This thesis is an exploration of affect theory and emotional rhetoric in the 2016 Presidential Election, and specifically in Donald Trump’s candidacy, first through a series of rhetorical readings of Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail and after his election. The first section of this thesis focuses on Donald Trump and the various rhetorical spaces he uses to reach his supporters through affectual means. Next, I will apply affect theory to Trump’s political rhetoric in order to illustrate how affect is intrinsic to his rhetoric and how he communicates to his audience. I find that utilizing texts by cultural rhetoric critics, namely those which discuss affect theory and the culture of emotion such as Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion, and culture and rhetorical spaces in Julie Lindquist’s A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working Class Bar, allows us to better understand the underlying cultural impetuses which created the conditions for Donald Trump’s presidency. In the third section, I examine how these theoretical frameworks provide an understanding of how fake news contributed to the current American climate of a post-truth media culture. And in the final section, I explore how satirical rhetoric is employed both as a defense against and as a rhetorical utility for Donald Trump, namely in his use of carnivalesque techniques and rhetoric to appeal to his voter’s sense of rebellion against and cynicism toward the political establishment. In doing so, I argue that Trump’s use of affect, particularly in his targeted approach to appeal to his base’s existential, socio-economic, and racial fears, was essential to his success in the 2016 Presidential election. / Master of Arts / Watching the coverage of Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign and eventual election, one of the most critical aspects not explored in depth by scholarship and academia was his campaign’s use of affect and emotional rhetoric. By appealing to his base’s passions, fueling dissention and anger against the opposition, Trump was able to incite a populist movement that lead him all the way to the White House. This thesis examines Trump’s use of rhetorical spaces such as political rallies and debate stages as avenues to stir up the emotions of his base, as well as becoming a mouthpiece for many on the far right to spread their agenda of isolationism and white nationalism. The use of fake news is also explored, particularly in how it was used to spread a far-right partisan agenda to misinform or mislead Trump supporters to vote against their own interests, and in some cases, even incite violence. Finally, through a brief history of the effects of satire on public opinion post-9/11, I argue that Trump uses carnivalesque techniques to appeal to voters’ sensibilities, particularly their fatigue regarding political correctness and their ire at their perception of being left behind by government insiders. By viewing Trump’s use of affect, I argue that scholars, and the general public, can gain insight as to how not to fall for such emotional rhetorical strategies so that they do not find themselves voting against their own socio-economic and representative interests.

In a time of extreme political polarization in America, it is necessary to understand how political attitudes are shaped and how and why political perspectives shift. This study explored political polarization and the search for common ground among American voters in order to evaluate 1) political orientation and associations with current and shifting political attitudes, perceptions, behaviors, and learning; 2) political efficacy and associations with political participation; 3) contributions of individual events, experiences, sources and/or social interactions to shifting political perspectives; and 4) the potential role of observational learning and experiential learning as it relates to political attitudinal change. Through a mixed-methods design, this study utilized both quantitative and qualitative methods in two phases in anticipation of the November 2020 U.S. presidential election. First, a survey was administered nationwide on Facebook in July and August of 2020. Second, a small number of participants that indicated that their political views had shifted during the Trump presidency were interviewed in October 2020 to discover more in-depth responses regarding both the formation and shifts of their political ideologies and attitudes. Quantitative statistical analysis from the survey (n = 1,313) revealed that 1) political orientation was significantly associated with a variety of current and shifting political attitudes, political participation, cognitive perceptions and emotions, social media and news media usage, and learning; and 2) personal and collective political efficacy was significantly associated with increased political participation. Qualitative analysis from the semi-structured interviews (n = 16) utilizing the Framework Method indicated that 1) social interactions with role models and media sources informed shifts in political attitudes, especially in regard to family; 2) deeper understandings of shifting political attitudes emerged when viewed through the observational learning subprocesses of attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation; 3) shifting political attitudes were associated with cognitive perceptions and emotions of partisan ingroups and partisan outgroups; 4) deeper understandings of shifting political attitudes emerged when viewed through the experiential learning stages of returning to the experience, attending to emotions, and re-evaluating the experience; and 5) barriers to shifting political attitudes were related to the cognitive perceptions of reason and emotion, whereas rewards for shifting political attitudes were related to increased political participation and learning. The study’s conclusions reaffirmed that there is widespread political polarization in the United States but that there are certain pathways towards common ground through civility and respect, intentional listening, and through the sharing of personal and emotional stories and lived experiences. Those who did shift their views shared an openness to learning through the observation of role models and sources (e.g., family, friends, mentors or teachers, religious leaders, media) and through reflection on past experiences. Aspects of political common ground were obtained not by agreeing on a contentious issue, but by acknowledging that multiple sides of an argument could be valid. It’s about how we approach the problem rather than how we solve the problem. Political orientation is much more complex than the dichotomous portrayal of left versus right.

