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“I Have the Best Words”: Social Media, the Rhetorical Rise of Donald Trump and
(Dis)Identification in The Women’s March on Washington

We stand together in solidarity with our partners and children for the protection of our
rights, our safety, our health, and our families - recognizing that our vibrant and diverse
communities are the strength of our country.

Mission & Vision, ​Women’s March on Washington

On January 21, 2017, I marched alongside 3 million women and men, with whom I

identified at least some small sense of consubstantiality. Arm in arm with my mother, I marched

through the streets of Washington DC, adding my voice to the precession, refusing to be

restrained to historical constructions of female identity. When one grandmother’s facebook post

ignited a global phenomenon, I, like millions others, heard her plea. The populist foray of

Donald J. Trump may have secured him the highest office in the land, but it also awakened the

political agency of the female population who refused to be beaten back into social submission.

The night of the 2016 election left half of the country bristling with uncertainty and, quite

frankly, dumbfounded as to how a man caught on camera bragging about grabbing women “by

the pussy” could actually inherit the United States presidency. The election cycle saw two polar

opposites, Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, pitted against each other in one of

the most bizarre political displays in recent memory. The world watched as then candidate, now

President,​ Trump promoted a culture of fear, employed gender-specific rhetorical attacks and,

quite literally, tweeted his way to the White House.

But, how could he win?​ I considered this on that chilly January morning as groups of

women walked past me, holding signs that read “Not my president,” “Nasty Woman,” and “Love

Trumps Hate.” It became clear that the women marching, in Washington and all around the
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world, had unified against a ​perceived evil​, that they did not identify with the campaign words of

Donald Trump and, like me, needed to feel united once more. The sheer amount of people from

differing backgrounds made it clear that I was witnessing something historic, that this march was

different than ones that came before. It occured to me, not only was this march global, it started

online. I argue that in order to explain how the rhetoric of the campaign led to the election of

Donald Trump and resulted in the global velocity of the Women’s March on Washington, it is

necessary to consider the political and rhetorical impact of social media, the most significant

communicative tool of the modern era, on both Trump supporters and Women’s Marchers.

In the United States, the internet has become increasingly ingrained into social practices

of communication and political agency, and thus deserves careful consideration in rhetorical

studies. In the last ten years, American politics has seen the rise of political movements via the

internet and various social media platforms movements like Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring

of 2011 and the Tea Party. Of course, the danger of using social sites to organize rests in the

ability to further fuel political polarization and encourage users to retreat into comforting filter

bubbles1. Despite these risks, social media has become a place for people to share and find, as

Burke contends, common ground, whether positive or not.

Journalists, political and social scholars alike often deliberate Trump rhetoric, but an

analysis of social media’s role in the rhetorical rise of candidate Trump and its facilitation of the

Women’s March on Washington (henceforth Women’s March) as a rhetorical response to said

rhetoric has yet to be undertaken. To evaluate social media’s impact on the velocity of the

Women’s March, it is necessary to consider Krista Ratcliffe’s definition of rhetorical listening.

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For further study into online filter bubbles see Flaxman, Seth, et al.
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In her work, ​Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness​, Ratcliffe offers rhetorical

listening as “a trope of interpretive invention,” a “code of cross-cultural conduct” and that

rhetorical listening “signifies a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in relation

to any person, text or culture”(17). For Ratcliffe, rhetorical listening is a person’s ​conscious

choice​ to embody openness and may help navigate the troubled identifications of Western

civilization. Negotiating such identifications requires the listener’s willingness to understand the

self and other, locate identifications across “commonalities and differences” and “analyze claims

as well as the cultural logics2 within which these claims function” (26). I argue that Women’s

Marchers were able to engage in rhetorical listening via the social media sites Twitter and

Facebook, prompting the march to become a global movement. As Wired Magazine writer Issie

Lapowsky puts it, “the Women’s March on Washington and cities across the nation and around

the world was, in internet parlance, about all of the things [...] It was, in other words, a protest as

sprawling, diverse and ubiquitous as the platform that spawned it: Facebook.” Her description

appropriately categorizes the Women’s March as an inclusive movement, one where women

with intersecting cultural identifications were able to unite not based on one social issue, but ​all

of them by listening rhetorically via social media.

