Julie Sedivy has taught linguistics and psychology at Brown University and the University of Calgary, and is the co-author of Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You.

Yes, there were tombstones and rusted factories and there was American carnage in President Trump’s inaugural speech. But his dark speech was more than just a refusal to shift from campaign mode and mend political fences. His stark simplicity of ideas, basic grammar and word choice offered insights into the way Trump is likely to govern. Research on presidential speech indicates that the more simply a president speaks the more likely he is to rule unilaterally through the use of executive orders.

The simplicity of Trump’s speech—it rated at an 8th-grade level on the Flesch-Kincaid Readability scale—fits with a general trend of politicians speaking more plainly in recent decades. (Even the rhetorically ambitious Obama delivered an inauguration address in 2009 that yielded a ninth-grade score.) And it aligns with Trump’s insistence that he speaks for ordinary Americans rather than for the elites. But Trump’s populist message, that he intends to deliver governmental power to the people, is belied by his own language.


Linguistic simplicity, argue political scientists, tends to go hand-in-hand with substantive simplicity; political speeches that use simple language tend not to grapple with multiple viewpoints or weigh the arguments in support of alternative perspectives. And that matters because simple speeches foster a belief that reality is not complicated, and therefore, that there’s not much need for deliberation or debate. This view flips the conventional warning that officials obfuscate through overly complicated language—simplicity, too, has the potential to obscure reality.

Political scientist Christopher Olds has shown that when presidents downshifted into simpler language in their weekly public address (as measured by the Flesch score), the public became more inclined to think that the government’s role in domestic matters should be minimized. A president who suggests that the economy is no complex thing leads the public to infer that government should merely “get out of the way” of markets and private transactions. In his paper, Olds noted that there was no evidence of the reverse—that is, presidents did not use simple language in response to the public mood—leading him to conclude that simplified rhetoric was “an explicit choice of presidential administrators and speech writers” that was “independent of public opinion.”

More ominously, Olds has also shown (drawing on data from presidential addresses between 1993 and 2015) that a shift into simpler language predicted a president’s heavy-handed use of executive orders. Olds suggests that a style of leadership that relies on simplification and anti-intellectualism is “a defiant form of leadership that opts to publicly demonstrate the rejection of external expertise.”After all, when the course of action is so self-evidently right, when discussion and compromise are obstacles to forward movement, why get your rhetorical boots mucked up in the weeds of policy?

Trump’s speech on Friday, at a lean 1,400 words delivered in a brisk 16 minutes, was shorter than the previous nine inaugural addresses. But brevity, by itself, does not equal simplicity, as a number of his predecessors have demonstrated.

Lincoln’s second Inaugural Address in 1865, considered a masterpiece of American political rhetoric (12th grade level, to boot), is a study in complexity. In 700 words, Lincoln used literary syntax, posed philosophical questions, and—most profoundly—struggled to reconcile perspectives that seemed irreconcilable. While Lincoln minced no words by pinning the blame for the Civil War on the “insurgent agents” seeking to expand their “economic interest” in slavery, he conceded that neither side could have predicted the devastating consequences of the war, that both sides were likely in the wrong, and that the war ultimately reflected forces outside of everyone’s control. In one breath he mused that “it may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces” and in the next he advocated, “but let us judge not, that we be not judged,” signaling to victorious Northerners that while they might feel righteously vindicated in their opposition to slavery, they should suppress the impulse to rush to judgment and retribution.

Trump’s speech demonstrated that he is no Lincoln. In some ways he stuck with his preference on the campaign trail to use simple language and avoid detail. This sets him apart not just from Lincoln, but (to a lesser extent) from other contemporary politicians. It would be a mistake, though, to view this simplicity as a symptom of verbal inarticulateness. In his inaugural address, Trump expressed a clear vision in which conflicting viewpoints cease to have relevance and he paved the way for action by a leader who portrays himself as the very embodiment and voice of the American people.

Unlike Lincoln, who wrestled out loud with the tensions that divided America, Trump’s speech made no meaningful acknowledgment of the deep rifts in the current American electorate. Instead, he draew a brute distinction between “you”—the American people—and the self-serving politicians of Washington, an “establishment that protected itself and not the citizens of our country.” Astonishingly for a president who assumes office at a moment of alarming polarization, who lost the popular vote, suffers from a plummeting approval rating, and whose election sparked a protest march of hundreds of thousands on the day after his swearing in, his speech made no mention of the ideological divisions that separate ordinary Americans from each other.

Telling, too, is his claim to represent Americans at large. In the earliest moments of the speech, after complimenting the Obamas as having been “magnificent ” during the transition period, Trump declared the inauguration “has very special meaning, because we are transferring power from Washington D.C. and giving it back to you, the people”; in one short sentence (whose parallels to the words of the villain Bane from the film “The Dark Knight Rises” have not gone unnoticed), he cast the Obamas as representative of a self-serving “Washington,” and merged identities with the American public, who stand united with him against a common enemy. Having incorporated the entire American electorate into his person, there are precious few explicit references to himself as an individual.

This ego-less style was a sharp break with the chest-pounding speech he gave at the Republican National Convention, when he proclaimed “I alone can fix it.” (He used the pronoun “I” only three times in the speech and “you” 20 times.) But in reality Trump’s inaugural address revealed a style of leadership that enlarges his own role and position of power. In its strokes of simplicity, Trump’s speech rendered invisible the millions of Americans whose votes registered disagreement with his proposed policies—the very policies he proclaimed “we” will implement. In his narrative about the transfer of power, he presented his own decisions and policies as having supreme legitimacy because they reflect the will of a unified electorate. And in his portrayal of any opposition as part of a corrupt establishment, he sent yet another signal that there is no need to talk things over. In a startling echo of his Twitter attack on Congressman John Lewis as being “all talk and no action,” he asserted: “We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action, constantly complaining but never doing anything about it. The time for empty talk is over.” The message is clear: We can expect less (collective) talk and more (unilateral) action.

In his speech, Trump told the American public: “Everyone is listening to you now.” But if we listen closely to Trump, the real message may be that everyone had better listen to him now.

Julie Sedivy is a cognitive scientist and writer who has taught psychology and linguistics at Brown University and the University of Calgary. She is the lead author of “Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You.” She can be found on Twitter as @soldonlanguage.