In other words, Trump’s habits of being vague, transgressive, or just plain wrong—all of which seem disqualifying to his critics—are actually the source of his strength.

Until we decode how Trump twists rhetoric to his advantage, we will have little chance of “controlling the uncontrollable leader,” Mercieca writes.

Trump’s rhetorical strategies can be divided into unifying and dividing ones, she continues. When in unifying mode, he strives to appear—in the eyes of his supporters, at least—as a risk-taking, fearless truth-teller who is unwilling to bow to “political correctness.” During the campaign and through his presidency, this “straight-talking,” based on using vernacular language and the vulgarities other politicians eschew, has bonded him to the “distrusting, polarized, and frustrated” members of the electorate who make up his base. At the lectern, he praises their wisdom and goodness and they echo that praise (argumentum ad populum, or “appeal to the crowd”). For Trump, the size of his crowds stands as proof of widespread support and as evidence that his views are correct. Ad populum helps explain why rallies remain so important to both Trump and his followers—the adoring, cheering crowds position Trump as the authority behind a movement. The power of the crowd thrusts Trump to commanding heights, allowing him to collect whoops and laughter when claiming he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody without losing votes.

“Demagogues use ad populum appeals to gain and maintain power because it is difficult to challenge what is believed to be popular,” writes Mercieca. The power of ad populum is so important to Trumpism that he’ll do anything to maintain it, even if it means holding rallies during a pandemic or vowing to move the Republican National Convention if the mayor of the host city won’t allow it to be staged at full capacity.

Trump’s signature rhetorical move might be paralipsis, the art of saying something while denying that it’s being said. “I don’t bring [Vince Foster’s death] up because I don’t know enough to really discuss it. I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder. I don’t do that because I don’t think it’s fair,” Trump told the Washington Post in 2016. “Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me “old,” when I would NEVER call him “short and fat?” he tweeted in 2017. During the campaign, he said he would never call Marco Rubio a lightweight, promised that he would never say Hewlett-Packard stock tanked during Carly Fiorina’s tenure as CEO, and praised himself for not mentioning Bill Clinton’s extramarital adventures. As Mercieca explains, such irony “connects audiences to demagogues by allowing audiences to believe that they see ‘the behind the scenes’ or the ‘backstage’ or the ‘real’ thoughts of the demagogue—the thoughts that the demagogue can’t or won’t acknowledge that they have.”

Trump’s primary dividing strategies include argument ad hominem, argument ad baculum, and reification. When spinning an ad hominem attack, Trump attacks the person or institution behind the idea when he can’t refute the idea itself. The most consistent victim of Trump’s ad hominem attacks might be the New York Times, which he can be relied on to disparage as “failing” or “poorly run and managed” and filled with “dopes” whenever it publishes a story that irritates him. In recent weeks, Trump has used Twitter to call the paper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet , “one of the dumbest men in the world of journalism,” the attorney general of Michigan “Wacky” and a “Do Nothing,” a Twitter executive who censored him “a hater,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “Crazy,” “incompetent,” and a “third-rate politician,” and a judge hearing the case against Trump University a “hater.”

Ad hominem displaces whatever ideas or policies under discussion with pure vitriol and works to erode the public’s trust in the facts and numbers presented by others, Mercieca explains. During one 2016 news conference, Trump called journalists “not good people,” “really disgusting” (twice), “dishonest and so unfair,” and “the most dishonest people that I’ve ever met.” Don’t trust them, was his message. Trust me.

Trump’s penchant for dispensing crowd-pleasing but demeaning nicknames—”low energy Jeb”; “Lyin’ Ted”; “Liddle Marco”; “Crooked Hillary”; “Sleepy Joe;” etc.—also falls into the ad hominem bin. Unable to debate their positions, he substitutes schoolyard taunts to ridicule his opponents. Go ahead and call the name-calling stupid and juvenile, but you can’t deny that it almost always plays to Trump’s advantage. His audiences love it and his targets once struck seem unable to remove the dart of his cruel jabs.