In this work, I propose that candidate Trump’s rise to power can be directly explained

through a analysis of his populist rhetoric, specifically, Trump’s extensive use of the social

media platform ​Twitter​ as the conduit for identification with his base. By constructing his

rhetorical dialogue to appeal to unconscious notions of ​whiteness​ and launching targeted attacks

on prominent women, Donald Trump used ​Twitter​ to disseminate coded messages and identify

2
A cultural logic is “a belief system or way of reasoning that is shared within a culture” (see Ratcliffe 10-11).
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with long held cultural prejudices. Furthermore, I consider the Women’s March as a direct

response to said rhetoric and suggest that Krista Ratcliffe’s considerations of rhetorical listening

and disidentification, amplified through the vast reach of social media, constitute significant

factors in understanding the global velocity of the march. I will engage with candidate Trump’s

various rhetorical appeals by assessing specific campaign cycle tweets between January 1, 2015

and November 8, 2016 for appeals to notions of whiteness, the use of gendered political frames

in those tweets, as well as tweets specifying rhetorical attacks on women. It is the goal of this

work to show social media’s pivotal role in facilitating identification between Trump and his

voter base, while consequently providing a space for Women’s Marchers to rhetorically listen,

disidentify ​and respond via the historic march.

Social Media as a Space for Identification and Rhetorical Listening

Since the inception of Facebook in 2004, social media has revolutionized human

communication. According to their respective company websites, Facebook boasts 1.23 billion

active users per day, while Twitter proclaims 313 million active users per month. Of those active

users, roughly eighty-two percent live outside of the U.S and Canada, meaning that one out of

every seven people in the world uses Facebook or Twitter ​every​ ​single​ ​day​. Social media is now

an integral part of the way we communicate, stay connected and identify with other people. User

generated content travels across the globe, stretching the boundary of our notion of audience and

increasing the potency of our cross-cultural connections. I propose that social media served two

functions in the 2016 presidential election, (1) it solidified Trump’s populist appeal and

identification with his base and (2) created an ideal space for Krista Ratcliffe’s theory of
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rhetorical listening​ to flourish, directly resulting in the global velocity of the Women’s March on

Washington.

By choosing Twitter as the campaign’s communicative link to his supporters, Trump

validated his political outsider stance while subsequently exposing his rhetoric to the rhetorical

ear​ of his opposition. Trump’s tell-it-like-it-is rhetoric was unrelenting when inciting specific

attacks on minority groups and his female opposition. If we consider a survey of 2016 campaign

tweets, the rhetorical style of opposing candidates emerges. In the study of 225 election cycle

tweets by the Trump campaign and 228 from the Clinton campaign, 41 percent of Donald

Trump’s tweets were deemed uncivil (containing a derogatory theme), 25 percent were a direct

criticism or attack on another, followed by 16 percent attacking candidates specifically.

Furthermore, 64.8 percent contained contained masculine frames, appealing to male voters.

Compare this with 67 percent of Clinton’s tweets promoting feminine frames, 49 percent

concerning public and social issues and ​zero​ instances of uncivil tweets (Lee and Lim 853). It is

interesting to note that with regard to tweet style, 73.7 percent of Clinton’s tweets were original

(meaning they expressed Clinton’s explicit ideas), while only 42 percent of Trump’s tweets were

deemed original, with nearly half (42.4%) dedicated to retweeting words of support for Trump

himself (854). The breakdown of tweet content clearly outlines the space where disgruntled

Trump supporters were able to identify with his messages while, consequently, highlighting the

extent to which Women’s marchers were able to disidentify with his derogatory themes.

