What Trump’s Words Reveal: A Lexical (Word) Analysis of President Trump’s Joint Session Speech on February 28, 2017
On Tuesday, February 28, 2017 (@ 9PM ET) President Trump delivered his first speech to the joint session of Congress. I loved it. I’m a capitalist, so I like what he said about lowering taxes and minimizing regulations.
But what I think doesn’t matter. Was it really a good speech? Based on what criteria? And if it really was a good speech, what made it good?
Yes, It Was a Good Speech — Based on the Market’s Response
Now you could listen to the mainstream media to determine if the speech was good. But their judgement is clouded by political biases. The Leftist Media tends to rate Trump’s speeches as horrible, hypocritical, and downright criminal in parts. The Right-Leaning Media, usually rates Trump’s speeches as fantastic, inspirational — the best since Reagan!
So who should you listen to, if not the experts in the media? The answer is: the people who have “skin in the game”. The people who stand to lose money if Trump’s policies fail. These people listen closely to the speech and think deeply about whether or not the proposals will improve America. These people are the investors. They make up the market.
And this is what the market thought:
So if the market’s response to Trump’s speech is any indication of its quality, then the speech was indeed good. This was reflected in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) spiking the day after Tuesday’s speech — it crossed 21,000 for the first time in history, ending the day at 21100.40.
True, the jump in the market may not be due to President Trump’s speech, it’s just one indicator of quality that I like to use.
Findings from the Lexical Analysis
Okay we know the speech was good, but we don’t know why it was good. This is where a lexical analysis can provide insights.
In a lexical analysis, the word is the focus. Lexical analyses measure, relate, and graph words. The techniques include word counts, word patterns, word sequences, and word networks, to name just a few. For example, here’s the word network for “America”, which shows how Trump discussed America.
The good thing about a lexical analysis is that it can be automated. Contrast this with a semantic analysis, which tries to determine the meaning of text. Meaning is better but harder to automate. Yes, computers are getting better at understanding natural language, but they still have a long way to go.
Findings
- The Speech was Allocentric — not Egocentric. The mainstream media often derides President Trump as having a huge ego. So, if you believe them you’d expect Trump to give an egocentric speech, where “I” figured prominently… but it didn‘t. In fact, Trump only used the word “I” 3-times the entire speech. What we find instead, is “our” and “we” appear at the top of the list — tied for 3rd and 4th most popular, and repeated 48 & 46 times, respectively. Rather than being egocentric, the data suggests the speech was allocentric — focused on others not the speaker.
- The speech centered on America and Americans. The top two nouns, were “America” and “Americans” — indicating that the speech centered on the country and its people. The word network for America depicted earlier shows the specific American issues discussed, including labor, infrastructure, families, and safety.
- The speech focused on jobs. Although “jobs” did not appear in the top 50 words, “jobs” combined with “job” would have put it in the top-20.
- Dreaming big was a key theme. The dream comments were aspirational and inspirational, e.g., “we must think big and dream even bigger” and “Your voice, your hopes, and your dreams, will define our American destiny”.
- God makes the Top-20. If you takes “God’s” (possessive) and “God” together, God makes the top-20 most popular words. Recently, politicians have said “God” only at the very end of their speeches, e.g., Trump’s & Hillary’s convention speeches: “May God bless America”.
- Noticeably absent were “immigration”, “terrorism”, “Obamacare” and the “wall”. These were all issues Trump campaigned on heavily. Yet “immigration” and “terrorism” were only mentioned once, and “Obamacare” & the “wall“ were not mentioned at all.
Taken as a whole, the lexical analysis suggests that President Trump’s speech was good because it avoided divisive issues and instead focused on Americans and unlimited opportunity. It inspired us to be better by reminding us that we are all God’s children and — even if you don’t believe in God — you only need to “dream bigger” to succeed in Trump’s America.
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Appendix: Lexical Analysis Data
Trump Joint Session Transcript:
Regular Expressions Used for Filtering Data
Words: [^\s]+
Syllables: [AEIOUYaeiouy]+
Sentences: [\.?!;:]
Characters (strokes): [^\s]
Summary Statistics
Characters: 6862
Words: 1444
Sentences: 105
Reading Level: 9th grade (8.83 — Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level)
100 Words Sorted by Repetition
The Distribution of Word Repetitions
Top 50 Word Pairs
Word Network for America
