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.
Citation
Ntontis , E , Jurstakova , K , Neville , F G , Haslam , S A & Reicher , S D 2023 , ' A warrant for violence? An analysis of Donald Trump's speech before the US Capitol attack ' , British Journal of Social Psychology , vol. Early View . https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12679
Publication
British Journal of Social Psychology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0144-6665Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2023 The Authors. British Journal of Social Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Psychological Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.