The mimesis of character in political rally speeches : Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign

Compelling microanalytic studies of audio-visual recordings of speeches have shown that political orators share culturally recognizable rhetorical techniques to invite an audience to respond favorably. Of these message formats (contrasts, lists, puzzle solution, headline punch line, and pursuits), quotations are rarely discussed, despite their significance in politics. Although interaction-based scholars have researched how politicians quote the voice and bodies of characters in their speeches, these interaction-based studies exclude embodied communication. This dissertation aims to contribute to microanalytic studies of political communication by analyzing the rhetorical delivery methods and skillfulness of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as they take on the role of characters in their 2016 presidential campaign speeches. When delivering speeches, these two competitors evoked voices and bodies of others, using different mimetic devices to establish intimacy, create depictive vividness of characters, and to denigrate the moral character of their opponents. An investigative analysis of one hundred randomly-sampled speeches exposes the significance of the visual rhetoric employed by Trump and Clinton in their storytelling which enabled them to adopt, enact, and construct moralized worldviews. I build on Herbert Clark’s (1996, 2010) theory of quotations as demonstrations, arguing that politicians use mimetic acts to depict characters, keep audiences engaged, and collaboratively spoil the image of their adversaries. To substantiate my argument, I examine several empirical extracts that illustrate the moment-to-moment performances of Clinton and Trump as they animate and individuate characters through quoting practices. Interaction-based methods (microanalysis and conversation analytic techniques) enabled me to compare and scrutinize the rhetorical skillfulness of Clinton and Trump’s animation techniques and repeated stories, providing a more comprehensive picture for why more mimetic techniques of animating or demonstrating a character’s personality can be beneficial to orators. My finding suggests that Clinton utilizes more diegetic, descriptive tactics of storytelling intended to create to the illusion that she is objectively reporting the words and actions of heroic or authority figures as a means of lending credibility to her attack on adversaries. While Trump creates intelligible caricatures of his adversaries alongside his audiences to discredit the American political system.