Six books written by figures who went on to hold top posts in the second Trump administration lean heavily on metaphors of war, decline, disease, and betrayal, according to an analysis published in Frontiers in Psychology. Of the metaphors the researchers counted, about 90 percent described threats or damage while fewer than 1 in 10 described repair or renewal, and the books more often cast opponents as enemies inside the country than as foreign threats. The authors argue that this shared pattern suggests the movement’s rhetoric extends beyond Donald Trump’s own speaking style.
In everyday politics, speakers frequently use conceptual metaphors, which are figures of speech that explain abstract, complicated policy disputes in terms of concrete physical experiences like combat, illness, or building construction. Rather than serving merely as decorative language, these comparisons direct attention toward specific causes and make certain responses feel natural or necessary. For instance, a 2011 series of experiments found that changing even a single word to frame crime as either a wild beast or a virus subtly steered whether people favored police crackdowns or social reform, even though participants were unaware that the metaphor had influenced their reasoning.
The researchers pair this idea with a concept they call cognitive mobilization, which they define as a pattern within a text rather than an effect on readers: metaphors combine with emotional cues to define a crisis, assign blame, and point toward a course of action. A 2026 systematic review of 51 studies found that anger was the emotion most consistently tied to support for populist politics, followed by fear, resentment, and nostalgia, and that populist politicians routinely use emotionally charged stories and blame to rally supporters.
Much of the scholarship examining how these linguistic tools operate in the Make America Great Again movement has focused on Donald Trump himself. Earlier work, such as a 2018 discourse analysis of Trump’s campaign and inaugural speeches, indicated that he relied on familiar, everyday metaphors to frame issues such as immigration and the economy while casting himself as a warrior, builder, and repairman.
Similarly, a 2025 analysis of Trump’s speeches found that after the 2024 assassination attempt against him, his metaphorical language shifted from themes of action and success toward vulnerability and earlier patterns from his 2016 campaign. Focusing solely on one politician’s speeches and social media posts, however, leaves open the question of whether the wider circle of elites who joined his administration share a common way of framing politics.
To examine whether a common narrative blueprint exists across this broader coalition, Xuhai Chen, Zhiheng Zheng, and Jiaxuan Lv of the National University of Defense Technology, a Chinese military university in Nanjing, analyzed full-length books written by prominent figures before they entered the administration. Unlike short social media posts or campaign rally remarks, book-length texts allow authors to lay out complete arguments and stable value systems. Analyzing books published prior to the authors’ government appointments also allowed the researchers to observe how these officials framed political reality before being constrained by executive-branch roles.
The researchers assembled a digital collection of six widely circulated books published between 2016 and 2024 by individuals who later assumed top positions in the Trump governing coalition. The sample included Hillbilly Elegy (2016; 79,782 words) by Vice President J. D. Vance, Decades of Decadence (2023; 79,863 words) by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, For Love of Country (2024; 69,780 words) by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Battle for the American Mind (2022; 79,234 words; co-written with David Goodwin) by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Government Gangsters (2023; 74,171 words) by FBI Director Kash Patel, and The Real Anthony Fauci (2021; 190,132 words) by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. After removing tables of contents, notes, and reference lists, the team divided the texts into individual paragraphs.
First, the authors used a machine-learning text-clustering method to map out the primary subjects discussed across all six books. Out of the entire collection, 914 paragraphs (11.57 percent) did not fit neatly into a consistent theme and were set aside as outliers. The remaining paragraphs clustered into 16 specific topics, which the researchers grouped into seven broad issue areas: public health and medical authority; education, religion, and the culture war; political and judicial institutions and the “deep state”; family, community, and class mobility; global order and national defense; economic decline and working-class anxiety; and immigration and borders.
Next, the team searched the paragraphs for candidate metaphorical words and manually checked each occurrence in context. A phrase was counted as a metaphor only when its contextual meaning differed from its basic, physical meaning and mapped a concrete experience onto an abstract political topic. For example, when Patel described political opposition to Trump as a “total war” or called the federal bureaucracy “rotten at the top,” those phrases were coded as metaphors of war and organic decay, whereas his reference to the actual armed conflict in Syria as a “civil war” was excluded as literal language. The keyword lists were built around six metaphor categories the researchers settled on after an initial open-ended reading, so other kinds of metaphors they noticed, such as those drawn from journeys, sports, or family life, were not part of the final counts.
From 3,660 candidate keyword hits, manual review confirmed 2,074 metaphorical expressions across six primary source categories: war and conflict, decline and fall, corruption and disease, invasion and infiltration, betrayal and abandonment, and revival and reconstruction. Because a single paragraph sometimes contained multiple metaphors from the same category, those 2,074 expressions corresponded to 1,704 paragraph-by-category pairings.
The researchers then coded those 1,704 pairings for how they positioned political groups (“us” versus internal or external “them”) and evaluated each pairing across 12 emotion categories, including anger, fear, disgust, nostalgia, humiliation, and hope. A second trained coder independently evaluated random subsets of the data, agreeing 80.0 percent of the time on whether a phrase was metaphorical, 99.5 percent of the time on which category confirmed metaphors belonged to, and 86.0 percent of the time on whether an out-group was present.