In a genre study of social media, Myers and Hamilton argue that social media is a new

type of rhetorical action genre and refer to Carolyn Miller’s earlier work on rhetorical action,

genres are the by-product of rhetorical forces of semantics (content) and syntactics (form)
[…] the combination of these two elements create a genre of communication norms by
which people interact and dialog […] While these norms change with society, they are
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cultural identifiers. They allow for individuals to know what to say and how to speak
within a variety of social contexts (228)

Facebook and Twitter combine form and content on a multimodal platform that broadens a

speaker’s rhetorical reach and encourages global ​listening​ to cultural information. Ratcliffe

argues that in order for rhetorical listening to occur, one must adopt a stance of openness in

relation to any person, text or culture (17). Similarly, the mission statements of both Facebook

and Twitter encourage this type of cultural openness:

Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open
and connected (Facebook company website)

To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without
barriers (Twitter company website)

It is this “sharing” and “connecting” element that was pivotal to the extensive rhetorical reach

of the Women’s March.​ ​University of Maryland researchers found that “almost 70% of people

who attended the D.C. march heard about it on Facebook. Meanwhile, 61% from friends and

family”(Larson, CNN). In fact, when my mother invited me to the march she’d heard about on

facebook, I, like so many others was inspired to attend my first protest march. Millions of

women and men were mobilized to protest on a grander scale than has been seen in recent

history because of the far reaching, inter-connecting power of social media.

Social media essentially socializes communicators across once impenetrable cultural

barriers. Gaps and conflicts in logic become more visible via social media and the potential for

disidentification​ amongst users largely increases. Rhetorical listening allows the listener to

understand the textual strategies of a speaker and enables them to question the logos of troubled

identifications3 (Ratcliffe 30). Considering Trump’s tweets were full of references to historically

3
Ratcliffe posits troubled identifications as “those identifications troubled by history, uneven power dynamics, and
ignorance” (Ratcliffe 47).
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troubled, intersecting identifications of race and gender, Women’s Marchers were able to

rhetorically listen to these statements, consciously disidentify and reject those sentiments. I

suggest that this was the case when would be Women’s marchers were exposed via​ Twitter​ to the

populist rhetoric of the Trump campaign.

A White Man’s Populist Rhetorical Appeal

Scholars often consider Aristotle’s work on rhetoric as a foundation for the inner-

workings of effective persuasion. For Aristotle, men's basic yearning for happiness lies at the

root of all persuasion, and by focusing rhetorical appeals on a speaker’s chosen language and

logic, epistemic trust is established between speaker and audience. However, modern notions of

rhetoric have expanded to consider the sincerity, propriety and character (​ethos​) of a given

speaker. In Kapust and Schwarze’s 2016 study of sincerity in political context, they suggest that

the relation between reason and affect has long been overlooked by modern studies in political

theory. Notably, they emphasize the work of Adam Smith as extremely pertinent to the 2016

presidential election of Donald Trump. According to Smith, “harmonizing one’s style with one’s

character is the central task of rhetoric,” or, it is to the speaker’s benefit that his perceived

character falls in line with that of his rhetorical style (101). Perceived character, or ​ethos​, in the

post-millennial 2016 political arena proved critical to both the election of ​candidate ​Trump and

the women’s resistance movement against ​President​ Trump. Additionally, Donald Trump’s

projected image as a reality television celebrity and self-made business mogul from a prominent,

white family directly influenced the trust of his supporters and their susceptibility to his

rhetorical style. In fact, in a tweet Trump proclaimed himself the ​blue collar billionaire​.
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The Trump campaign’s populist elocution proved an effective rhetorical strategy,

whether an accurate representation of Donald Trump’s political beliefs or not. For many

political theorists, evoking a populist stance remains a great risk to the success of political

campaigns. For Adam Smith, “​ethos​ is not simply a product of one’s nature; instead [he]

suggests that ethos must also be determined by the political context in which a speaker deploys

and the audience evaluates rhetorical style” (108). As Oliver and Rahn discuss, the political

conditions of a society must be just right for a populist candidate to ascend to power (192). By

definition, populist rhetoric requires exploitation of the tension between the “common folk” and

political elites who strive to harness their privilege by keeping the corrupt in power. Populist

rhetoric, however, is not restrained to criticism of the elite but may also veer into racial

scapegoating and anti-intellectualism. Trump’s campaign mimicked traditional populist

rhetorical style in that his appeals were “simple, emotional, and frequently indelicate”(191). In a

well-known tweet at the start of the election cycle, Trump declares, “If I run, I will be in all the

primary debates and you will see why I am the only one who can Make America Great

