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An Inch Becomes a Mile: Donald Trump’s Escalation of Victimhood Rhetoric
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Thorpe, Eliabeth
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2022-12-09
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On November 15th, 2022, Donald Trump formally announced that he was running for
President in the 2024 election cycle. However, the nation he was addressing had significantly
changed compared to the one he addressed on June 16th, 2015, when he came down Trump
Tower’s escalator to announce his 2016 candidacy. Much of this change can come down to his
words and the actions they inspired and enabled, as seen by the January 6th Insurrection and
numerous other examples of far-right domestic terrorism. While there is a large body of
established research that fully described the methods Trump used in winning the 2016 election,
current research has been focusing on how his words caused the rise of political extremism
during and after his presidency. This paper seeks to contribute to this ongoing discussion by
using established methodologies of rhetorical analysis to posit that Donald Trump radicalized his
supporters by leveraging ongoing social pressure to create a shared identity of hate and
violence.
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