The Insidious Creep of Trump’s Speaking Style

“Many such cases.” “Many people are saying this.”

You may recognize these phrases as “Trumpisms” — linguistic coinages of President Trump — but they’ve also become ingrained in our collective vocabulary. Since they became popular as memes during his first presidential campaign, we have begun using them, first sardonically, and then out of habit.

If you search for “many such cases” on X, you’ll see new posts of the phrase seemingly every minute, primarily applied to nonpolitical contexts like work anxiety or the real estate market. Google Trends shows both expressions increasing in usage since the mid-2010s.

This is remarkable, given how quickly memes typically die out. Internet humor usually follows transient fads, but these phrases associated with the president seem to have found a more permanent home in the English language.

The difference is in how his ideas spread and mutate through the language he uses. Mr. Trump’s speech, evolving in the social media era, is overwhelmingly entering language through online jokes, but then sticking around in our actual conversations. The Trumpisms that stay are well suited for virality and recombination through algorithmic media. They’re no longer being used in direct reference to the original joke, because they can be reapplied to everyday situations.

You could argue that Mr. Trump’s language is predisposed to becoming “memeified” on social media platforms and is reshaping our reality as a result.

Mr. Trump’s impact reaches well beyond just two phrases. Since he helped popularize “sad!” as an interjection, I regularly hear people use it that way as well; something similar is in effect with “frankly,” “fake news” and the discourse marker “believe me” at the end of a sentence. All of these terms were buoyed by Mr. Trump’s usage, turned into ironic callbacks (including by his supporters), and then incorporated into everyday speech. In fact, Mr. Trump may have a greater impact on the English language than any president in the history of the United States, maybe ever.

That last sentence borrowed the grammatical structure of a 2016 meme where Mr. Trump described NAFTA as “the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals, maybe ever.” Since then, the joke has become a kind of syntactic skeleton called a phrasal template: a grammatical place holder with empty slots to fill. Now any concept can be loaded into the template of “[superlative] X in/on the Y in the history of Z, maybe ever” — making it easier to apply to new scenarios and outlive the original meme.

Mr. Trump’s speech is chock-full of phrasal templates. “Make X Y Again” and “Thank you X, very cool” are just two more examples regularly applied to normal situations. Because the Mad Libs-style adaptability feels intuitive to other contexts, the language spreads. Graphic design enthusiasts want to “make logos cool again,” and others say “thank you very cool” to provocative fan art of their video game characters.

This didn’t happen with previous presidents in the online era. Joe Biden certainly had catchphrases, like “folks” and “malarkey.” Barack Obama would often punctuate speeches with “Let me be clear,” and George W. Bush was well known for his “Bushisms.” Yet none of these phrases became a part of the average person’s day-to-day speech.

So what makes a phrase go more viral? Research has identified Mr. Trump as having a higher frequency of evaluative words like “huge,” “stupid” and “disaster,” and a more emotionally charged tone than the average politician. We know from studies on virality that emotional language is more likely to go viral, so perhaps Mr. Trump’s intense speech style is more susceptible to being spread online. That’s not even getting into the highly divisive content of what he’s saying, which often generates more comments, which in turn is rewarded by social media platforms.

Researchers at the University of Chicago have found Mr. Trump to have a quantifiably unique syntactic style compared with those of other politicians. His word choice is less predictable to large language models, a type of A.I. that powers programs like ChatGPT. Others have noted that he disproportionately appends extraneous language to his sentences — like “believe me” or “maybe ever” at the end of the trade deal meme.

That “maybe ever” makes the sentence it concludes seem much odder than otherwise and theoretically more likely to turn into a viral meme. Strange-sounding sentences can generate more comments and spread further online. This is how Trumpisms become algorithmically favorable, reaching us on our phones. At a certain point, they turn into a feedback loop: Mr. Trump’s own omnipresence is now part of the irony behind the meme.

Not everything Mr. Trump says survives: People don’t say “covfefe” anymore, even though that was a popular meme. Rather, his jokes live on when they can find a useful function, typically through the applicability of his absurd phrasal templates and discourse markers. Those structures become “carriers” for other types of unrelated speech. The more we repurpose, the more the meme fossilizes itself in our language, and the more we actually start to talk like Mr. Trump.

Each medium in its own way affects how messages are diffused and can therefore have an impact on the success of political candidates. For example, it’s generally accepted that the medium of TV played a role in John Kennedy’s election over Richard Nixon in 1960, because Mr. Nixon was less photogenic.

If television as a medium was more suited to electing “attractive” candidates, it follows that social media as a medium is more suited to electing “memeable” candidates. Because of Mr. Trump’s outlandish style and substance, he seems more adept at dominating our social media feeds. Each appearance is another chance for his supporters to donate or feel energized — and slowly shifts our shared reality closer to his ideas. The same could be true of our language, in which Mr. Trump appears far more than his opponents.

Political scientists have long noted how the Overton window — the range of acceptable discourse in a society — can shift depending on which ideas appear represented in that discourse. As social media algorithms reward more extreme and memeable discourse, that type of speech begins to show up more, affecting our cultural attitudes through its very presence. It is reasonable to infer that the ubiquity of Mr. Trump’s speech can play a role in normalizing his policies.

Mr. Trump’s ideas begin as ridiculous and are easily parodied on the internet — at this point, they’re already affecting our head space. When those parodies become a subconscious part of language, their overt power is diluted but the underlying idea remains there, continuing to subtly represent his presence.

The fact that we’re talking like Donald Trump could mean that we’re starting to think like him as well.

Adam Aleksic, known online as the Etymology Nerd, is an American linguist and the author of “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language.”

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