Again!”(Tweet, 07 May 2015). It is his strategic use of the campaign slogan ​Make America

Great Again ​that provided a hopeful banner under which white, lower-educated, self-proclaimed

“neglected” Americans could align themselves against the self-serving, elite policy makers,

especially Hillary Clinton. In the exit polls released by the New York Times directly after

election day, statistical information concludes that 53 percent of Trump’s voters were white

males, of which 67 percent possess no education higher than a high school diploma. It should

also be noted that 52 percent of Trump voters were white women, of which 61 percent are

without a college degree. (Huang 2016). Once confirmed as the Republican nominee, Trump
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often tweeted directly to his target supporters, as evident in this October 8, 2016 tweet, ​“The

media and establishment want me out of the race so badly - I WILL NEVER DROP OUT OF

THE RACE, WILL NEVER LET MY SUPPORTERS DOWN! #MAGA.” Here, one month

before the election and one day after the infamous access hollywood tapes4 were released, he

reinforces that he remains anti-establishment, anti-media and loyal to his supporters, insisting

that he is being persecuted by the media. At the end of the tweet, Trump added the hashtag

#MAGA,​ an acronym for his campaign frame. Unique to the Twitter platform, hashtags link

strangers together in common conversation. In other words, “by including hashtags in one’s

tweet, it becomes included into larger ‘conversation’ consisting of all tweets with that hashtag

[...] The structure of communication via hashtags facilitates impromptu interactions of

individuals (often strangers) into these conversations”(Murthy 3). This implies that Trump

supporters from around the country could connect via these hashtags and identify with one

another, as well as with Trump himself. Moreover, ​I contend that Trump’s stringent political

frame, ​Make America Great Again​, facilitated identification with his voters by tapping into their

unconsciously unifying identification with ​whiteness.

To discuss Trump’s rhetorical appeals to unconscious notions of whiteness, I refer to

Ruth Frankenberg’s definition of whiteness in her work ​The Social Construction of Whiteness:

White Women, Race Matters​. She defines whiteness as “a location of structural advantage, of

race privilege, a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed, and a place

from which white people look at themselves and at others, and at society”(1). Regarding

“unconscious” whiteness, Ratcliffe explains that during the 1960s white privilege ceased to be a

4
On October 7, 2016​ The Washington Post​ released a audio of then candidate Trump boasting to Access
Hollywood’s Billy Bush that his celebrity status allowed him to sexually assault women at his discretion.
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topic of polite conversation and thus went “underground” following the Civil Rights movement

(21). Soon, white privilege became invisible to most whites, and in the modern era, whiteness is

everywhere and nowhere, it is everything and nothing, all at once. On the subject, scholars agree

that whiteness has permeated all aspects of U.S. life, social hierarchy and culture. It has become

the standard by which all things are measured, invisible to whites, though never invisible to

non-whites. Given the tumultuous racial history of the United States, its citizens continue to be

categorized by racial difference, and race often plays a copious role in framing political

campaigns.

Race is ever-present in the campaign slogan of this wealthy white man, tweeting to his

audience that only he can “Make America Great Again.” If we consider this tweet from April

2015, the enthymematic function of his political frame becomes clear, “​Government can be

efficient with the right leadership. Let’s Make America Great Again.” There are two stated

premises in the above enthymeme, (1) Government can be efficient with the right leadership and

(2) Make America Great Again. The unstated conclusion then becomes, Government is not

efficient under the current leadership and you need me as your leader to make the country great

again. At first glance this might seem benign, but upon further reflection and considering his

audience, another connotation emerges. Trump revealed himself to be a harsh critic of President

Barack Obama from the start of his term in 2008. As Marilyn Frye explicates, “whitely’ people

[...] assume that their ‘ethics of forms, procedures and due processes’ represent the only correct

standard of conduct-- [they] attempt to impose their beliefs on all others”(qtd. in Keating 906).