Unlike other politicians working the hustings these days, Trump delights in argument ad baculum. Latin for “appeal to the stick,” ad baculum is the practice of making threats, often violent ones, against opponents. Continuously threatening Hillary Clinton with jail or suggesting that “Second Amendment people” act against her to preserve their gun rights might be the two ripest examples of Trump’s use of ad baculum in Mercieca’s book. He has joked about killing reporters, praised violence against protesters at his rallies, and threatened countless officials, corporations, entire states and even universities with dire consequences if they continue to defy him.

“Like other ‘ad’ appeals, demagogues use argument ad baculum to shift attention away from the argument,” Mercieca writes. Trump’s violent rhetoric has enjoyed a second life among his supporters. According to a new ABC News report, Trump’s name has been invoked at least 54 times “in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault.”

Finally, Trump depends on the technique of reification to reduce whole classes of people to “things” not worthy of fair treatment. Throughout his presidency, Trump has worked the reification angle against Mexicans, on immigrants, on Muslims, and on people from “shithole countries“ to elevate his status and reduce theirs to mere objects.

The overarching thrust of Trump’s rhetorical strategies is to short-circuit independent thinking and form a “political community based on compliance rather than persuasion.” Once you achieve compliance among your followers, you no longer need their consent to do what you want to do. Every rhetorical move Trump has made from the beginning of his campaign through this weekend, when he promised “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons,” has been designed to appeal to his followers’ emotions, not their intellects and to blur the traditional trail that words and deeds pave toward accountability. The Washington Post can collect every Trump lie and every Twitter insult Trump has issued and it won’t mean a damn to his supporters. They’ve made their compact to comply with his demagogic authority, allowing them to blissfully ignore the reasoned criticisms of his detractors and allowing Trump to dodge accountability. In fact, he appears to enjoy being roughed up by the press, Mercieca notes, writing in his own book, Crippled America, that he didn’t “mind being attacked. I use the media the way that the media uses me—to attract attention.”

I’ve only scraped the top layer of Mercieca’s thinking on Trumpian rhetoric. She attempts to fix his place in the constellation of demagogues, separating him, for example, from Hitler and Mussolini because he has not used violence in his climb to power. She explains how he uses the “self-sealing” properties of conspiracy theory to plug the holes in his spurious allegations, and points out his use of tu quoqueto disqualify comments from his critics and opponents by branding them as hypocrites: In Trump’s pat view, “Clinton had no standing to criticize him because she should be jailed for her offenses.” Can Trump’s demagoguery be corralled? Mercieca’s more optimistic than I am, arguing that one way would be to let the demagogue’s audience in on his game. It could be that we’re stuck with him as long as the alienating, distrusting, polarized, and frustrated conditions she says made his rise possible continue to exist.

Reading Mercieca prompted another question. How did Trump come to master these aspects of rhetoric? I doubt if he spent much time studying classical rhetoric at Fordham or the University of Pennsylvania. Former wife Ivana Trump once said that Trump owns a copy of Adolf Hitler’s speeches, My New Order, and had read them. Asked about it, Trump responded with a kind of paralipsis: “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.” (Later, he told Barbara Walters that, yes, he had received the book as a gift.)

My guess is that if Trump has mastered rhetoric through book learning or imitation, he would be bragging about it like he does his other accomplishments, from real estate deals to golf scores. The fact that he’s silent on this score might indicate that like other demagogues, he learned by example, perhaps from his former attorney and mentor Roy Cohn, and reinvented some of the other techniques from scratch.

Whatever the provenance of Trump’s demagogic skills, you’ve got to say this for him. He’s a natural.

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Disclosure: I am quoted once, briefly, in Mercieca’s book, neutrally. Send demagogic threats via email to [email protected]. My email alerts have some choice ad hominems for my Twitter feed. My RSS feed reduces all living things to pure things.