Trump’s and Biden’s styles during the 2020 US presidential election

Abstract

AbstractThis study analyzes the stylistic and rhetorical characteristics of Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the 2020 US presidential election. As communication channels, the oral (TV debates and radio interviews), written speeches, and tweets sent during the last 2 months have been examined. As stylometric markers, the most frequent functional words indicate that Trump employs more diverse personal pronouns more frequently than Biden. For the Democratic nominee, the first-person pronouns (I and we) are mainly used with, compared to Trump, a higher rate of prepositions, signaling the use of a larger number of nouns. When comparing the three media of communication, this study shows that the oral form is closer to the written one and that tweet-based communication presents a distinct type compared with the other two. Usually, written texts tend to contain more functional words than either the oral form or tweets. When comparing the two nominees, the frequency of familiar words (e.g. the, to, of, a) tends to be higher in Biden’s addresses, whereas Trump opts more often for grandiose terms (e.g. great, just, strong). As rhetorical features, the Republican president uses more emotional words, both positive and negative. The Democratic candidate does not propound negative messages and opts for symbolic (e.g. nation, country) and achievement terms (e.g. plan, win, work) with numerous references to people and family (e.g. folks, Americans, son).