If you don’t say what you mean, do you mean what you don’t say?

Political speech is how you "do things with words"

Donald Trump, June 2024, momentarily without words (image by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Political speech may sound robust, but it is a fraught and fragile form.

At an election rally in Florida on July 26, candidate Donald Trump told his audience: “Christians, get out and vote! Just this time – you won’t have to do it any more. You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians.” At that point, as The Guardian reported on the event:

… with a slight shake of his head and his right hand pressed against the left side of his chest, Trump said, “I’m not Christian.” But he added: “I love you. Get out – you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”

The account of the incident by Reuters elaborated this way:

It was not clear what the former president meant by his remarks, in an election campaign where his Democratic opponents accuse him of being a threat to democracy.

Political speech, as I’ve written before, may be the archetype of what the philosopher J. L. Austin calls “how to do things with words” (Austin, 1962). Words aren’t just descriptions. They can be actions. But what can we do when someone doesn’t say what he means? Does he necessarily mean what he doesn’t say?

Following Austin’s line of reasoning, practitioners of critical theory look for subtexts – meanings that are inferred or even implied by language that alludes to something else. If you find them, there’s probably a secret agenda, a manoeuvre for power. Critical theory is really a family of theories “that aim at a critique and transformation of society by integrating normative perspectives with empirically informed analysis of society’s conflicts, contradictions, and tendencies” (Celikates & Jeffrey, 2023).

We may never know what Trump meant by those statements. He may not know himself. But we can take the other side of the communication and imagine what those who listened to the words could take as their meaning. The Reuters account – careful in its wording, as the news agency always strives to be – does not directly interpret them. But by alluding to the “opponents” and the “threat to democracy”, it points us to one possible understanding: that once re-elected Trump intends to make future elections unnecessary.

That understanding calls to mind how leaders in many countries – from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe – have hidden behind sham elections to mask their subversion of democratic process. By calling the voting in Russia’s recent presidential “contest” an “election”, Vladimir Putin is “doing things with words”, saying what he doesn’t mean.

The interpretation that Trump plans to subvert democratic processes in America is plausible, but is it certain? That would mean that not saying, explicitly, what he means, he is in fact meaning what he has chosen not to say.

In the late 1940s, Allen Dulles, director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, coined the phrase “plausible deniability”. It has become a staple of political theory, often used to describe the events in the Watergate scandal that led to the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency. You can get away with something awful if there is another, plausible explanation. In speech, it’s one of the ways you “do things with words”.

Is Trump’s rambling style just a manner of speaking, casual, spontaneous, prone to excess? Or is it something sinister, intentional, with an escape route through plausible deniability? Is this talk about not needing to vote after November just words? Or does it show how he “does things with words”? How would you know?

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures at Harvard University, 1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Celikates, R., & Jeffrey, F. (2023, December). Critical Theory (Frankfurt School). Contribution to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/