 My name is Jennifer Mercia and I'm an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University. I have written a book that is about how Trump has taken advantage of pre-existing distrust, polarization, and frustration. He uses six rhetorical strategies repeatedly. So ad populum is appealing to the wisdom of the crowd. Trump in particular appeals to the wisdom of his own crowds. And what he does is he wields his crowd like a cudgel. He uses them as a wedge against all of his critics. And a lot of people love Trump, right? A lot of people love me. Ad baculum is threats of force or intimidation. Trump is constantly threatening to exert force, whether it's over the media, threatening them with libel or threatening to sue them. If a city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them. American exceptionalism is usually thought of as America's unique role in the world. America is just different and because of that we have certain obligations to the world community and we are at our best when we live up to those obligations. For Trump, however, American exceptionalism is America winning, plain and simple. And he considers himself to be the best example of America winning this. Here in this clip you'll see Trump crowing about how America is winning. We're winning all over despite all evidence to the contrary. When I spoke at this forum two years ago, I told you that we had launched the great American comeback. Today I'm proud to declare that the United States is in the midst of an economic boom, the likes of which the world has never seen before. Paralypses is one of Trump's favorite rhetorical strategies because it allows him to say two things at once, which means that you can't hold him accountable for what he said. Colloquially, Paralypses is, I'm not saying, I'm just saying. I'm not going to say anybody didn't do well, they didn't do well. I refuse to say it's Bobby Knight, but it's Bobby Knight. Now I won't say it was because of me, but it was. Reification is treating people like objects. Typically it's a part of war rhetoric. So presidents and leaders throughout the world and throughout history treat people as less than human and that prepares a nation to go to war with them. It allows us to deny them rights and to murder them. Thanks to Democrat policies, MS-13 gang members, they're the worst. We're allowed to infiltrate the country. You know, I called them animals and Nancy Pelosi said they're not animals, they're human beings. Ad hominem is attacking the person rather than their argument. It's a distraction technique as all ad fallacies are. It seeks to reroute our attention away from the central concern of the argument and towards the person of the interlocutor. In this case, Trump routinely attacks his reporters and he attacks them personally. Those are all ways of changing our attention. Saying very positive things about the job the federal government has done and those people and those people have been just absolutely excoriated by some of the fake news like you, your CNN, your fake news. And let me just tell you, they were excoriated by people like you that don't know any better because you don't have the brains you were born with. So what I mean by he's a post rhetorical demagogue is that he doesn't use rhetoric to persuade. He doesn't use rhetoric to convince, to give good arguments, to unite the nation. Instead, he uses language as force. He's more interested in compliance gaming than he is in persuading.