Fake News and Indifference to Truth: Dissecting Tweets and State of the Union Addresses by Presidents Obama and Trump

State of the Union Addresses (SOUA) by two recent US Presidents, President Obama (2016) and President Trump (2018), and a series of recent of tweets by President Trump, are analysed by means of the data mining technique, sentiment analysis. The intention is to explore the contents and sentiments of the messages contained, the degree to which they differ, and their potential implications for the national mood and state of the economy. President Trump's 2018 SOUA and his sample tweets are identified as being more positive in sentiment than President Obama's 2016 SOUA. This is confirmed by bootstrapped t tests and non-parametric sign tests on components of the respective sentiment scores. The issue of whether overly positive pronouncements amount to self-promotion, rather than intrinsic merit or sentiment, is a topic for future research.

State of the Union Addresses (SOUA) by two recent US Presidents, President Obama (2016) and President Trump (2018), and a series of recent of tweets by President Trump, are analysed by means of the data mining technique, sentiment analysis. The intention is to explore the contents and sentiments of the messages contained, the degree to which they di_er, and their potential implications for the national mood and state of the economy. President Trump's 2018 SOUA and his sample tweets are identi_ed as being more positive in sentiment than President Obama's 2016 SOUA. This is con_rmed by bootstrapped t tests and non-parametric sign tests on components of the respective sentiment scores. The issue of whether overly positive pronouncements amount to self-promotion, rather than intrinsic merit or sentiment, is a topic for future research.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to empirically examine whether the massive spreads and fatalities of the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA, the country with the most advanced medical technology in the world, are symptomatic of leadership failure. The authors posit that when political leaders, such as the President of the USA, in conjunction with a group of state governors and city mayors, employed conspiracy theories and disinformation to achieve their political goals, they contributed to the massive spreads and fatalities of the virus, and they also undermined the credibility of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the health-care professionals in providing the pertinent control guidelines and true scientific-based medical information.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a review of current studies that address the handling of global infectious diseases to build a better understanding of the issue of pandemics. They then employed a theoretical framework to link the massive spreads and fatalities of the COVID-19 pandemic to political leaders, such as President Trump and the group of obsequious state governors and city mayors, who propagated conspiracy theories and disinformation through social media platforms to downplay the severity of the virus. The authors compared the massive spreads and fatalities of the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA under President Trump to President Obama who handled H1N1, Ebola, Zika and Dengue. More importantly, the authors compared President Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic to other political leaders in advanced countries where there were no concerted efforts to spread conspiracy theories and disinformation about the health risks of COVID-19 pandemic.FindingsThe authors' theoretical analysis alluded to the fact that political leaders, such as President Trump, who are engulfed in self-deceptions, self-projections and self-aggrandizements would engage in self-promotion and avoid accountability for their missteps in handling global pandemic shocks. In contrast, political leaders in other advanced countries did not downplay the severity thus their ability to curtail the spreads and fatalities of the COVID-19 pandemic.Research limitations/implicationsThe theoretical viewpoints presented in this paper along with the derivations of the spreads–fatalities curtailment coefficients and the spread–fatality upsurge coefficients under Presidents Obama and Trump, respectively, may not be replicable. Given this plausible limitation, future research may need to provide a deep analysis of the amplifications of conspiracy theories and disinformation because they are now deeply rooted in the political economy of the USA. Furthermore, since scientists and medical professionals may not be able to forecast future epidemics or pandemics with pin-point accuracy nor predict how political leaders would disseminate health risks information associated with different pathogens, it is imperative that future research addresses the positive or adverse effects of conspiracy theories and disinformation that are now easily propagated simultaneously through different social media platforms, which are currently protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The multiplier effects of conspiracy theories and disinformation will continue to amplify the division about the authenticity of COVID-19 pandemic and the emergence or reemergence of other pathogens in the foreseeable future.Originality/valueThe authors derived the unique spreads-fatalities curtailment coefficients to demonstrate how President Obama used effective collaboration and coordination at all levels of government in conjunction with medical experts to curtail the spreads and fatalities associated with H1N1, Ebola, Zika and Dengue. They further derived the spreads-fatalities upsurge coefficients to highlight how President Trump contributed to the spreads and fatalities of COVID-19 pandemic through his inability to collaborate and coordinate with state governors, city mayors and different health-care agencies at the national and international levels.

