Wallace: Nine women have come forward and said that you have either groped them or kissed them without their consent. Why would so many different women from so many different circumstances… [Trump nodding his head] make up these stories?
Wallace: Her two minutes. Sir, her two minutes.
In response to Wallace’s question regarding the assault accusations, Trump addresses the women who are accusing him as ‘those people’ (line 4 ). Instead of addressing the women by their names or even as female he refers to them as those people. He is intentionally placing an imaginary distance between himself and his accusers which he ultimately hopes will dismiss any affiliation between himself and the nine women. Furthermore, Trump is relieving the serious claims being presented towards him by attempting to make the issue much less serious. He does this by proclaiming a long and off-topic answer instead of discussing the nine women who came forth with accusations.
One positive alternative he could have taken to answer this question was to honestly state his particular relationship with the women and perhaps where he knew them from and or why they may have had any incentive to come forth. However, he chose to highlight the violence that occurred in the Chicago rally. An example where he gives an irrelevant answer is in lines 7-9 where Trump states “people were hurt and people could have been killed.. It was lies and fictions”. Trump's unintelligible answers can also be explained by Labov who calls this verbosity. Labov describes verbosity as “words multiply, some modify and qualifying, others repeating or padding the main argument” (Labov, 1972, p.219).
​As Trump is speaking, Secretary Clinton expresses various nonverbal reactions and commentary to Trump's’ response. In lines 6 and 8-10 Hillary makes reactions such as rolling her eyes, looking down to avoid all eye contact, and shaking her head. Hillary hears the senseless response her opponent is making, and her nonverbal response is in utter disbelief. Although she attends to the proper interactional regimes of a presidential debate by not speaking while Trump speaks, she seems to find his response implausible. The custom presidential debate interactional regime consists of giving complete intelligible responses and speaking with the eloquent diction of a person suitable to run the country.
Particular behavioral norms also establish the interactional regime of presidential debates such as speaking when prompted by moderator and giving precedence of political issues over personal attacks. Trump’s negligent form of acknowledgement of women deviates from the interactional regimes of a presidential debate. The use of “those people” to address possible assault survivors does not abide by the interactional regime of the debate. He also deviates from the proper interactional regimes through his persistent interruptions and disregard to respect another candidate while speaking. A possible question to consider is whether Trump’s lack of agreement with the interactional regime due to his lack of how to assess communicative competence in spaces? Another point to consider is the the likelihood that Trump’s interruptions of Secretary Clinton perhaps an indication of Trump’s view of women.
In this debate former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Mr. Donald Trump have brought with them a new flavor of how to run for office. The interactional regimes and communicative competence of the debate were altered which is ultimately a reflection of the society we live in today. These deviations from norms indicate an issue much greater which is that women are still not respected as equals in America. By Trump not fully taking such a critical issue as assault accusations seriously he reproduces the deal in which society depersonalizes women and that it is acceptable to disregards their significance. This is a problem that expands further than within the context of the debate. What is important for Americans to understand is that the language illustrated in the debate setting is profoundly indicative of ideologies that linger in our country. Through Hillary’s nonverbal remarks, she obviously does not find Trump’s linguistic choices to describe women acceptable. Personally, I do not take this issue that was presented in the debate lightly and should not be linguistically expressed by anyone as such; billionaire presidential candidate or not.
Jessica is a student in the introductory sociolinguistics course at Swarthmore College.
Your analysis shows a sort of two-fold nature of language. In juxtaposing what Trump could have said about his allegations with what he opted for you show that not only can language de-humanize, but a lack thereof does as well. Labov's verbosity is an apt tool here, but you also show that it used in conjunction with Trump's subject change, the unintelligible answers you highlight, is further dehumanizing: it would have been one thing to talk around the issue, to be verbose, yet still address it, but to choose to talk around another issue and take up so much time in doing so is doubly bad.
I hadn't thought about how not talking about something could dehumanize an entire group, but your analysis proves that this, unfortunately, was the case at this debate.