Donald Trump's Presidential Discourse: From Loser to Winner

Interest in the language that Donald Trump used during his two presidential campaigns, and which twice secured his victory, is due to its sharp differences from the language of the other candidates, most notably its simplicity and brevity. Trump has the lowest ratings across the board on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. During the first presidential campaign of 2016, political opponents and engaged scientists, including many psychiatrists and psychotherapists, saw this as a sign of his intellectual failure and, based on analyses of his speeches and tweets, went so far as to demand his removal from the presidential election as suffering from severe mental illness. The ideological struggle was covered by science, but after his victory in the 2025th presidential campaign, the general trend of research on Trump's presidential discourse changed to the opposite. It turned out that the extreme brevity of Trump's words and sentences is the most effective tool for communicating with his voters, most of whom are conservative average white Americans without higher education, who preserve traditional American values and have an income below the average annual income of a U.S. resident. Trump's campaign speeches, with a ranking of 4.1 on the Flesch-Kincaid test (a level of difficulty comparable to the language of a 4th grade student) were accessible to 95 per cent of the U.S. adult population, which was unattainable for other candidates, both Democrats and Republicans. After the election, American political technologists switched to studying Trump's body language, for example, on the material of the joint interview with Ilon Musk, trying to predict in this way potential contradictions in the ruling American elite.

presidential discourse, Donald Trump, Flesch-Kincaid test, campaign speeches, electorate, body language