The Trump Administration’s attempts to rescind trans students’ domestic legislative protections is part of a new period of backlash against trans rights progress globally. This article examines the USA’s changing role concerning trans students in education policy and rights progress internationally. It outlines developments in transnational policy for trans students. It contextualises US leadership in this policy area, particularly US President Obama and US President Trump’s use of executive powers. It considers theoretical conceptualisations of trans rights ‘progress’ using the work of queer and trans theorists, before analysing data from 60 interviews with key informants participating high-level global networking for trans students’ rights, documenting how stakeholders characterise recent US contributions. Several informants identified a period of ‘progress’ in trans rights during the Obama Administration, but others were more sceptical of such claims and critical of recent policy change by the US Government’s Trump Administration. Alternative models for Northern and Southern engagement in global networking for trans students’ rights are outlined and discussed.

The Trump Administration’s attempts to rescind trans students’ domestic legislative protections is part of a new period of backlash against trans rights progress globally. This article examines the USA’s changing role concerning trans students in education policy and rights progress internationally. It outlines developments in transnational policy for trans students. It contextualises US leadership in this policy area, particularly US President Obama and US President Trump’s use of executive powers. It considers theoretical conceptualisations of trans rights ‘progress’ using the work of queer and trans theorists, before analysing data from 60 interviews with key informants participating high-level global networking for trans students’ rights, documenting how stakeholders characterise recent US contributions. Several informants identified a period of ‘progress’ in trans rights during the Obama Administration, but others were more sceptical of such claims and critical of recent policy change by the US Government’s Trump Administration. Alternative models for Northern and Southern engagement in global networking for trans students’ rights are outlined and discussed.

At the center of this work is the analysis of the consequences of implementing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (also known as - the Iran nuclear deal) on divergent foreign policy approaches as the main indicators of the mismatch in relations between the United States and the European Union during the administration of the 45th US President Donald Trump. While the US unilaterally withdrew from this agreement, EU member states remained in it. The United States and the European Union, on the one hand, and Iran, on the other, had completely different definitions of their own national security, insisting on their unilateral security, while failing to redefine the problem in the direction of mutual security. However, in addition, the US and EU member states, although both concerned about their own security due to the possible emergence of a nuclear-armed Iran, instead of a complementary approach to the issue had a mutually competing one. Using the case study method, as well as the analytical-deductive method and the content analysis method, the author explains the difference in this approach through the concept of the strategic culture of the US and the EU and concludes that they are a consequence of the different understanding of international relations, but also due to the different identity characters of these two actors. The main thesis of the paper is that the US administration of Donald Trump, with its more realistic and Hobbesian view of international relations, and a different understanding of the US national interest in the Middle East, adopted a different approach to curbing Iran's nuclear armament ambitions compared to the approach of the European Union, which is conditioned by a more liberal and Kantian nature of its view on international relations. With unilateral foreign policy actions, Trump's administration risked causing damage and shaking its own credibility in relations with the European Union. On the other hand, the European Union remains committed to multilateralism and the preservation of the Iran nuclear deal. The subject of this research is the direction of the foreign policy actions of the United States and the European Union, in the period from the unilateral withdrawal of Trump's cabinet from the Iran nuclear agreement on May 8th, 2018, until the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, a general of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard on January 3rd, 2020 in the Republic of Iraq. The current state and perspective of contemporary transatlantic political relations in the context of unilateral withdrawal will be taken into consideration. In accordance with its new foreign policy agenda and strategy, and more inclined to a realistic view of international relations, the Trump administration risked deeper conflicts and divergence with the European Union over regional security issues. Thus, there was a threat to limit the further deepening and strengthening of the transatlantic partnership with the leading member states of the European Union, especially with the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and the government of the Republic of France. Additionally, the subject of research will be the patterns of behavior, embodied in speeches and foreign policy actions, which are consistent with the different approaches of the US and the EU to the problem of preventing the theocratic regime in Iran from developing its nuclear program. Accordingly, the focus will be on the period of the Trump administration, which, with its political will to break off with the legacy of the Obama administration, began to perceive Iran as a factor causing instability in the Middle East region. The Trump administration did not ratify the Iran nuclear agreement and continued to act under its obligations, solely because of the unfavorable benefits and a large number of shortcomings for the US. Thus, the paper will analyze whether the US administration of Donald Trump had a concrete foreign policy strategy in relations with the European Union and Iran. Also, the paper will try to answer the question of whether a unilateral or multilateral approach to regional security problems is more fruitful, taking into consideration the question of whether the unilateral approach of the only superpower in the world is more effective or, on the other hand, an international coalition of states is needed to suppress the Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

Strategic plans are a foundational element of the Federal Performance Framework introduced by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in 2012 to encourage agency implementation of the GPRA Modernization Act of 2010. This study compared federal Chief Financial Officer (CFO) agency strategic plans written between Fiscal Years (FY) 2012 and 2019 under Presidents Obama and Trump, respectively. A component analysis of selected agency strategic plans revealed that CFO agencies adhered to a rational plan design before and after the presidential transition. But under President Obama, agency plans adhered more closely to the design criteria in OMB implementation guidance. A decrease was observed in the number of strategic goals and strategic objectives in agency strategic plans written under President Trump. Under both Presidents, CFO agencies pursued a mix of strategic objectives including a larger percentage that were externally-oriented, mission-related outcomes or objectives in both administrations. A higher percentage of strategic objective statements in all of the CFO agency plans written under President Trump were more externally-oriented and included more mission-related outcomes, when compared to agency plans written under President Obama.