The above tweet insinuates that the leadership of Obama is insufficient, ineffective and weak and

that he, Trump, a white man can make America great once he takes power back from the black
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man. In another tweet from May 4, 2015, Trump promises,“If elected, I will undo all of Obama’s

executive orders. I will deliver. Let’s Make America Great Again!” The Pew Research Center

determined that during his tenure as president, Barack Obama signed 277 executive orders. It is

telling that Donald Trump did not focus on one, two or even ten orders signed by Obama, instead

he promised to undo ​all​ of them, effectively promising to erase the memory of the first black

president. In this tweet, he makes a pact with his white supporters by promising them “I will

deliver” the country back from the ​other​, with the “let’s” in the final sentence signifying a space

for identification between speaker and audience. ​Race is also present in his many documented

tweets on ethnic groups, his pointed mentioning of his critics ethnicities, and tweets about

mounting crime in traditionally non-white regions. These rhetorical choices solidified his

position as a political outsider, a man who tells-it-like-it-is and a champion of the (white)

working class, thus reinforcing his claim to authenticity and solidifying his identification with

white, lower-educated voters.

In order for Trump’s populist style to be effective, his tweets often applied politically

motivated frames. As Brian Arbour discusses in his work on political frames, “a frame is a way

of presenting an issue or an idea in a message. [A] campaign will ‘select some aspect of

perceived reality and make them more salient’[...] As a rhetorical device, frames then serve as

‘bridges between elite discourse about a problem or issue and popular comprehension of that

issue’”(606). For the Trump campaign, ​Make America Great Again​ was an extremely effective

political frame, whose repetition, accessibility and unstated premise - America has lost its

greatness - made it a profoundly successful persuasive strategy. At his political rallies and

online, Trump bombarded voters with images of a time gone by, a nostalgic era of a booming
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coal industry where average (white) Americans could trust that their way of life remained safe

and secure from foreign threat. Chants of “Make America Great Again​” ​convinced his

supporters that he was the ​only​ person equipped to fix their shared problems, and not only that,

he was the only “real-world” candidate who recognized their pain. On Twitter alone, Trump

tweeted either ​Make America Great Again​ or​ #MAGA​ four hundred and seventy-seven times

between January 1, 2015 and election day. Though Trump did not overtly mention ​whiteness​ as

the commonality among his voters, his oration as a wealthy, white man tweeting his contentious

political frame, rife with racialized undertones, facilitated unconscious identification with

ever-present, often hidden white-privilege in America.

Of course, as Oliver and Rohn suggest, this type of populist rhetoric does not appeal to

the masses at large. For example, in their analysis of voter response to populist rhetoric in the

2016 election, their data suggests that Trump supporters as a whole were “far more nativistic and

socially alienated” than Hillary supporters, who constituted the majority of total voters as evident

in Clinton’s three million popular vote lead over Trump (200). In other words, the rhetorical

attacks made by Trump lie in stark contrast to the sentiments of the country at large. By

embracing a very stylized, populist rhetorical strategy, Trump effectively alienated half of the

United States population and this, for reasons to be explored further, directly resulted in the

Women’s March on Washington.

(Dis)Identification and Framing the Election of Donald Trump

Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification when applied to the 2016 election provides a

clear representation of the rise of candidate Trump. In rhetoric, Burke’s identification theory

maintains that in order for persuasion to occur, the speaker must find common ground with his
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audience. For Burke, identification may be wholly or partially unconscious, but audience

awareness is tantamount to the rhetor’s ability to persuade. In the 1960s, Dennis Day argued that

identification is the ​only​ way to successfully persuade an audience and refers to Burke’s

implication that identification is compensatory to division (Head 31). At the core, human’s seek

to ​identify ​with one another in an attempt to bridge the inherent division of one entity from

another. To do this, two parties must find a “substance” in common and in doing so become

consubstantial​ to one another, prompting identification and encouraging openness from one

entity to another (31). Hence, identification is essential to persuasion.

During the 2016 election, Donald Trump’s ability to facilitate identification with his base,

predominantly over social media, served as the deciding factor in his presidential win over the

democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. As previously mentioned, Trump maintained a populist

tactic from the outset of his campaign, without ever deviating from his harsh twitter attacks. His

use of Twitter made him easily accessible to his voters and often drew constituents to his Twitter

page specifically to see what he had to say, encouraging views of Trump as the ​tell-it-like-it-i​s

candidate. His rhetorical style and incessant tweeting fostered common ground on which his

audience could identify with one another, while at the same time, placing blame on the elites in

power and other ethnic groups for their collective socio-economic shortcomings. Prior to the

election Trump posted tweets like this one on April 19, 2016, “​LETS GO AMERICA! Time to

take back​ our country, and ​#MakeAmericaGreatAgain​,” hastening the divide between white

Americans and minority groups, as well as distinguishing himself as separate from elitist

Washington. ​The Trump campaign elicited images of “the nation or ‘heartland’ [as] the

primordial basis for a shared identity. This construction of a ‘we’ is facilitated also by the
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invocation of the people’s enemies, both internal and external,--the people often come to know

who they are by who they are not” (Oliver 191). Again, this is perhaps most evident in Trump’s

now trademarked slogan ​Make America Great Again​. The slogan effectively pitted his

supporters’ identified ​we​ against the corrupt values of the ​other​, with ​other​ in this case being

political elites and non-white groups. Rather than attempt to unite the country on common

ground, Trump chose a specific demographic, white-labor-class-American-men, as his target

audience and garnered support through Burkean identification with the help of social media.

On several documented occasions, Trump promoted what Diana Fuss theorizes as

disidentification5. ​She describes disidentification as “an identification that has already been made

and denied in the unconscious”(Ratcliffe 62). In addition, she argues that disidentification may

be positive in cases where recognizing difference promotes cultural healing. However, she also

warns that disidentification opens possibilities for stereotyping as was the case with Candidate

Trump’s xenophobic rhetorical references to minorities (64). Trump continually stereotyped

entire ethnic groups, constructing a​ perceived evil​ on which Trump supporters could place blame

for their socio-economic plight. For example, in his candidacy announcement speech, Trump

promised to curtail crime and job loss. He proceeded to classify Mexican immigrants as “rapists”

and “serious criminals,” while at the same time making generalized claims that most crime is

committed by blacks and hispanics. In a tweet from August 29, 2016, Trump remarks, “​Look

how bad it is getting! How much more crime, how many more shootings, will it take for

African-Americans and Latinos to vote Trump=SAFE!”​ ​Here, Trump isolates the entire African

American and Latino population, traditionally democratic voters, and insinuates that their

5
See Ratcliffe Chapter 2 “Identifying Places of Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Disidentification, and
Non-Identification.
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populations are disproportionately suffering from violent crime. He neglects to mention at whose

hands this supposed “violent crime” is enacted or any other fact about this statement. ​In a recent

study on voter susceptibility to gain/loss political frames, Lutigg and Levine’s findings offer a

possible explanation for this Trump campaign’s tweet. They found that “persuasion is most

enhanced when loss/gain frames ‘match’ the motivational goals of the respondent. Furthermore,

[they] find that it is primarily the less educated for whom this functional matching effect matters

in the context of political persuasion”(450). This tweet highlights a space for minority

disidentification, specifically disidentification with the Black Lives Matter movement who

protests the disproportionate killing of African Americans at the hands of the police. Donald

Trump identified and ​disidentified ​with specific populations in his bid for president of the United

States precisely because he understood his audience (white, working-class, less-educated) and

gained their trust through a foundation of political identification. However, his Twitter rhetoric

also laid the foundation for the rise of a political resistance to his rhetorical tactics.

Rhetorical Attacks on Gender and Marcher (Dis)Identification

Rhetorical listening maintains that prior to identification, the listener may assert his/her

agency where places of division may occur. It is within these spaces of division that

disidentification​ with the Trump campaign began the Women’s March on Washington.

