendo 2011):

Here, the Islamic refugee is the implied subject who may not embrace tolerant American values and is assumed to hold opposing ideals to Americans. In the U.K., several problems around segregation, terrorism, and immigration were lumped together in the public and political imagination and diagnosed as stemming from too much cultural diversity (Kundnani 2017). Similarly, the notion of differing Muslim values was drawn on by Trump to deny citizenship. Trump ordered a cessation of the U.S.’s refugee program and a ban on travelers from several Muslim-majority countries (Roberts 2019). Although the refugee program cessation only lasted five weeks, admissions of Muslim refugees dropped 91% between 2016 and 2018 (Bier 2018a). Trump directed refugee acceptance away from Muslim-majority countries and increased security screening and application hurdles for refugees (Bier 2018b). While the Trump administration was constitutionally prevented from a religion-based ban on immigration, there have been outcomes to that effect. The clear message in Trump’s expatriation speech, and resulting public policies, was that keeping out Black and Brown immigrants and refugees protects white American values and white Americans themselves: a core element of racist, national populism.

As ethical philosophers, critical race scholars, psychologists, and social scientists have shown, racist speech like that continually used by Trump has serious negative consequences for individuals directly harmed by the speech as well as the wider audience. Both the addressee and bystanders can normalize this speech and become desensitized and prejudiced through exposure to racist speech (e.g., see Matsuda et al. 1993; Soral et al. 2018). Matsuda (1989) made one of the strongest and clearest legal arguments for the identification of an explicitly defined class of racist hate speech that does not warrant protection and argued that the state’s refusal to do so perpetuated racism. Further, Popper’s paradox of tolerance suggested that a tolerant society that values free speech cannot simultaneously allow intolerance and extremist speech that seeks to destroy democratic institutions (Rosenfeld 1987). Why does the U.S. remain the only Western democracy that “tolerates those who seek freedom of speech in the pursuit of its destruction” (Rosenfeld 1987, 1457)? As Matsuda so eloquently wrote, and as the entire international community continues to witness, it is sheer lack of legal and political will that leaves the U.S. “frozen at the first amendment bulkhead, [watching] the rising tide of racial hatred wash over our schools and workplaces” (1989, 2380).

Space constraints prevented us from analyzing and discussing each of the categories of speech here or from clearly identifying and discussing those which were specific to the political context so that work could not be presented. While this study is descriptive in nature, future research can now clearly examine and attempt to verify causal relationships between distinct categories of hostile exercitives and the actions that follow, whether they be authoritarian policies or individual acts of violence. For example, a widely shared unpublished study by Feinberg, Branton, and Martinez-Ebers at the University of North Texas found a 226% increase in hate crimes in counties that hosted Trump rallies; that study was replicated and expanded by Kubiske (2020) who also found a correlation between spikes in hate crimes and Trump rallies.

This was the first study to systematically analyze the campaign and rally speeches of Trump using an existing typology of V.T.H. (Asquith 2013). Two dominant categories of speech were found that are used in both the political and criminal context: criminalization and expatriation. Another category was identified that may be unique to the political context but was not necessarily unique to Trump: domination, which included phrases and rhetoric utilized by Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan. The goal of criminalization, domination, and expatriation is to exclude and remove perceived enemies from participation in U.S. society, just like the assumed goal of hate crime offenders. Each category comprised speech that explicitly named and targeted others who threatened the social and political dominance of the speaker (and those who identify with the speaker) and called for them to be criminally prosecuted, expelled, and banned from the U.S. All of the statements were exercitives made with authoritative force and have resulted in explicit federal policies to meet the goals of the statements: most clearly, the prosecution, detention, and deportation of tens of thousands of immigrants and refugees, including children, people battling illness and disease, documented U.S. citizens, and members of the U.S. military.

The V.T.H. typology was created by Asquith to investigate the link between hate speech and hate crime and to consider the illocutionary force and perlocutionary effects of such speech/text. This typology retained its veracity in the analysis of political speech acts; albeit in a different form, and with additional—possibly specific—content (such as domination and denigration). Speech acts issued from political actors are not primarily directed at specific individuals, as they are in conventional hate crimes. However, as with hate crime victimization, political speech acts are “message crimes” (Perry 2001), whose audience is much wider than the targeted victim. Interpellating the other, especially in public V.T.H. such as campaign speeches, not only aims to label and demarcate that which is abhorred but also to forewarn bystanders of the dangers of being otherwise. Just as with V.T.H. in hate crimes, while the intent may be to exercise the illocutionary force to constrain and expel the other, these speech acts are equally powerful in deepening the perlocutionary effects, including the effect of inciting others to act.

Our findings are unlikely to surprise readers who have been exposed to this V.T.H. over many years and may have become immune to its effects. However, the importance in undertaking this type of analysis cannot be underestimated, especially in terms of quantifying the hostility and pointing to how political speech seeks to frame, and is framed by, the hatred experienced by marginalized populations in the U.S. and internationally. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution inhibits a perfunctory legal response to such speech/text. However, in undertaking this analysis, we hope that closely parsing President Trump’s language in political speeches may reinvigorate the long-standing debate about what is free about this type of speech, and what, if any, legal, policy and practice changes can be enlivened to reduce both the force and consequences of words that wound.

Correspondence: Dr. Jace L. Valcore, Assoc. Professor, University of Houston Downtown, 1 Main Street, Suite C.340, Houston, TX 77002, United States. Email: valcorej@uhd.edu

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^[1]Birtherism refers to a social movement, predominantly sited in the U.S., which raises doubts or denies that the 44th President, Barack Obama, was born in the U.S., and thus implies he was ineligible to be President (Serwer 2020).

^[2] “Latinx” is a gender-neutral alternative to Latino or Latina (Oxford English Dictionary 2019).

^[3] See Asquith (2008, 2013) for detailed discussion of each of these themes, including their etymology and sociohistorical deployment.

^[4] In the U.S., Islamophobia and antisemitism are classified together as faith-based prejudice and/or racist violence. However, in Australia and the U.K., Islamophobia and antisemitism are categorized as distinct modes of hate and are analyzed separately from other faith-based prejudice and racism; albeit, often these cases are additionally categorized as racist violence if this is explicit in the hate incident.

^[6] The authors could not find a similar speech act in other political speeches or in V.T.H. in hate crimes. It appears that this speech act is unique to Trump.

^[7] Importantly, the second most common type of V.T.H., deprecation, is not discussed in this paper as it does not directly infer hostility. Future analysis will unpack this unique category of Trump’s political speech.

International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy

Valcore, Jace; Rodgers, Jess; Asquith, Nicole --- "We Will Build a Great Wall': Domination, Criminalization, and Expatriation in Trump Campaign and Rally Speeches" [2021] IntJlCrimJustSocDem 10; (2021) 10(1) International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 143

Introduction

Correspondence: Dr. Jace L. Valcore, Assoc. Professor, University of Houston Downtown, 1 Main Street, Suite C.340, Houston, TX 77002, United States. Email: valcorej@uhd.edu

References