Visits by American presidents in Poland are important, socio-political and media events. This fact was the motivation to conduct research on media presentation of the visits of two American presidents – Barack Obama in 2011 and Donald Trump in 2017 – to Poland which were presented in Polish daily newspapers. The content analysis was based on opinion-forming titles: “Gazeta Wyborcza”, “Rzeczpospolita” and “Dziennik Gazeta Prawna”, and tabloids: “Fakt” and “Super Express”. The aim of the paper is to show the differences in how selected dailies cover two visits and explain where these differences might come from. The research hypothesis assumes that the ideological profile of chosen daily press determines media image of the American presidential visits in Poland, and that the significance of press materials may impact the formation of readers’ views and opinions about leaders of the USA. The author tried to answer the following questions: do the selected titles show bias against any of the presidents?, is the narration of daily newspapers similar to the tabloid press?, and do they undergo tabloidization? The article consists of five parts. The first part discusses the special relationship between Poland and the USA and the perception of American presidents’ visits to Poland. The second section describes agenda-setting, which is the theoretical framework for this study. The third part of the article describes the research methodology, which is based on content analysis. The fourth section is a description of the study of materials published in Polish daily press. The article ends with a summary of the study results. The bias was demonstrated in “Gazeta Wyborcza” (numerous articles, critical of Donald Trump), “Fakt” (numerous articles with positive attitude towards Barack Obama and Donald Trump) and “Super Express” (numerous satirical articles about Barack Obama). In the context of the discussed issues, daily newspapers did not make their narration similar to tabloid press and did not succumb to the tabloidization of media.

This paper makes a text mining analysis of the US President Donald Trump and the former President Barack Obama’s remarks on their respective Twitter accounts to examine what words are mainly used by these powerful politicians, and through that what political messages they attempt to convey. The study analyzes Twitter messages from 2017 to 2019 in terms of language patterns and sentiment analysis. The analysis of the language patterns is focused on the use of parts of speech, the use of capital letters, and exclamation points. The results show that Trump uses pronouns most and verbs and nouns are followed, while Obama uses nouns most and pronouns and verbs are next. Trump uses capital letters much more than Obama and the most frequently used word is GREAT while Obama hardly uses capital letters. In the case of Trump, he uses exclamation points with the word, you most while the word everybody is the case for Obama. As there is no nonverbal language elements such as intonation in text messages, Trump tends to use many capital letters and exclamation points to express his feelings as nonverbal elements of language. Through sentiment analysis it was found that both politicians use more positive words than negative words. However, Trump uses more negative words than Obama. As the messages on Twitter have become a primary means for political communication, the two politicians tend to use more positive words to create the positive images.

