Trump made politics in America worse study finds

Politics in America have never been more fraught with negativity and most voters would pin the blame for this problem on Donald Trump. The former president’s particular form of political language is quite annoying but is he really at fault for America's negativity problem?

New research suggests that Trump is one of the main reasons for the sharp increase in negative political language in the United States. Here’s what the study uncovered and why it pinpoints the former president as a problem. 

Published in the journal Scientific Reports, the new study was spurred on by the current gap in our understanding of how political language has changed throughout the former president's time in office. Things got worse but we couldn’t show why.

Political scientists and media pundits have blamed the former president for being the start of the country’s burgeoning negativity but there had never been any proof that Trump was responsible for the shift, at least until now. 

“In 2016, when Trump was elected president, everyone had the impression that the tone of politics had become rougher, uglier, and more negative,” explained Robert West, study co-author and professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. 

“As data scientists, we were curious to see whether people’s hunch was right. But we didn’t have data for it yet, since there was no public corpus of news quotations linked to the people who had uttered them,” West continued. 

In order to solve his data problem, West and his colleagues spent four years collecting a compendium of quotes. By the time they finished their collection, the Trump presidency was over and they had an enormous number of quotes. 

Just how many quotes were collected? The researchers explained that they had gathered nearly a quarter-billion quotes from 127 million online news sources according to PsyPost, and those quotes ranged from mid-2008 until April 2020. 

The data was put into a collection called and organized into a website Quotebank, which is a publicly accessible search tool that allows others to search keywords for quotes about that word. Focusing just on the U.S., there are 24 million quotes from over 18,000 politicians. 

It was this data pool that the researchers used to analyze the changing nature of politics in the United States using a tool called Linguistic Inquiry and Word. This toll measured quotes for their tone and content.

The quotes were scored based on whether or not the words in them prompted negative emotions, and when the research was completed, the study’s authors found that a spike in the use of negative language followed Trump’s entrance into politics. 

“The tone of US politicians indeed became suddenly and significantly more negative with the start of the 2016 primary campaigns in June 2015,” the study’s authors wrote in the discussion section of their research paper. 

The study’s authors also pointed out that the “frequency of negative language remained elevated between then and the end of our study period (April 2020)” and added that this coincided with a rise in political polarization on online platforms. 

Political debate during Trump’s entire term was characterized by a negative tone and the study’s authors noted “Trump as a key driver of this development.” So just how bad was the former president’s influence on political discourse?

PsyPost pointed out that when the researchers removed the former president’s quotes from their analysis, the rise in negative language dropped by 40 percent, which means Trump almost certainly had a huge impact on turning politics negative. 

“People’s hunch is true: during Trump’s presidency, the tone of U.S. politics became significantly more negative, and it happened as a sudden jump at the time when Trump’s primary campaign started,” Robert West explained to PsyPost.