Trump’s Metaphorical Drug Deal and Lynching Fallacy
Trump invokes outrage to terrorize and intimidate while justice is served.
.jpg "President Trump Departs for West Virginia")
The most important political metaphor during the first month of the impeachment inquiry surfaced again during testimony from the top US diplomat in the Ukraine, William B. Taylor Jr., on October 22. Only it was overshadowed by President Trump’s new—and predictably more outrageous—metaphor for the investigation that same morning: “a lynching.” The tiresome “witch hunt” trope seemed to have finally lost steam—itself merely a recycled sound bite left over from the Mueller investigation. It was time for Trump to crank up his rhetoric another notch to induce more outrage and drown out the serious talk of his own behavior in the Ukraine dealings—this time by incredulously equating imagined injustices against him with the very real injustices inflicted on an estimated 4,000 African Americans who were lynched by mobs of white supremacists in the decades after Reconstruction.
An outside observer need not follow all the details and nuances of the affair to grasp the gist of what was going on: something shady outside the rule of law.
Metaphors are central to everyday language use, including our political discourse—and for good reason. Metaphors help us make sense of the unfamiliar and complex by invoking the familiar and easier to understand. The complexity of the Ukraine shenanigans is a case in point. Taylor opened his testimony with a lengthy statement that laid out a detailed chronology of events spanning several months and involving multiple people engaged in both a “regular Ukraine policy decision-making channel” and an “irregular channel.” Taylor himself is one of several witnesses who have testified since the start of the official impeachment inquiry. As the depth and complexity of the evidence continues to accumulate against the president, the public needs a captioning device to make sense of this imbroglio.
Look no further than the metaphor attributed to John Bolton by Fiona Hill in her testimony on October 14 and reiterated a week later by Taylor. After learning of the irregular channel’s efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political rivals, Hill testified “that Bolton told her to notify the chief lawyer for the National Security Council about a rogue effort by Mr. Sondland, Mr. Giuliani and Mick Mulvaney,” stating, “I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up.”
Metaphors operate by drawing from a source domain—such as drug deals—to understand a target domain—in this case, the Ukraine dealings. The conceptual schema of the source domain maps onto the target domain, allowing us to use the schema of drug deals to reason about and make sense of the rogue diplomatic efforts in Ukraine. Criminality is central to the drug deal schema, implying that the rogue diplomatic efforts involved criminal—or at the very least highly unethical and thereby impeachable—behavior.
Taylor reiterated the drug deal metaphor in his testimony, noting that “Ambassador Sondland had connected ‘investigations’ with an Oval Office meeting for President Zelenskyy, which so irritated Ambassador Bolton that he abruptly ended the meeting, telling Dr. Hill and Mr. Vindman that they should have nothing to do with domestic politics. He also directed Dr. Hill to ‘brief the lawyers.’ Dr. Hill said that Ambassador Bolton referred to this as a ‘drug deal.’”
The drug deal metaphor works well as a framing device because it neatly encapsulates a series of complex events and discussions in an easy-to-understand image. An outside observer need not follow all the details and nuances of the affair to grasp the gist of what was going on: something shady outside the rule of law.The drug deal schema entails culpability on the part of those involved. This culpability maps onto the target domain, implicating those involved in pressuring Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political rivals. In his testimony, Taylor left no doubt who the culpable parties are, including the president who directed the efforts from the top.
The cross-domain mappings between the drug deal frame and the Ukraine dealings align both metaphorically and with the facts uncovered by investigators. Both domains deal with illicit activity carried out by shady characters trading in contraband beyond the reach of the law.
On the other hand, using the lynching frame to reason about the impeachment investigation, as Trump tried to do in his tweet, attempts to force an alignment between incongruent schemas. There is no violent mob operating outside the rule of law here, as the lynching schema implies. A better metaphor would be the impeachment investigation as a grand jury where that grandy jury—metaphorically mapping onto the House of Representatives—is doing the investigative groundwork necessary to decide whether to bring an indictment. In this metaphor, articles of impeachment correspond to a grand jury’s indictment—the type of indictment that a grand jury might issue after investigating an organized crime ring engaged in, apropos Bolton’s metaphor, a drug deal.
By comparing the impeachment inquiry to a lynching, Trump conjures up a host of entailments that merely spark outrage while minimizing the painful history of lynching in US society. That, of course, is the point. Trump knows how to fuel outrage and you can count on him amplifying his already hyperbolic rhetoric even more as the evidence against him continues to mount. The only thing lynching has in common with Trump’s situation is the way he uses language to terrorize and intimidate much like white supremacists used lynching to terrorize and intimidate during the Jim Crow era. The president’s violent and fallacious language is, to borrow one of his favorite words, “sad.” But we shouldn’t let the outrage it stirs distract us from earnest efforts to hold him accountable for his impeachable behavior.