THE STORY OF AMERICAN STATE BUILDING is one in which crisis, once episodic, has become a routine feature of American politics. At the heart of this development is the modern executive: emergency powers are presidential powers. The principal objective of this article is to highlight institutional developments since the late 1960s that framed the Donald Trump administration's actions during the COVID-19 pandemic and currently roil the American state: the expansion of administrative power in the White House, which is largely unconstrained by the institutional imperatives of the bureaucracy, Congress, or state governments, and the emergence of the modern executive as the repository of party responsibility, with both Democrats and Republicans dependent on presidents for messaging, fundraising, mobilization, and programmatic action. Together, these developments form a dynamic of executive-centered partisanship—a merging of partisanship and executive prerogative characterized by presidential unilateralism, social activism, and polarizing struggles about national identity that divide the nation by race, ethnicity, and religion. Our account of executive-centered partisanship and how it affected the Trump administration's response to COVID-19 sheds new light on contemporary crisis management and the political nature of administrative power. Other presidents would have responded differently, perhaps with greater success in stemming the spread of the virus; other presidents might have attempted to centralize administrative power more aggressively in fighting the pandemic, rather than deflecting responsibility to states and private entities. Nevertheless, Trump's actions were not irresolute. They were defined by a purposeful pursuit of partisan objectives: a denigration of bureaucratic expertise and an attack on the “deep state”; the politicization and racialization of federal administrative procedures to crack down on legal and undocumented immigration; a campaign of “law and order” to quell civil rights demonstrations; and a punitive form of federalism, defined by partisan retaliation against “blue states.” Contrary to dominant analyses that paint an administration in disarray, we argue that the Trump administration responded to the crisis through a tactical redeployment of national administrative power to fulfill partisan goals, within a party system beholden to executive power.11 Nicholas F. Jacobs, Desmond King, and Sidney M. Milkis, “Building a Conservative State: Partisan Polarization and the Redeployment of Administrative Power,” Perspectives on Politics, 17 (June 2019): 453–469. As such, we conclude that given the current political and institutional context, American presidents are less likely to offer unifying leadership during national crises, or to suffer the political consequences for failing to do so. Instead of subjecting his party to the “blue wave” many Democrats hoped for, Trump's polarizing leadership agitated a highly mobilized and fiercely contested election that sharpened, rather than ameliorated, partisan conflict. Republicans did better than pre-election prognostications implied down ballot, where they gained 11 seats in the House and maintained control of most state legislatures. Moreover, Trump's term in office enabled Republicans to solidify a conservative majority in the courts. As a result, his successor, Joe Biden, came into office having to navigate public health and economic crisis with a bare majority in the Senate, statehouses and governors more deeply divided than Congress, and a judiciary in which 28 percent of all sitting judges were appointed by Trump, including three new justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Most tellingly, despite his personal defeat, Trump reigned over his party and reveled in the adulation of its base supporters. In short, the American state offers modern presidents not only the opportunity to strengthen their commitment to partisan tactics under the cover of national emergencies, but also the power to do so without the traditional constraints of party, Congress, and the states. That this strategy mobilized the Republican base and did not arouse a national repudiation of the president's leadership is evidence of the power bestowed on the modern presidency to advance partisan objectives in a deeply divided nation. The article proceeds as follows: First, we argue that while the government's response to COVID-19 is an exceptional case, scholars often learn much about the operating dynamics of the American state by exploring how crises shape and transform certain governing commitments. Students of American politics have long argued that national crises have been central to major political developments. Therefore, the absence of transformative change in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis—the stubborn persistence of the polarizing struggles over American identity that have intensified since the late 1960s—poses hard challenges to this prevailing perspective. Second, we argue that executive-centered partisanship explains the discrepancy between received wisdom and the contemporary battle for the services of the administrative state. We identify three ways in which the Trump administration's actions revealed and reinforced the dysfunctionalism of executive-centered partisanship during COVID-19: the delegitimization of bureaucratic expertise in partisan politics; the decay of constitutional forms that sustain the division and separation of powers; and the politicization of administrative procedures and policy implementation, now central to the partisan struggle to contend with a diversifying and politically fragmented America. Each of these factors, we argue, is symptomatic of the political pathologies that fester under executive-centered partisanship. We conclude with an analysis of Trump's legacy and its effect on the first few months of Biden's presidency. We do not mean to suggest that Biden's leadership is equivalent to Trump's, or that the Democratic and Republican Parties share equal blame for routinizing presidential partisanship. Not only does the base of the Republican Party not apologize for violent insurrection and embrace conspiratorial tales about election fraud, Republican Party leaders in Congress and the states openly question foundational rules and precedent for short-term advantage. Nevertheless, from the early days of his presidency, Biden has struggled to escape from the cultural and institutional forces embedding executive-centered partisanship in American democracy. Despite claims to the contrary, Biden's early performance in office, especially with respect to the COVID-19 crisis, has reinforced the essential features of presidential partisanship.22 Nicholas F. Jacobs and Sidney M. Milkis, “Get Out of the Way: Joe Biden, the U.S. Congress, and Executive-Centered Partisanship during the President's First Year in Office,” The Forum 19, no. 4 (2021): 709–744. Trump's presidency, therefore, has further fused partisanship and executive administration, fanning, rather than dousing, the flames of social discord, all while testing the “resilience” of American democracy.33 Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Broadway Books, 2019). Emergencies have routinely engaged the potential power of the American state and served as a rallying cry to unify the nation. Yet the public health and economic crises wrought by COVID-19 revealed how the worst emergency since the Great Depression failed to free American politics and government from the conditions that deeply divided the nation. Therefore, there is a need to distinguish COVID-19 from previous crises in American political development, and to reconsider the ways in which earlier emergency responses have affected the development of the American state. To do so, we place the emergence of COVID-19 as a national crisis within a richer historical context, one that accounts for the secular development of a politicized administrative state and the deterioration of partisan organizations. Likewise, although the COVID-19 pandemic has been unique in many ways, it is a telling case for understanding the underlying factors that influence the partisan imperatives to use public crises and the authority they confer for partisan advantage. Indeed, unlike other crises fabricated for partisan objectives—for example, the “war on drugs” that Richard Nixon declared in 1971—COVID-19 posed and proved a dire threat to public health. Paradoxically, the Trump administration sought to exploit the public health emergency, even as it denied its severity. As a result, COVID-19 deepened a political crisis that for decades had politicized the administrative state, subjecting it to a contest between liberals and conservatives for its services. Our analysis takes a broader understanding of the American state. The idea of a “state” cannot be encompassed by Max Weber's definition of “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”44 Max Weber, “Politics as Vocation,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. and trans., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 77–128 (originally published 1919). Especially in the United States, with its fragmentation of power, the state should be understood as “negotiated arrangements between the central government and powerful subnational units, patterns of competition and contestation among political parties, and relations among ‘public’ and ‘private’ providers of social welfare.”55 Desmond King and Robert C. Lieberman, “Review: Ironies of State Building: A Comparative Perspective on the American State,” World Politics 61 (July 2009): 547–588, at 549. The American state is not easily characterized as weak or strong—its power derives from a centralizing ambition amid a complex system of institutions that seeks to cultivate or impose a specific type of American community. This American state is a legacy of unintended consequences, historical contingency, and the unique position of the presidency in the constitutional order. In particular, the rise of the modern state, especially in a political culture that presumes to proscribe centralized power, is inextricably connected to American wars and domestic emergencies, which are frequently characterized as the moral equivalent of wars. Unlike some other republican charters, the U.S. Constitution does not have formal provisions that establish prerogative executive power in times of emergency.66 For example, Article 16 of the French Constitution explicitly allows the president to take exceptional measures “where the institutions of the Republic, the independence of the Nation, the integrity of its territory or the fulfillment of its international commitments are under serious and immediate threat” (see https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/France_2008). This provision was an important template of the Fifth Republic, formed in 1958, which transformed a parliamentary into a presidential system. However, crises have created opportunities for presidents to cut through the normal working arrangements of American politics. The central role of the presidency as a vanguard of institutional change has long been understood by scholars; furthermore, territorial expansion, globalization, and the nationalization of American political culture have encouraged the consolidation of an executive-centered state. The imperative to act—especially when confronted with the existential possibility of the state's destruction—leads to creative extensions of existing administrative power and social policy.77 Suzanne Mettler, Soldiers to Citizen: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); William J. Barber, Designs within Disorder: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Economists, and the Shaping of American Economic Policy, 1933–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, “Regimes and Regime Building in American Government: A Review of Literature on the 1940s,” Political Science Quarterly 113 (Winter, 1998): 689–702; and Sheldon D. Pollack, War, Revenue, and State Building; Financing the Development of the American State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). Emergencies are not only instrumental in episodic bouts of executive aggrandizement; crises and presidential emergency powers have also entrenched the American state's more permanent