Thomas Jacobs, professor of communication science at UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles and a specialist in political rhetoric, was interviewed about Trump’s political speeches in the Flemish newspaper De Standaard.
The article, entitled “Why Trump calls migrants ‘aliens’ or ‘animals’: ‘If you dehumanise them, you can more easily take away their rights’”, is reserved for subscribers and is written in Dutch, but here are some excerpts of the background and explanations given by Thomas.
The word ‘foreigner’ is an old term in US political and legal jargon,’ explains Thomas Jacobs, a communications expert specialising in political rhetoric.
‘But in recent years we’ve seen more and more populist politicians like Donald Trump using it as a code word. Trump invokes a whole arsenal of tough measures against immigration. People immediately understand what he’s referring to, and in this way he manages to sketch out a whole ideological world. It’s much more effective than making a long speech with arguments and nuances. It’s a kind of weaponisation of language. When judges and lawyers also use the term, it becomes standardised, with all the associations that Trump uses’.
Furthermore, with his language being a fault line in society, Thomas Jacobs said
‘If you don’t say or don’t want to use the term “illegal aliens”, or if you want to talk about illegal aliens, you can’t use that term and if you use the term “non-citizens” instead, you’re not on his side.’ Neutrality is not an option, you have to expose yourself. In our country, for example, the term ‘cultural Marxism’ has been gaining ground for some time: these terms are empty boxes, they don’t mean anything immediately. But they allude to a certain ideology and are very powerful: they create a dividing line between people who don’t agree with the principles of cultural Marxism. They create a dividing line between those who want to use them and those who don’t want to use them. The same goes for ‘alien’.
Trump goes even further. At the September 2024 election debate with Kamala Harris, he claimed that Haitian refugees eat dogs and cats. And in May, at an election rally in New Jersey, he associated refugees with Hannibal Lecter, the man-eating psychopath from the film Silence of the Lambs. ‘In the scientific literature, we call this a ‘dead cat’,’ explains Jacobs. ‘If you throw a dead cat on the table at a dinner party, you can be sure that the conversation will turn to that subject. It’s a way of bending the agenda to your will: throw a good one once and you can be sure that in the next few days the discussion will be about immigration, which is to the right’s advantage. The left has more of an advantage, for example, when it comes to healthcare’. An effective strategy, but this strategy also has its drawbacks, explains Jacobs: ‘You can go too far and push people away, but that didn’t stop Trump winning’.