The 2016 presidential election and restrictive immigration policies implemented under the Trump administration created a climate of heightened tension and uncertainty for undocumented immigrants from Latin America. There is a gap in the psychological literature regarding the mental health of undocumented immigrants from Latin America residing in the U.S., the largest number of which reside in California, and few studies have examined the experiences of mental health clinicians conducting therapy with undocumented immigrants, particularly keeping in mind the impact of national policy agendas that fuel anti-immigrant sentiment. Following Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR) methodology, this study gathered first-person narratives from 15 mental health professionals who work with undocumented immigrants from Latin American in California, with a focus on the effect of change in political leadership following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Nine domains emerged from the analysis. Mental health clinicians reported that the 2016 election had a significant impact on their work, including client’s distress and the clinician’s own emotional response to the political climate. Themes in therapy following the election, challenges to conducting therapy with undocumented clients, and the risk and protective factors that were reported to have the greatest influence on client mental health are discussed. Clinical implications and recommendations for the provision of mental health services to undocumented immigrants from Latin America are offered, including a separate set of recommendations for supporting mental health clinicians who provide mental health services to undocumented immigrants from Latin America.

After the 2016 United States presidential election, people became newly involved in social action and civic engagement efforts around the nation. This participation involved joining both established and newly developing groups. One newly developed group was Indivisible. Indivisible chapters were created all over the country; group goals included resisting the aims of the Trump administration and saving democracy. The chapters looked different depending on the local context and group member composition. Some early participants moved on; other activists remained involved in this work over time. Not enough has been understood about their reasons for staying committed, or what kind of learning and changes resulted from their involvement in these communities. This study considered the Indivisible participants who were new to activism, and their experiences with learning, sustained involvement, and community. This study focused on the factors that kept new activists involved in Indivisible social action efforts from 2017 to 2020, what participants learned or how they changed through their involvement, and the roles of community in participants’ learning or development. Participants were involved for a minimum of two years; 93% had been involved for four to five-plus years at the time of the study (n=51). All of the study participants were able to articulate what they had learned through their participation in Indivisible activities. Learning more about the experiences of new activists was prioritized to understand how to support adult learners drawn to social activism and civic engagement in the future. This qualitative case study included accounts from participants in Indivisible groups from around the United States. Data were collected from 55 participants who submitted demographic questionnaires with critical incident questionnaires, with a subset of 22 participants then doing a follow-up interview. A different subset of four participants also participated in a focus group. The study found eight factors that sustained involvement, seven sub-factors that could help to sustain involvement, and three factors that may hinder involvement. The most significant factors were: (1) Community relationships and friendships, (2) Making a difference and thinking more was possible, and (3) Having a sense of duty, and belief that quitting was not an option. The most reported sub-factors were: (1) Supportive family members and friends and (2) Indivisible’s flexible format helping participants make it work for their interests and contexts. There were eleven findings specific to learning. The learning and changes findings included: (1) Participants learned about democracy and activism; (2) Participants learned to contribute and work together in community; (3) Participants had increased consciousness; (4) Participants experienced leadership or personal development; (5) Participants reported becoming more empowered, assertive, and politically engaged; (6) Learning was supported and facilitated in Indivisible communities through several community aspects. The findings of this study may be of interest to adult learning professionals interested in learning that took place within social action or civic engagement activities, and for people seeking to encourage and support new participation in social action organizations.

This thesis investigates the discourse patterns of Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Jeb Bush during the Republican primary campaign from August 2015 through January 2016. The goal of this study is to identify differences among the candidates’ discourse patterns, particularly those distinct to the discourse style of Donald Trump, on the basis of a newly compiled corpus from their respective debates and speeches. This corpus analysis reveals differences in terms of readability and lexical choice that distinguish the speech style of Donald Trump from Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio and identifies metaphors utilized by Donald Trump. Drawing heavily from the research of Charles Fillmore and George Lakoff, this study also illustrates the importance of metaphors and frames within political discourse, and the corpus analysis of Republican candidates during the 2016 election provides clear evidence that candidates use frames and metaphors to create a unique profile. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

In 2012, President Barack Obama used prosecutorial discretion to initiate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that deferred deportation and provided employment authorization for a two-year renewable period to undocumented immigrant persons that came to the U.S. as children. Under former President Donald Trump’s administration, DACA was rescinded in 2017. A review of the literature suggests this is the only study to explore the perceived impact of a policy shift in DACA status, given the critical time of interviews conducted from April 2016 to October 2018. Thus, substantially advancing the literature, qualitative data on a diverse group (N=10) of young adult DACA beneficiaries revealed positive and negative impacts. The sample included 60% currently gainfully employed, 40% attending college—while 80% had experienced emotional distress by having an unauthorized legal status and facing obstacles to pursuing higher education. Of note, 40% rated themselves as currently relatively healthy, while 60% indicated having experienced a decline in their physical or mental health since entering the United States. As significant sources of stress, 90% had experienced anxiety centered around having to wait to renew their DACA status and having to pay for their status renewals. Given the rescinding of the DACA program in 2017, many were ill-prepared, as 90% had never experienced being undocumented without a DACA status as an adult in the United States. The main body of qualitative data generated six categories that encompassed 51 emergent themes: 1-Participants’ health trajectory across their lifespan; 2-Participants’ experiences of barriers to seeking care and having their health and mental health needs addressed; 3-Participants Living at the Intersection of Contemporary Immigration; 4-The impact of other family members’ immigration status; 5-From enjoying benefits of the DACA program, to having a false sense of normalcy, to feeling ambivalence, and experiencing detriments; and, 6-Potential DACA policy shifts and anticipated impacts ranging from negative (fear, loss, suffering) to positive (relief). These six broad categories suggest how, despite the benefits of their DACA status, substantial barriers and sources of anxiety and stress still impacted the lives of the young adults and their families. Implications of the findings are discussed.

This dissertation consists of three essays in the field of environmental economics. The first chapter provides the first causal evidence that hostile activities online lead to physical violence. Given the recently documented relationship between pollution and social media, I exploit exogenous variation in local air quality as the first step to instrument for online aggression. In an event study setting, I find volatile organic compounds (VOCs) increase by 7% when refineries experience unexpected production outages. Together with higher air pollution, I find more aggressive behaviors both online and offline, as well as worse health outcomes near refineries. A one standard deviation increase in surrounding VOCs leads to 0.16 more hate crimes against Black people and 0.23 more hospital visits per thousand people each day. Second, I consider how emotional contagion spreads through social networks. On days with pollution spikes, surrounding areas see 30% more offensive and racist tweets and 12% more crimes; those geographically distant but socially networked regions also see offensive and racist tweets increase by 3% and more crimes by 4.5%. Nationally, overlooking spillovers would underestimate crime effects of pollution by 24%. My findings highlight the consequences of social media hostility and contribute to the public debate on cyberspace regulation. The second chapter, which is coauthored with Andrew Wilson, analyzes the relationship between weather and railway accidents. Rail thermal expansion and contraction are key considerations in rail design and construction; rail operators and rolling stock may likewise exhibit vulnerability to temperature changes. We quantify the sizes of these effects by leveraging a comprehensive dataset of railway malfunctions in the United States spanning 1997-2019. We find that both heat and cold cause elevated rates of railway malfunctions, with relatively larger increases in the number of incidents leading to a casualty as well as the number of injuries and deaths resulting from these incidents. We find that exposure to daily temperatures averaging over 30°C (86°F) leads to a 16% increase in the number of rail malfunctions, a 13% increase in the number of incidents leading to a casualty, and 18% and 36% increases injuries and deaths-effects net of any operational adjustments made to mitigate these effects. Further, while we also find that warmer locations exhibit a weaker relationship between heat and railway malfunctions, we find no evidence that companies are learning, year-over-year, how to reduce accidents. Finally, we note that effects of heat are strongest for derailments (versus other types of malfunctions) and freight trains (versus passenger trains). Our findings highlight the vulnerability of the railway system to the climate. The number of injuries and deaths associated with weather exposure-especially in comparison to operators' reported private costs of equipment failure-suggests a role for enhanced rail safety regulations and adaptation funding to protect critical heat-exposed infrastructure. The third chapter, which is a joint work with Douglas Almond and Muye Ru, explores the impact of federal policy rollback on methane leakage. Improvements in satellite measurement enable independent assessment of regulatory and climate policy. In August 2020, the Trump Administration lifted Obama-era requirements that oil and gas firms detect and repair methane leaks. We merge geo-identified data from the European TROPOMI (satellite instrument) to the specific locations of the US oil and gas infrastructure. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find a prompt increase in US methane emissions following the summer 2020 rollback. The number of high-methane emission events from the oil and gas sector more than doubled after the rollback relative to the coal sector, which did not experience the same regulatory rollback. While the oil and gas industry claims it faces a persistent, profit-making incentive to stem natural gas leaks and emissions, we find a large and nimble response by industry to changes in federal policy. Public policies that reduce methane externalities are critical given that global methane concentrations are rising at an increasing rate.

This dissertation consists of three papers at the intersection of social policy and immigration. The first paper analyzes the impact of immigrant welfare exclusion on government social spending at both an aggregate and specific social program level, using cross-national social expenditure panel data from 21 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries between 1990 and 2015 and taking advantage of the significant variation in welfare exclusivity across OECD countries by year. The second paper utilizes the variation in states’ response to the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion to investigate its effects on low-income immigrants’ inter-state mobility, specifically in-migration, and out-migration. Finally, the third paper utilizes data from the National Survey of Children’s Health to examine the effect of the announcement of the Trump administration’s revised Public Charge rule on insurance coverage and other health outcomes for children of immigrant parents.

For the last half-century, American politics has been ravaged by a war for control of the courts. While conflict between the courts of law and the elected branches of government has been a recurrent theme in American history, this conflict has taken on a heightened importance beginning with the rights revolution ushered in by the Warren Court. Judicial originalism was born as part of a backlash against Warren and Burger Court expansions of constitutional rights in areas as disparate as First Amendment protections for individual speech and the expansion of substantive due process to cover contraception and abortion. By the end of the Trump Administration, the judicial backlash against this expansion of constitutionalized rights appears to have gained the upper hand as the Supreme Court and lower courts of appeals, especially the Fifth Circuit, have begun a substantial counteroffensive. Roe v. Wade has been overturned, a longstanding goal of legal conservatives, and the groundwork has been set for a rollback of the federal administrative state, which has often seen by legal conservatives as a political foe. This dissertation discusses the theoretical underpinnings of contemporary conservative jurisprudence, with a particular focus on the formalistic interpretive methodologies of originalism and textualism. It argues that textualism, at least as advanced by Justices Scalia and Gorsuch, is philosophically confused, and it argues that originalism is insufficient to its purported task of weakening the judiciary through a limitation of judicial discretion. Because legal conservatives often defend their views as a natural outgrowth of a commonsense picture of political morality, grounded in the concepts of the rule of law, democracy, and the separation of powers, I also discuss the interplay between those concepts within legal conservative discourse. Contemporary legal conservative conceptions of these ideological constructs are compared to historical predecessors in the works of John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, Hans Kelsen, and others. I argue that the legal conservative versions of these constructs are defective and seriously imperiled by the threat of legal indeterminacy. I conclude that they should be reconfigured to meet this challenge.

Desde la llegada de Donald Trump a la presidencia, la relación entre Estados Unidos y América Latina, específicamente hacia gobierno como los de Nicaragua, Cuba y Venezuela, viró a un comportamiento más confrontacional por parte de la administración estadounidense. Particularmente, frente a la crisis venezolana, una crisis multidimensional con impactos regional y alcance global, diferentes actores internacionales han abordado la situación, siendo el Grupo de Lima uno de los principales mecanismos multilaterales que se ocupó de dicho escenario de crisis. En tal sentido, la presente investigación busca responder la siguiente pregunta: ¿de qué manera la estrategia estadounidense hacia Venezuela durante el periodo de la administración Trump impactó en el desempeño y funcionamiento del Grupo de Lima (2017-2019)? Postulamos que la estrategia de Estados Unidos si bien tuvo un impacto inicial positivo fundamental para el posicionamiento del Grupo de Lima (2017-2018), posteriormente tuvo un impacto negativo producto del cambio de la estrategia de presión económica y política, lo que terminó por debilitar y dividir al Grupo de Lima (2018-2019). Respecto al impacto inicial, encontramos que el Grupo de Lima y Estados Unidos convergen en un grado de coordinación y apoyo importante que le permite al Grupo de Lima posicionarse, temporalmente, como uno de los espacios políticos más importantes en lo que respecta a la presión hacia el régimen de Nicolás Maduro. Sin embargo, este impacto inicial cambia desde mediados del 2018, momento en el que la administración estadounidense modifica su estrategia de presión económica y política. De un lado, Estados Unidos debilita el desempeño del Grupo de Lima, ya que la plataforma política y humanitaria de este queda en segundo plano frente al tratamiento de las nuevas sanciones económicas por parte de la administración Trump, medidas que se dan fuera del espacio del Grupo de Lima. De otro lado, la estrategia de Estados Unidos impacta sustancialmente el funcionamiento del Grupo de Lima al posicionar a nivel mediático y político el uso de la fuerza, lo que profundiza las diferencias políticas entre los gobiernos de América Latina y termina por dividir al Grupo de Lima.