A warrant for violence? An analysis of Donald Trump's speech before the US Capitol attack

Abstract

On January 6th, 2021, Donald Trump's speech during a ‘Save America’ rally was followed by mass violence, with Trump's supporters storming the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden's victory in the presidential election. In its wake, there was a great deal of debate around whether the speech contained direct instructions for the subsequent violence. In this paper, we use a social identity perspective on leadership (and more specifically, on toxic leadership) to analyse the speech and see how its overall argument relates to violence. We show that Trump's argument rests on the populist distinction between the American people and elites. He moralises these groups as good and evil respectively and proposes that the very existence of America is under threat if the election result stands. On this basis he proposes that all true Americans are obligated to act in order prevent Biden's certification and to ensure that the good prevails over evil. While Trump does not explicitly say what such action entails, he also removes normative and moral impediments to extreme action. In this way, taken as a whole, Trump's speech enables rather than demands violence and ultimately it provides a warrant for the violence that ensued.

Why is it so difficult to have productive conversations with people with different beliefs and ideologies? A psychological perspective

“…To summarize, humans have a cognitive tendency to overestimate the extent to which people who hold different beliefs and ideologies dislike, devalue, and may even wish to harm them. Furthermore, these misperceptions are likely maintained or even exacerbated by political leaders' rhetoric about rival-party members (Luca & Buell, 2005;Ntontis et al, 2023)-rhetoric which may itself be based on misperceptions of those rival-party members' actual views (Druckman et al, 2023). Thus, this psychological tendency is one factor that likely makes it difficult to have productive conversations with people who hold different beliefs, as many people will understandably assume that it is not possible to have a productive-or safe-interaction with people who they believe feel this way about them, and will therefore avoid initiating such interactions.…”