Alain Bauer, a Trump against the grain
While most Europeans appear quite hostile to the figure of Trump, the French are certainly ahead of everyone else, well represented by their president, the most muscular political leader in the European Union in his effort of opposition. Indeed, it cannot be denied that Macron, who has long been without a majority behind him due to questionable domestic policy choices, enjoys consensus in his marked anti-American battle. This is, moreover, a tradition that goes back a long way, dating back to De Gaulle, founder of the modern semi-presidential republic. The general was the only one to distrust—as far back as the 1960s, in the midst of the Cold War—the reliability of the United States, and his position set a course followed by his successors, starting with Chirac, who in 2003 refused to follow George Bush into the Iraq War. It is therefore singular—in such a transalpine context—the publication of a book on Trump (Alain Bauer, Le pouvoir des mots. Décryptage d’une redoutable mécanique de persuasion de masse, First Éditions, Paris 2026) which does not join the chorus of French journalism that is substantially critical of the American President, while being careful not to sing his praises.
The fact is that Bauer – professor of Criminology at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, consultant to French institutions on issues concerning security and terrorism – tends to carve out the posture of a technical expert, limiting himself to describing and analyzing given situations and power relations within the conflictual context of the geopolitical universe: a posture conspicuously clear in his frequent appearances in television debates on international political events, in which he always avoids partisan stances, or any biased, moralistic, or ideological judgments. In the book in question, the title seems to allude to an implicit critique of the manipulative use of Trump’s communication strategy, but then, one only needs to open it and read the few pages of the introductory chapter (entitled Donald Trump, this fine strategist underestimated by the elites) to find information that seems to wipe out mountains of dismissive remarks about the character, starting with Philip Roth, who in 2017 contemptuously declared him to be in possession of a 77-word dictionary. Television archives from the 1980s and 1990s – Bauer writes – reveal a Trump “radically different” from the one who would triumph in his two entries into the political arena in the 2000s, possessing “a vocabulary of significant conceptual richness, capable of handling semantic nuances with the dexterity of a man well-versed in the linguistic codes of the ruling classes.”
Starting from this capital discovery, Bauer organizes his intervention with a cold montage of materials: a hundred keywords, including the topical ones (America first, Fake news, Make America Great Again, The system is rigged, Woke), and the engaging ones to capture the listener (Believe me, Frankly) and about forty manifesto-phrases (including Politicians are all talk and no action, The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer), impressively recurrent in the long-winded speeches of a second-style Trump, who has decided to enter politics and therefore changes register, knowing he must hook a voting public increasingly impatient with the abstract and hazy language of politics. Therefore, not an instinctively uncultured and crude Trump, but rather a Trump who consciously chooses to wear a mask, selecting a particular, deliberately impoverished language. Commedia dell’Arte actors improvised starting from their repertoire of monologues, snippets of dialogue, maxims, etc. (the so-called generici, named as such because they were passepartout keys, suitable for insertion into multiple comedies); Trump, in the same way, leverages a small treasure trove of words and expressions that Bauer subjects to a convincing socio-linguistic examination. A communication – the Trumpian one – simplified, peremptory, aggressive, rich in superlative coloring (Big, Fantastic, Strong, The best, Wonderful), which arouses emotional responses, which speaks to the gut rather than the brain, pointing out the target to be hit (Corrupt, Dishonest, Incompetent, Weak). Even the repetitiveness of the speech is calculated, determining a flow of information “that inhibits the critical spirit,” so that – Bauer concludes – Trump “transforms the presidential function into a permanent spectacle, replacing institutional solemnity with an aggressive theatricality that fascinates as much as it repels.” Bauer uses a negative verb (révulser, to repel, to outrage) but emphasizes that in modern society “indignation generates audience and audience confers power.”
(January 20, 2026)
