Donald Trump’s second presidential term has been characterized by comments many find to be outrageous. While the consequences of Trump’s rhetoric are significant, what his statements and comments mean are equally important. Richard Holtzman writes that we can focus on this meaning by interpreting four characteristics of the presidency: as meaning-maker-in-chief, how it has been historically constructed, its symbolic significance, and as a way to reconsider the political order and civic health of America.
Since his return to the White House in January 2025, President Donald Trump has routinely made statements which many commentators, and many Americans more generally, have found outrageous. These include comments, among many others, about the United States turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” annexing Canada as the 51st American state, and sending “homegrown” criminals to an El Salvadorian terrorism prison center without constitutional due process. How should we make sense of this presidential rhetoric?
The limits of mainstream presidency research in American political science
Today, most research on the presidency in American political science (both quantitative and qualitative) asks questions about whether one action leads to a certain consequence. For example: Are Trump’s comments about Canada becoming the 51st state the result of a political strategy? Or did his reference to a US “take over” of Gaza drive a measurable change in public opinion? This search for causality lies at the heart of “positivism,” a social science methodology that seeks to apply the traditional “scientific method” to arrive at generalizations about the presidency through observations and experience. For decades, these methodological conventions have set the expectations for how research should be done. Indeed, for most American political scientists, presidency research means positivist research.
But there are other sorts of research questions that we can ask about Trump’s rhetoric and, with them, other ways to study the presidency. For example: What does his rhetoric mean? This sort of question is grounded in a social science methodology called “interpretivism,” which explores human meaning and meaning making, and analyzes how interpretations construct our social and political worlds. Interpretivism, in contrast to positivism, in the words of Jeffery K. Tulis, is “more a search for meaning than for causes, more a concern for significance than for laws, more a quest for coherence than for certainty”.
But what do these methodological considerations have to do with Trump’s rhetoric? Positivist research in political science has contributed much to our understanding of the presidency; but like all methodologies, it has its limits. Consider what happens to aspects of the contemporary presidency that do not readily lend themselves to the search for causes, laws, and certainties, such as Trump’s idiosyncratic rhetoric. A cursory review of mainstream presidency research reveals the disappointing answer: rhetorical idiosyncrasies are typically ignored. Why? Because the more atypical and outrageous the rhetoric, the less it lends itself to making generalizations.
Interpreting the presidency and presidential rhetoric
Yet, whether you can measure its causal significance, Trump’s rhetoric is undeniably meaningful.
Despite the narrow view of interpretivism which predominates in mainstream American political science, questions about the meaning of presidential rhetoric do not lie beyond the purview of presidency research. In fact, Tulis—author of the influential book, The Rhetorical Presidency—has argued that the very characteristics which make the presidency ill-suited for positivist methodology (for example, by its nature, very small sample sizes) are the very same that make it especially well-suited for interpretation. In his essay, “The Interpretable Presidency”, Tulis identifies four interpretable characteristics of the presidency, which are developed and demonstrated in my forthcoming book, What Does the American Presidency Mean? (2025).
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Characteristics of the presidency we can interpret
The first characteristic is presidents as meaning-makers-in-chief. Just as Supreme Court decisions interpret the US Constitution, Tulis states that “[p]residents themselves offer interpretations of the political order”. These interpretations create meaning by defining and framing ambiguous situations, actions, decisions, and events. Presidential rhetoric is a form of presidential interpretation. And rather than limiting the measure of rhetoric’s significance to its ability to influence public opinion, Tulis explains that a presidential interpretation is “informative by virtue of the questions to which it points or the problems that it raises.” Consider: what broader questions do Trump’s rhetorical musings about deporting or disappearing “homegrown” criminals point to or what problems does it raise?
The second aspect identified by Tulis is the historical construction of the presidency. The contemporary presidency is emphatically not the institution presented in Article II of the US Constitution; nor is it the office that presidents occupied in the 19th century, the 20th century, or even a few months ago. Instead, the presidency, its powers, and how both are understood have been and continue to be constructed and reconstructed. In other words, there is no objective “presidency” to be discovered if only we had the right sort of data and methods. Rather, understandings of the presidency and presidential power are contingent, dynamic, and intersubjectively created through interpretations. Consider: What meanings of the presidency and its powers are constructed by presidential rhetoric, such as Trump’s 2019 claim that “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want”?
The third aspect of the presidency that lends itself to interpretation is its symbolic significance within the American polity. As Tulis explains, presidents serve as “reflectors and carriers of America’s political self-understanding”. Interpretive analyses raise questions about the presidency’s symbolic dimensions, focusing on spoken and written rhetoric, visual images, spectacles, and the performative character of the contemporary office, such as what it means to look, sound, and be “presidential.” For interpretivism, it is the very singular uniqueness of the presidency, rather than its comparability, which makes it worthy of our attention. Consider: What does it symbolize about America’s political self-understanding when the White House’s official social media account and the president post AI-generated images of Trump as a king or the pope?
The final aspect, according to Tulis, is the presidency as a “forum for intellectual reconsiderations of the political order as whole”—particularly, critical or value-based reconsiderations concerning the evolving state of the civic health of the American polity. In other words, an interpretive approach not only engages in, but self-consciously embraces something that positivism does not traditionally permit: a stance which recognizes that what we study matters to us not just as political scientists, but also as citizens and human beings. In contrast to research approaches that limit their analytical view by replacing as Tulis writes, “citizens’ concerns with…questions that [are] amenable to the answers it [can] provide,” interpretivism does not accept that relevance must be sacrificed at the altar of positivist “rigor”. So, consider: How do you interpret the Trump presidency, his rhetorical behavior, and what they signify about the civic health of the American polity?
In this current political moment defined by presidency-centered crises, Americans and observers around the world are trying to make sense of Trump and his rhetoric. Asking what the presidency means and why those meanings matter are not only legitimate questions for American political science to be asking, but they are also necessary ones. Recognizing this need for methodological pluralism in the study of the American presidency, and the valuable contributions of interpretivism to this important endeavor, are both long overdue.
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- Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics
