An Inch Becomes a Mile: Donald Trump’s Escalation of Victimhood Rhetoric

Abstract

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.