Donald Trump vs. Greta Thunberg: A Rivalry Built on Shared Rhetoric
Over the past decade, scientists have observed climate destruction and the resulting biological change reactions that threaten Earth’s biodiversity and the sustainability of human life. Hence, climate policy is at the forefront of international debate and many politicians and climate activists aim to relieve the fear of uncertainty by presenting simple, interpretive narratives on the issue. In 2019, Greta Thunberg established herself as a spokesperson for younger generations at the UN Climate Summit, when she urged world politicians to take immediate action on climate change, claiming that they had stolen her childhood with empty words. She left a powerful impression on the world that challenged people to reevaluate their understanding of climate destruction and their role in mitigating its effects. In stark contrast, Donald Trump employed his Twitter account to dispute the science supporting global warming and unveil the threat that climate policy poses to United States economic development. Despite their opposing views on climate change, Greta Thunberg and Donald Trump are masters of building pathos, manipulating ethos, and exploiting kairotic moments to gain international attention and instigate debate.
Through two opposing narratives, Greta Thungberg and Donald Trump aim to rationalize climate change, while subsequently generating intense feelings of guilt and fear, respectively. In Thunberg’s case, climate change is the most urgent issue facing the world in the 21st century. She begins her speech indignantly blaming older generations for their inaction on climate change, asserting that “I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean” (NPR). Her voice is emotionally-charged, and her face is taught. Onlookers instantly sense Greta’s distraught as she explains that she must forgo critical education to address the failures of her predecessors and protect the environment for younger generations. Her argument builds upon the commonplace belief that older generations are responsible for the world they leave behind, thus forcing her audience to consider the moral obligation they have to protect the environment. Thunberg continues by holding her audience liable for the human suffering and death, collapsing ecosystems, and “beginning of a mass extinction” resulting from their fixation on economic growth (NPR). Therefore, Greta presents a narrative where world policymakers are the antagonists preventing younger generations from a healthy, sustainable world. She promotes herself and other climate activities to the position of all-knowing and truthful hero. Nevertheless, the story remains unfinished, granting policymakers the opportunity to join the heroic side by taking swift actions to pass climate change policy. Emerging from her emotional language and narrative building techniques, Greta instills a feeling of guilt in her audience, as they begin to realize their failure to provide a profitable world for future generations.
Comparably, Donald Trump views climate change as a large-scale attempt to restrict capitalist growth and decelerate the productivity of the United States. On November 6th, 2012, Trump released his uncensored opinion to the American public in a twitter post that reads, “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive” (Brown). Though his perspective rejects the general scientific consensus that the world’s climate is changing as well as the dominant ideology that humanity needs to take more responsibility for their implications on the environment, the tweet went viral, gaining over 104,000 retweets and nearly 66,000 likes (Wong). At the time, there was an emerging sentiment towards government establishment and political discourse in the United States (Kayam); building on these insecurities, Trump appeals to the general public and inculpates China for its apparent attempts to limit United States growth and level the global economic playing field. Therefore, Trump enlists China as a villain for threatening the United States economy, and he subsequently generates a fear of climate change. Much like Thunberg, Trump also appeals to his audience as a trustworthy hero, yet he plans to save American economics instead of the global climate crisis. Still, he presents two plausible resolutions which help his audience to conceptualize the problem; if the United States pursues climate policy, economic growth will decrease and therefore lessen the power that the United States holds over the global economy. Otherwise, America can neglect ‘faulty climate change concerns’ and continue with economic growth to become a world superpower. Building on the overwhelming insecurity with government establishment and presenting a formidable story of climate change, Trump successfully invokes fear in his audience that climate legislation is a threat to the United States economic growth and power.
When presenting these narratives, Thunberg and Trump play on shared ideologies and beliefs to build strong relationships with their audiences. However, there is a noticeable age gap between sixteen year old Greta and the older generation of politicians in her audience. To fight the ideological and scientific background discrepancies, Greta pulls extrinsic evidence from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018 to prove her environmental expertise: “To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5°C global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [IPCC] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on January 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons” (NPR). The short array of numbers and statistics appeals to the economic and mathematical minds of her audience, as politicians are focused on the growth, profitability, and long-term implications of their legislation. Additionally, Greta and her audience share the dominant ideology that humanity is destroying the environment. While politicians are reluctant to implement climate policy and sustainability initiatives, there was some motivating factor that triggered such a large, captivated assemblage behind the podium. By sharing the dominant ideology and raising concerns with up-to-date research, the politicians can reasonably conclude that Greta is a reputable speaker on the subject and a sufficient representative of younger generations.
Donald Trump differs from Thunberg because he already possesses presidential ethos, and his posts are a rhetorical mechanism for strengthening the relationship with his Twitter followers. Much like his pathetic appeal, Trump plays on the anti-establishment sentiment rising in the United States to develop a shared belief system that connects his audience. He uses his Twitter “to directly criticize the mass media,” (Kayam) and in January 2019 posted the following tweet: Be careful and try staying in your house. Large parts of the Country are suffering from tremendous amounts of snow and near record setting cold. Amazing how big this system is. Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” (Brown). At first glance, the tweet is an upright mockery of science and mass media portrayals of the current climate crisis. It urges viewers to reevaluate the reliability of their new sources by questioning how science can claim that global temperatures are rising, if parts of the country are reaching record setting lows. Furthermore, Trump builds a rallying support system upon the notions that America is a great place to live and mass media establishments are failing humanity. Hence, he capitalizes terms like ‘Large,’ ‘Country,’ and ‘Global Warming’ to emphasize the values that align with his followers. The rudimentary logic, emotions, and general sentiments that Trump reveals in his tweets are the driving force behind his Twitter success, and the methods from which he builds such a strong following.
At the height of the climate change debate in 2019, Greta Thunberg and Donald Trump successfully earned international spotlight for their opposing views on climate change. While they employed differing logics, both used storytelling as a means to conceptualize the large-scale, complex threat that climate change poses on the global economy. Greta portrayed her young age as a strength, using it as a means to drive guilt into her audience, and Donald Trump enlisted the fear of economic failure into his followers as he presented his perspective. Despite utilizing different mediums of communication, Thunberg and Trump took on surprisingly similar rhetorical techniques, hence both climate change narratives rose to news headlines and instigated debates. The similarities of appeal brought about an international rivalry, which further enhanced the civic initiatives on both sides of the controversy.
Works Cited
Brown, Brendan. Trump Twitter Archive, https://www.thetrumparchive.com/.
Kayam, Orly. “Straight to the People: Donald Trump’s Rhetorical Style on Twitter in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” Language and Dialogue, vol. 10, no. 2, 2020, pp. 149-170.
Nordensvard, Johan, and Markus Ketola. “Populism as an Act of Storytelling: Analyzing the Climate Change Narratives of Donald Trump and Greta Thunberg as Populist Truth-Tellers.” Environmental Politics, vol. 31, no. 5, 2022;2021;, pp. 861-882.
Staff, NPR. “Transcript: Greta Thunberg’s Speech at the U.N. Climate Action Summit.” NPR, NPR, 23 Sept. 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-u-n-climate-action-summit.
Wong, Edward. “Trump Has Called Climate Change a Chinese Hoax. Beijing Says It Is Anything But.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 18 Nov. 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/world/asia/china-trump-climate-change.html.