Considering Donald Trump used social media to spread his message, virtually everywhere,

Nicholas J.G. Winter hypothesizes that political issues can be purposefully framed to

unconsciously promote gender implications. He maintains that, “gender implication” is the

process by which opinion on political issues become entwined [...] with considerations of gender.

The term ‘implication’ makes clear that the process need not be explicit: The rhetoric need not
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refer explicitly to gender and individuals may be unaware of gender’s impact on their

opinions”(455). In terms of frames and gender implications, there is one issue that Trump

heavily assaulted on the campaign trail: Healthcare. Trump consistently promised to repeal and

replace Obamacare, the crown achievement of the Obama administration. In Winter’s view,

Hillary Clinton symbolically gendered healthcare when she became the head of the health reform

task force in 1992. Her presence, coupled with the traditionally paternalistic nature of the

medical profession and the biological differences between male and female medical care, made

health care a national representation of changing gender roles (460-5). During the 2016 election

cycle, Trump waged war on female Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, Obamacare, as well as

threatened an uncertain future for medical service provider Planned Parenthood. In doing so,

Trump’s attacks translated to a direct attack on feminine and minority issues, a fundamental

reason for Women’s Marchers’ disidentification with Trump’s ideologies.

Donald Trump’s rhetoric was never more visible than during his targeted attacks on

gender, often reinforcing long held western patriarchal biases. Social patriarchal biases refer to,

“A sex/gender system in which men dominate women and what is considered masculine is more

highly valued than what is considered feminine. Patriarchy is a system of social stratification,

which means that it uses a wide array of social control policies and practices to ratify male power

and to keep girls and women subordinate to men” (qtd. in ​Dragiewicz).​ Twitter gave Trump the

agency to speak to his 17.6 million followers, and served as his weapon of choice for gendered

assaults. The election often pitted him against several strong, female​ ​opponents and media

personalities such as Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Megyn Kelly and Elizabeth Warren. As

these females questioned his ability to lead the country, they effectively challenged the
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campaign’s construction of Trump’s overt masculinity. Ever true to his rhetorical style, Trump

began tweeting direct insults at these women, with his most visible and recurrent attacks aimed at

Clinton. For example, four months prior to the election Trump tweeted, “Crooked Hillary has

ZERO leadership ability. As Bernie Sanders says, she has bad judgement. Constantly playing the

woman card-- it is sad!”(Tweet, 06 May 2016). In this tweet, Trump invokes the patriarchal

notion that Clinton used her womanhood to “play” people into feeling sorry for her, effectively

disidentifying with the feminist movement. His crass opinion of Clinton is most apparent in this

retweet posted before election year,“If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her

think she can satisfy America?” (Tweet, 16 April 2015). By retweeting the words of another,

Trump aligns himself with men who hold misogynist views. Trump evokes gendered and sexual

imagery to objectify Clinton and adversely affect voter perception. This imagery would appeal

to males (and females) who believe that a woman’s ultimate purpose is to please her husband.

Perhaps Trump's choice of language aligned with the beliefs of his white male base, however, the

attack of a prominent white woman by a prominent white man brought about consequences that

Trump may not have anticipated.

By tweeting pointed and gendered discourse, women across the globe consciously

identified the harmful social effects of this rhetoric by participating in rhetorical listening. Again,

rhetorical listening posits a conscious stance of openness to any person, text or culture, where

recognizing commonalities ​as well as​ differences and analyzing cultural logics work together to

foster identifications. It also invites a​ logic of accountability​, meaning that listeners must grasp

“that none of us lives autonomous lives, despite the grand narrative of U.S. individualism. [We]

are all members of the same village, and if for no other reason than that [...] all people
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necessarily have a stake in each other’s life” (Ratcliffe 26-31). Listening rhetorically to Trump’s

tweets, women (and men) were able to recognize the long troubled identifications at the forefront

of his words. It is here, as unconscious female identifications with race, gender and nation

intersected within a space of division, where ​disidentification ​with the Trump campaign began

the Women's March on Washington.

