Letter to the editor: We can defeat Trump by appealing to Americans’ senses

Keep it real

Our country needs to memorialize the COVID-19 pandemic and the 100,000-plus now dead. We cannot allow President Donald Trump to normalize the severity of this tragedy, nor forget his many failures to respond in a timely manner.

Historians note how Franklin D. Roosevelt in a rhetorically brilliant move coined the label “Hoovervilles,” making vivid the many shantytowns constructed because Herbert Hoover didn’t provide relief to hundreds of thousands of Americans during the 1930s.

The challenge for the Democrats in 2020 is to employ a host of vivid (and hence persuasive) images and words to prevent a minority of voters from reelecting Trump. The strategy might include the use of visual rhetoric (photos of food lines, bodies being stored in refrigerated trucks and relatives unable to see their loved ones at the end of life).

This could be supplemented by drawing on the rhetorical concepts of vivacity and resemblance, which explain how words can bring reality to a level similar to the other four senses. Voters might feel the pain fellow citizens are suffering — pain that Trump denies, downplays or, to use the president’s favorite pastime, “plays through.” The impact of such rhetoric may be a larger number of voters casting ballots against Trump.

- Richard Cherwitz, Ernest A. Sharpe Centennial Professor Emeritus, The University of Texas, Austin