Political candidates’ use of first person plural on late-night talk shows
Eean Grimshaw, Menno Reijven
University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Previous scholarship has argued that politicians often take advantage of the ‘we’ in political interviews by, e.g. maneuvering between identities to achieve various goals (Wilson, 1990). In late-night talk shows, politicians often dually embody both a politician and entertainer identities, therefore, we ask how primary candidates use ‘we’ in accordance to those identities. Following Dori-Hacohen (2014) and using data from the U.S. 2016 campaign, we found several distinct uses of ‘we,’ by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. We found that Donald Trump uses the ‘we’ in two main ways: both to discuss his campaign, and to create an American voice. Hillary Clinton, however, frequently uses it to talk about her campaign as in the following:
(1)
1. HC: I do feel sometimes like this campaign has
2. entered into an alternate universe and so
3. I’m out here talking about hey
4. here's how we can create a lot more good jobs
5. here’s how we can help young people pay off their 6. student debts=
Clinton uses the ‘we’ not in reference to herself and the American people, but to herself and her campaign (1:1), hence it is the ‘delimited social we’ (Dori-Hacohen, 2014), which excludes the other participants in the interaction, namely the host and audience. Therefore, this use of the delimited social ‘we’ is less inclusive than that invoked by Trump, as in the next excerpt:
(2)
1. DT I’m interested in the success of our country
2. and right now I mean you- you see
3. what’s happening you see what’s happening jus- generally
4. speaking and we have a long way to go but then
5. you try and pin me into this and I’m saying myself
6. ↑I don’t even know him↑
Trump refers to “our country” (2:1) in an inclusive way, using the ‘open general we’ (Dori-Hacohen, 2014), a usage that includes the entire American society in it. He repeats this usage, moving to ‘we’ (2:4), while maintaining the same open general reference. By starting and ending their utterances with “I”, both candidates insert the “we” into their personal voice, but use very different ‘we’s’. Comparing the usage of ‘we’ between candidates we found that Clinton mainly focused on her campaign platform or herself as a primary candidate. Trump used it in a more inclusive way to refer to himself and the entire US population. As such, we discuss how ‘we’ is used to negotiate the inclusion/exclusion of particular audiences.
References
Dori-Hacohen, G. (2014). Establishing social groups in Hebrew:‘We’in political radio phone-in programs. Constructing collectivity:‘We’across languages and contexts, 187-206.
Wilson, John. 1990. Politically Speaking. Basil Blackwell.