How Come Everyone Likes Trump When He Gets Pissed Off?

Sooner or later, we were going to be treated to an academic analysis of Trump’s political rhetoric which would conclude that he was introducing a style of political speech which was more nasty, angry, and vulgar than any political rhetoric previously used or heard.

And the analysis now exists in a study published in an open-source journal, Scientific Reports, which can either be read here or downloaded here.

The authors of this piece are faculty at universities in Germany, Switzerland, and Israel, and they have run 24 million quotes made by 18,627 American politicians between 2008 through 2020, looking for negativity in content, a perspective driven by a Pew survey which found that 85% of respondents believe that political debate in the United States has become ‘more negative’ in recent years.

And what reason do the researchers give for this change in how public figures debate political issues? Donald Trump — that’s what. A majority of the individuals who answered the Pew poll blame Trump for the increased negativity of political rhetoric and the detailed calculations by the researchers who did the Scientific Reports piece appears to bear this out.

With all due respect to academic research and academic researchers, I knew that Trump had injected a new and grossly negative…