As previously iterated, disidentification can only occur after identification has taken

place, subconsciously if not consciously. Sites like Twitter and Facebook instantaneously

propelled Trump’s political discourse to every region of the United States. As he, the

embodiment of American male white-privilege, steamrolled over traditional comprehension of

propriety in politics and advanced his barrage on prominent white women, he unwittingly

brought historical struggles for female agency, control of the female body and human rights to

the forefront of the Women’s March. Rhetorical listening also provides an opportunity for

listeners to assert their agency by recognizing and responding to a speaker’s rhetorical choices,

though this may not happen in every instance. The increased rhetorical visibility and socializing

nature of social media enabled women to form cross-cultural connections when they

simultaneously disidentified with Trump and identified globally with one another against his

perceived evil. After alluding to debate moderator Megyn Kelly’s period as the reason for her

tough stance toward him in the first debates, Trump tweeted, ​“I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a

bimbo, because that would not be politically correct. Instead I will only call her a lightweight

reporter!” (Tweet, 27 January 2016). This mocking of the historical battle for women’s rights

perfectly illuminates why a woman might consciously disidentify with a Trump presidency. Yet,

Trump also targeted women of color like in this tweet from September 30, 2016 attacking Miss
 19
Universe Alicia Machado, “​Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out​ sex​ tape and past)

Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?” There is clearly potential to

disidentify with female immigrants and latina women in this tweet. Additionally, the tweet

highlights criticism of Hillary Clinton as disingenuous, a sentiment echoed by Women’s

Marchers who felt that the movement itself eclipsed the struggles of minority women. ​By virtue

of his espousal of gendered rhetoric against white women, an entire classification of women

were mobilized into action for they were no longer “blinded” by unspoken determinations of

white privilege. They, like their long abused women-of-color counterparts, were not safe from

the glare of Trump’s populist onslaught.

Ultimately, the ​share​ and ​connect​ aspect of social media sparked the largest coordinated,

cross-cultural challenge of historically troubled identifications in recent human history, with an

estimated 3.6 million marchers participating in 500 cities, 100 countries and across all seven

continents. The Women’s March became a multicultural protest movement, uniting people

across historically complicated social, racial and gender boundaries. Hundreds of facebook pages

were created as sites for women to organize sister marches and share intersecting identifications.

The Women’s March on Washington facebook page quickly materialized, led by professional

activists whose goal was to bring women with intersecting identities together in a peaceful,

respectful, unifying manner. However, the march received criticism as a site for privileged white

women to complain about Trump’s words, negating the ever-enduring struggles of their minority

and non-binary counterparts, and that the march, despite all efforts, was not inclusive enough.

True, a women’s movement that includes all intersections of privileged, marginalized,

non-binary, exploited populations of women has yet to materialize, but perhaps this is a jumping
 20
off point for political protest to transect traditional categorical constraints. The mere fact that I

saw hordes of white women listen as the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and others who

have been killed at the hands of police, pointed out white women’s blindness to injustice signals,

to me, a step in the right direction.

Conclusion

On January 21, 2017, out of the ashes of a bruised and battered democracy, my mother

and I added our voices to those of the one million men and women marching beside us in the

streets of our nation’s capital. The Women’s March on Washington gave rise to a resistance

movement whose reach was made possible by the global reach of social media. During the

campaign, women listened as Donald Trump won the presidency with his divisive, sexist and

racist tweets. They heard attacks on multiple identities and issues that intersected their own.

They rallied, connected and refused to accept the words of a populist rhetor. Yet, however much

social media may promote rhetorical listening, it remains the very medium that delivered a

populist candidate to presidential office. Perhaps we have entered a new era of social protest and

taken a small step toward an inclusive human rights movement, one that negates difference and

transcends categories. It will become the duty of citizens and scholars alike, to listen rhetorically

to political prospects to discern the true bearers of change from dangerous ideologues. Despite

his best efforts to divide the country, it may be that Donald Trump’s political rhetoric is the

incentive American citizens require to rectify the transgressions of the past.

 21
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