features.88 Robert P. Saldin, War, the American State, and Politics since 1898 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Especially during major episodes of bellicosity, the terms of political conflict are redefined, and wartime presidents are central actors in defining these terms. Indeed, David Mayhew has written that wars “seem to be capable of generating whole new political universes.”99 David R. Mayhew, “Wars and American Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 3 (September 2005): 473–493, at 473. All-consuming emergencies open up space for presidents to act unilaterally, permitting political outcomes in both foreign and domestic policy that are largely inconceivable absent the nationalizing and centralizing tendencies of national crises.1010 William G. Howell, Saul P. Jackman, and Jon C. Rogowski, The Wartime President: Executive Influence and the Nationalizing Politics of Threat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). As John Lapinski demonstrates, “crises often delegitimize existing government policies that are directly and, in some cases, indirectly linked to the event.”1111 John S. Lapinski, “Policy Substance and Performance in American Lawmaking, 1877–1994,” American Journal of Political Science 52 (April 2008): 235–251, at 238. Although Congress and the courts do not vanish during protracted states of crisis or war, “modern presidents are undoubtedly the preeminent actors.”1212 Douglas L. Kriner, After the Rubicon: Congress, Presidents, and the Politics of Waging War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). “Reconstructive presidents,” Stephen Skowronek argues, can bring about new political orders, but they typically do so only when the prevailing regime is in disarray—after the extant regime's internal weaknesses are exposed, often because it cannot contend with governing exigencies.1313 Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton, revised ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Therefore, for liberals and conservatives alike, the grandeur of an energetic executive has been forged during the country's most perilous, unpredictable moments in history. More often than not, war and crisis are understood to be central to the development of foreign policy institutions within the presidency, such as the National Security Council.1414 Bryan Mabee, “Historical Institutionalism and Foreign Policy Analysis: The Origins of the National Security Council Revisited,” Foreign Policy Analysis 7 (January 2011): 27–44. However, the fact that foreign crises are so central to redefining domestic priorities for presidential administrations suggests that emergency powers cut more deeply into the fabric of the modern political system. Presidential state building is nurtured by large-scale, national crises, but the modern executive, dependent on loyal partisans, is not an institution that works on behalf of the “whole people” or rallies the country to tackle national crises through enduring reforms. Even in the work of administering less politically charged programs, such as disaster funding or decisions to close military bases, the modern presidency is electorally motivated and often acts to serve its core constituency.1515 Douglas L. Kriner and Andrew Reeves, The Particularistic President: Executive Branch Politics and Political Inequality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). During emergencies, well-organized and highly motivated factions within a single party can leverage the institution to enact unpopular and divisive schemes.1616 Daniel DiSalvo, Engines of Change: Party Factions in American Politics, 1868–2010 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Moreover, the reliance on unilateral administrative measures to advance party objectives—disingenuously justified in the name of the “national interest”—further enfeebles legislative institutions during moments of crisis.1717 Neomi Rao, “Administrative Collusion: How Delegation Diminishes the Collective Congress,” New York University Law Review 90 (November 2015): 1463–1526. With the country sharply divided by deep cultural rifts, such presidential unilateralism arouses fundamental struggles over inclusion. For a time, the executive-centered administrative state was sustained by a fragile consensus that obscured partisan conflict over national administrative power. The extraordinary crises of the Great Depression and World War II led to institutional changes and policies that subordinated partisanship to administration, consolidating a New Deal state committed to a “coalition” between partisans of executive power and the proponents of expertise, or “neutral competence.”1818 Herbert Kaufman identifies the “quest for neutral competence” and the “quest for executive leadership” as core commitments in the development of the administrative state. See Kaufman, “Emerging Conflicts in the Doctrines of Public Administration,” American Political Science Review 50 (December 1956): 1057–1073. Politics was then a search for pragmatic solutions to the challenging responsibilities that America had to assume, at home and abroad, to secure economic and national security. However, public support for the New Deal state fractured in the wake of the cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s.1919 Hugh Heclo, “Sixties Civics,” in Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome Mileur, eds., The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 53–82. The attempt to realize the Great Society exposed the liberal state's central fault lines (notably racial inequalities), and with violent upheaval in Vietnam and in the nation's urban core, the pragmatic center that buttressed the New Deal disintegrated. Once contested by conservative Democrats and Republicans as a threat to constitutional government, national administrative power gained acceptance on the right as liberalism expanded throughout the 1960s. In the wake of the cultural revolution of that decade, Republicans built a conservative base whose foot soldiers, most notably the Christian Right, rallied around the belief that liberalism had so corrupted the country that the national government had a responsibility to aggressively protect “traditional values” and uphold “law and order.”2020 Nicholas F. Jacobs and Sidney M. Milkis, What Happened to the Vital Center? Presidentialism, Populist Revolt and the Fracturing of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), chaps. 