Thursday, February 16, 2017

Trump's Speech in Adjectives, 2/16/2017


This is my interpretation of Trump's speech at today's press conference, right to the point when he starts to take questions.  I picked out most of the adjectives he used, and list them here, beginning from the start of the speech.  The list is not necessarily exhaustive, because I based it on listening to the speech, not on the transcript.  The former is the way most people would have received the speech:

great
tremendous
very well
tremendous
fantastic
important
important
strong
strong
terrible
out-of-control
late
terrible
catastrophic
good
proud
incredible
incredible
tremendous
good
good
wonderful
broken
dishonest
tremendous
out-of-control
broken
fantastic
fantastic
great
worst
massive
great
great
happy
greatest
depleted
depleted
depleted
strong
strong
strong
not happy
happy
outstanding
brilliant
great
wonderful
horrible
great
safe
bigly
bigly
great
great
great
great
great
 big

The positive adjectives are used to describe his first weeks of presidency, his cabinet and Supreme Court picks and his future plans.  The negative adjectives are used about the state of the country, the murder rate in Chicago (horrible) and the American media (broken, dishonest, broken).

I find the repetition fascinating, and I bet it works.  Trump also stated that he inherited a mess from Obama  at home (not true) and abroad (not Obama's doing), and he used the word "mess" a total of five times in that context.  He referred to ISIS as a cancer twice, and he used "chaos" to describe both the 9th circuit which ruled against his Muslim travel ban and twice to describe the state of the American media.

The American military, according to Trump (not in reality), is depleted, depleted, depleted, but he will make it, and the police, strong, strong, strong. (Isn't it interesting that he singled out the military and the police for expansion?)