Annotations and “translations” of the seemingly cryptic statements of President Donald Trump have been an ongoing feature of media coverage of his candidacy and the first year of his presidency. Efforts in the media to decipher Trump’s enigmatic references have presented Donald Trump and his campaign as communicating in a language unintelligible to mainstream media audiences. As in Keith Basso’s account of a Western Apache speech genre termed “speaking with names” (1996), the coherence and significance of Donald Trump’s use of proper names and a variety of other expressions often become clear only when linked to a context at a remove from their immediate surround, generally one found in the world of conservative and alt-right media. In providing such clarification, mainstream media annotations of Donald Trump’s words render his speeches a moment of something like language contact between two distinct communicative worlds: the “right-wing” and the “mainstream.” The result is the aggravation of divisions between multiple disconnected communicative “silos” or “bubbles.” Trump’s verbal practices thus bring into question the very existence of something that might be called “the American public.”

This section introduction sets the stage for chapters 2, 3, and 4 by surveying some aspects of Trump’s speech acts that have precipitated a breakdown of the body politic. For example, Trump’s use of the determiner the before human kinds (such as “the gays”) pigeonholes and homogenizes the groups in question, rendering them an undifferentiated “other.” The chapter also discusses how Trump threatens Habermas’ notion of “the public sphere,” widely influential in contemporary understandings of the development of Western-style democracy. Trump’s divisive linguistic practices threaten the Enlightenment principles behind a Habermasian public sphere in which rational individuals freely participate with others in discussions of common problems, through a common language. The chapter further discusses how Trump hails and enlists his supporters through interactional routines, including entraining them during his campaign rallies with powerful three-syllable chants (such as “Get them out!”, “Lock her up!”, and “Build that wall!”). Trump also divides the nation by sanctioning insensitivity against his detractors, enacting the role of a stern, even merciless father figure.