4 and 5. As presidents have the of partisan leadership and as partisans their political to the president's personal it has become more to national from the president's In the institutional of the presidency with the of the American emergencies offer even greater opportunity for presidents to they act on behalf of their partisan As a partisanship in the United is a struggle over the of the state. has become an executive-centered struggle for the services of national administrative power. The of executive has been deepened by partisan in which Democrats and Republicans not only on of and policy but also their as existential to the American of J. H. C. David G. J. J. S. and in Science no. of this party conflict it First, since the struggles over and have partisan fundamental about it to be an have been further by the expansion of presidential power, executive to partisan conflict. As party wars have Congress, the legislative have become more dependent on presidents to cut through the and advance through executive action. During the and both Democrats and Republicans dependent on presidents to their and advance partisan through unilateral Sidney M. Milkis, H. and J. Happened to and the New American Party Perspectives on Politics Indeed, Republican presidents have the development of executive-centered partisanship. to the of social in the Richard Nixon was the first conservative president to the of national emergency with a partisan of American With a rallying cry of and Nixon new in the urban core, and abroad, in the of an presidential administration and a conservative modern Richard P. The Administrative (New York: As of the National at the time, conservatives only the work of the New Deal and Great Society the of a powerful president is to to war within his executive in to his Conservative National in in The New Republic, that the politicization of emergency powers did not at the the unilateralism in foreign had been a since the of the threat of an was to its partisan Andrew The New Presidential University of Press, the one foreign the funding of the in is an of that is in the of the American The President: (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, the other the administration's and use of presidential power a deeply partisan commitment to the and to the Republican Party with a of American power A the War on in an by modern embrace of a state. Not only did legal a of legal support for the constitutional independence under the of the in by Donald Trump's Supreme M. of during the and Law Review the White House also to centralize the Republican to transform the and into on the president's leadership in the War against Sidney M. Milkis and H. the Republican and the American Party Perspectives on Politics (September Democratic presidents have also the that crises in to their partisan dynamics are not dependent on the of the White they are to executive-centered partisanship. was on the of the economic that the country had in a presidency, it would be by the of the country of an economic despite and from partisans, the administration its partisan to health the most divisive and partisan policy with perhaps the of The consequences are Democrats in Congress from an with the legislative of his the and of crisis the president's governing strategy long the worst of the Great had As the president in the to the and Sidney Milkis, Partisan Polarization and the Administrative The Forum no. built the centralizing of his conservative and liberal to advance through executive the of a powerful but of the the and especially The 17 at 16 The of and of the to control the federal bureaucracy, and the of Richard its into the administrative presidential powers over and to management strategy directly to his for example, J. and L. and the Administration,” The Journal of 2011): and R. The of in Press, In political crises often leadership and we the for to around the political upheavals also in the community and should in the current of American presidents are to power for partisan are that presidents the were Donald Trump's of the worst national crisis since the Great Depression should have to the of “a late regime Herbert or in a political repudiation of a conservative political and the rise of a new Richard about Trump's and Biden's The Nation, at 16 The Trump presidency at of the At the Trump's about the spread of the his that the president has to battle the pandemic, Trump responsibility to state and governments, and, when for racial and in the of of for the and sought to the of public and for as the president's public amid the of the and did his months a of these only how the Trump administration failed to the threat that COVID-19 posed to public health and the D. and David Trump's The to Leadership on the New York at 16 and C. and Trump from the Trump the of partisan than attempt to the modern executive as the of the public as many and public had been to during a national crisis of the Trump further fused executive prerogative and partisanship. This was not a of Trump's many was to executive

This study has the purpose of depicting the kinds of speech errors, the comparison of speech errors’ frequency, and the causes of speech errors made by former American Presidents Barack Obama (BO) and Donald Trump (DT) as the interviewee in an interview program entitled "60 Minutes". This study used a qualitative approach. The data source was BO and DT’s video in “60 Minutes” Interview. The data in this study were in the form of words, phrases, and clauses transcribed from the speech made by BO and DT. Based on the analysis, it was found that BO made 111 speech errors and six (6) types of speech errors, while DT made 90 speech errors and nine (9) types of speech errors. The causes of speech errors made by former American Presidents in “60 Minutes” 2020 interview are caused by social factors, both situational anxiety, and social circumstances.

