Never a bottom: The defining phrase of Donald Trump's presidency was 'new low'

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Stock phrases come to define the way we talk about certain issues. Things that clash with prevailing social justice norms are “problematic.” Political scandals are named with some new compound word that ends in “gate.” Victims of disasters — natural or man-made — are sent “thoughts and prayers.”

The defining phrase of the Trump presidency: “new low.”

Using fairly simple big data analytics, we can see that President Donald Trump's association with new lows was a near daily occurrence in news stories, blog posts, editorials, commentary, letters to the editor and broadcasts over his four years in office. In fact, saying that Trump had plumbed the depths of some “new low” became so routine that it became a cliché to note that it was a cliché. We can also see that Trump’s conduct at certain moments, in particular, prompted the media to coalesce around the notion that some ever-deeper depth had been reached.

Crude profanity and norm-breaking

The first such moment was when, after barely a month in office, Trump falsely accused former President Barack Obama of wiretapping him. What we thought at the time would be the most dramatic such moment came in summer of 2017.

That's when, following the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Trump praised the “very fine people on both sides.” That new low seemed to cap a summer of new lows, including his mocking of Mika Brzezinski’s face lift on Twitter, White House dysfunction that reached a lunatic peak with the hiring and firing of Anthony Scaramucci, and Trump’s ribald speech to the Boy Scouts’ Jamboree.

Cumulative Weekly Frequency of Media Records in the Thompson/Reuters News Database Associating President Trump with a “New Low.” (criterion: Trump /50 “new low”)
Cumulative Weekly Frequency of Media Records in the Thompson/Reuters News Database Associating President Trump with a “New Low.” (criterion: Trump /50 “new low”)

These moments of crude profanity, of “norm-breaking,” to use another cliché of the Trump years, were often the moments where the most substantial media consensus formed around Trump having brought things to some new low. His dismissal of the nations of the global south as “shithole countries,” mocking Christine Blasey Ford during the Kavanaugh hearings, attacking John McCain after his death, calling Stormy Daniels “horseface,” or telling Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib to “go back” to where they “originally came from,” all were widely described as indecorous new lows.

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Such consensus around new lows was notably weaker when matters of real policy were at stake. New lows were widely noted when the scale of his campaign’s collusion with Russia first came to light after Trump fired James Comey. But the phrase had less currency after the revelations of the Mueller report, which all included 10 episodes of Trump possibly obstructing justice, his later impeachment for pressuring the Ukrainian government to provide opposition research on Joe Biden by withholding military aid, his quiescence in the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, his diplomatic failures with North Korea, his catastrophic mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, or even for his crackdown on Black Lives Matter protesters after the murder of George Floyd.

Trump supporters at a rally in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump supporters at a rally in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021.

One policy area where Trump consistently seemed to find new lows was in his conduct toward Russia. His mincing infatuation with Vladimir Putin at the Helsinki Summit and his willingness to derail the G7 Summit in 2019 over Russia’s exclusion were rare foreign policy moments that drew broad agreement of a new low being reached.

Another was Trump's routine cruelty toward immigrants. There was a general consensus that his child separation policy, virtual closing of the country to refugee and willingness to shut down the government over border wall funding, as children were dying in immigration detention, were all major new lows.

A final descent into the depths

As the Trump administration entered its final year, the media consensus on moments of major new lows became fewer and further between. While the phrase still made it into news coverage almost daily, its power appeared to have become exhausted or literally difficult to apply after so many previous new lows. Still, there were exceptions.

In the summer of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was surging and violent police protests were nightly fixtures across the country, widely covered opinion polls showed that a record three out of four Americans believed the country was on the wrong track. In October, the president showed he was still capable of finding new lows of indecency with his kamikaze approach to his first debate with Biden and willingness to campaign while possibly still contagious with COVID-19.

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Then, in his final weeks in office, Trump pressured the Georgia Secretary of State to "find" enough votes to reverse Biden's win and incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol. Both were widely condemned as “new lows.”

The end of the Trump years will not be the end of new lows. All presidents reach new lows, typically in their approval ratings. Commentators have a long tradition of treating new lows in an opinion poll as an opening to chronicle a president’s recent failings. But one can hope that the sheer number of new lows in the past four years never again gets so high.

Michel Paradis teaches at Columbia Law School and is the author of "Last Mission to Tokyo." He received his doctorate in computational linguistics from Oxford University. Follow him on Twitter: @MDParadis

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump constantly scored 'new lows' as president. He never hit bottom.