Feasibility of contextual behavioral speech analyses of US presidents: Inaugural addresses of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, 1993–2017

“Fake news” has become a global term since Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States. President Trump adopted what we describe as a “discourse of fake news” to attack and discredit news media and political rivals, which is suggested to have been reproduced by politicians in other national contexts. This article investigates whether Australian politicians adopt a fake news discourse. To do so, data are gathered over six months after Trump’s election from four political communications fora : parliamentary debates, social media (Facebook and Twitter), press, and politicians’ websites. We find fake news discourse is predominantly the domain of conservatives. Frequent users employ fake news discourse to delegitimize primarily the media, but also political opponents. Australian politicians’ use of fake news discourse is rare, but it is amplified by news media. Concerningly, it is seldom contested. We argue this has negative consequences for public debate and trust in media and political institutions.

This study attempted to investigate the types of sentence structures spoken by Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the election night speech in the year of 2020. The design of this research was qualitative and quantitative research. The total of 101 sentences of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump were analyzed by using syntactical structure analysis. The instruments of this research were documentation and checklist tables. The data were analyzed by using Miles, Huberman, and Saldana’s theory, and Carnie’s theory was used for the rules in portraying the tree diagram. The results of the study showed that all types of sentence structures appeared in both speeches. In Joe Biden’s speech, there were 40% simple sentence structures, 26.7% complex sentence structures, 16.7% compound sentence structures, and 16.7% compound complex sentence structures. In Donald Trump’s speech, there were 59,2% simple sentence structures, 19.7% complex sentence structures, 15.4% compound sentence structures, and 5.6% compound complex sentence structures. In other words, the simple sentence structures appeared the most dominant in both Donald Trump and Joe Biden speeches. It is recommended that other researchers should study the sentence structures of other American presidents (e.g. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barrack Obama) in order to expand the descriptions of sentence structures of the US presidents in general.

Purpose This paper aims to examine how disruptive presidential leadership reshapes the business–government nexus by analyzing the Trump administration as a critical case of political and economic transformation. It explores how unilateral governance, policy volatility and weaponized interdependence compelled firms to adopt short-term, defensive and state-contingent innovation strategies. Through a comparative analysis of the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, the study seeks to clarify how differing leadership styles influence corporate behavior, policy uncertainty and long-term institutional resilience. Ultimately, the paper reframes presidential power as a structural force shaping corporate adaptation, innovation trajectories and the stability of capitalist governance. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a comparative qualitative design, integrating theoretical analysis with empirical evidence across the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. It combines insights from presidential power theory, institutional economics and business strategy to construct an analytical framework linking leadership style to corporate adaptation under policy uncertainty. Data sources include policy documents, economic policy uncertainty indices and secondary literature on trade, innovation and regulation. Comparative case analysis is used to trace causal mechanisms connecting disruptive governance to firm-level strategic responses. This multi-level approach allows for identifying both short-term adaptive behaviors and long-term institutional consequences within the evolving business–government nexus. Findings This study finds that the Trump administration’s disruptive leadership produced policy chaos that often operated as administrative incompetence, forcing firms into defensive, opportunistic and state-contingent innovation. Executive orders, tariffs and regulatory reversals aimed less at creating opportunities than at protecting existing hierarchies. Short-term gains in sectors like semiconductors came alongside fractured supply chains and declining predictability. Firms either aligned with shifting state priorities or diversified abroad to manage volatility. Ultimately, chaotic governance accelerated adaptation, but eroded the coordination, regulatory stability and institutional trust needed for long-term competitiveness. Originality/value This paper reframes presidential power by linking disruptive leadership, and the chaos that signals Trump’s administrative incompetence, to firm-level strategic behavior. Instead of treating policy uncertainty as external, it shows how leadership style and governance design actively produce it. Integrating theories of presidential power, business influence and institutional resilience, the study bridges political science and corporate strategy. A comparison of the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations reveals how politically generated chaos becomes a structural force shaping innovation, exposing the trade-offs between short-term adaptability and long-term institutional stability.