Across the 2,074 verified metaphors, the researchers found a pronounced imbalance between crisis and repair. Threat-oriented metaphors made up 90.55 percent of the total (1,878 instances), while metaphors of revival and reconstruction accounted for just 9.45 percent (196 instances). War and conflict was by far the most common category at 47.1 percent (976 instances), followed by decline and fall at 19.7 percent (408 instances), corruption and disease at 14.0 percent (290 instances), revival and reconstruction at 9.5 percent (196 instances), invasion and infiltration at 5.6 percent (117 instances), and betrayal and abandonment at 4.2 percent (87 instances).
Although the six authors wrote about very different subjects, the statistical difference in how they used the six metaphor categories was modest (showing a Cramér’s V of 0.178, where 0 would mean the authors used the categories in identical proportions and 1 would mean each used entirely different ones). The authors interpret this as evidence that the writers drew from a shared toolkit while emphasizing different elements.
War and conflict was the most common category in all six books, with Gabbard and Hegseth leaning on it heaviest at 71.38 percent and 54.47 percent of their metaphors, respectively. Patel (29.66 percent) and Kennedy (19.75 percent) stood out for their frequent use of corruption and disease imagery, with Kennedy also showing the highest rate of invasion and infiltration metaphors (9.39 percent). Rubio relied almost equally on war and conflict (37.25 percent) and decline and fall (36.47 percent), while Vance showed the highest proportions of revival and reconstruction (13.79 percent) and betrayal and abandonment (6.90 percent).
These metaphorical frames regularly crossed policy boundaries to turn domestic policy disputes into existential struggles. War and conflict metaphors were high in discussions of global order and defense (64.19 percent), but they also made up 57.00 percent of the metaphors in education and culture-war topics and 51.24 percent in discussions of political and judicial institutions. In Battle for the American Mind, for instance, Hegseth portrayed kindergarten-through-12th-grade schooling as a “16,000-hour war” and a “battlefield” for children’s minds where conservative parents confront “fortified machine-gun nests.” The authors argue that framing curriculum debates as military combat narrows the space for compromise or gradual policy reform.
Other metaphor categories performed specialized roles depending on the policy area. Decline and fall metaphors accounted for 60.49 percent of the metaphors in economic discussions, where authors like Rubio and Vance portrayed the loss of manufacturing jobs as the physical and moral collapse of working-class families and towns.
Meanwhile, corruption and disease metaphors linked political institutions (26.71 percent) with public health (19.81 percent), portraying federal agencies and medical authorities as sources of internal rot or contamination, framing that the authors argue makes forceful intervention seem justified. Invasion and infiltration metaphors appeared most frequently in public health (9.28 percent) and immigration (9.09 percent), using flood and breach imagery to depict both migrants and viruses as overwhelming forces pouring across vulnerable boundaries.
When the researchers examined how the 1,704 paragraph-metaphor pairings defined allies and enemies, they found that 82.4 percent (1,404 pairings) included collective group positioning. The single most common arrangement pitted “us” against an “internal them,” accounting for 31.7 percent of all pairings (541 instances), followed closely by passages focusing solely on an “internal them” at 25.4 percent (432 instances).
By contrast, passages pitting “us” against an “external them” made up only 4.6 percent (78 instances), and those mentioning an “external them” alone accounted for 1.3 percent (22 instances). Rather than focusing mainly on foreign nations, the books largely cast domestic figures, such as elites, government bureaucrats, institutional authorities, and ideological opponents, as insiders who had betrayed or infected the country from within.
The emotion analysis helped explain how these metaphors fit together as an argumentative structure within the texts, rather than a psychological sequence that readers necessarily move through. Expressions of fear and anxiety appeared in 95.54 percent of the 1,704 pairings, creating a near-constant backdrop of urgency across all six books. Against that anxious baseline, individual metaphor categories carried distinct emotional signatures above chance levels: war metaphors paired with anger and pride, corruption and disease metaphors clustered with disgust and humiliation, decline metaphors evoked nostalgia and loss, and betrayal metaphors combined humiliation, disgust, and anger.
Although revival and reconstruction metaphors represented less than a tenth of the total, they carried a strong concentration of hope, sacredness, pride, and appeals to justice, which the authors interpret as a focused promise of renewal that gives the anger and disgust of the crisis passages somewhere to go.
These patterns align with a 2025 analysis of Donald Trump’s speeches and social media posts, which found that Trump shifted his rhetoric from personal grievance to nationalized victimhood, using narratives of inflicted pain and retribution to morally justify retaliatory policies like sweeping trade tariffs. Even though the new study analyzed the metaphorical architecture of crisis and repair in book-length texts by coalition elites rather than Trump’s own speeches and social media posts on victimhood, both analyses point to threat- and conflict-centered narratives as a recurring feature of the movement’s rhetoric.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider when interpreting these findings. Because the study examined published books rather than surveying readers or interviewing the writers, it maps out the structure of political arguments on the page rather than the private thoughts of the authors, and political books are often shaped by co-writers and editors.
The analysis also cannot determine whether reading these metaphors causes audiences to change their attitudes or take action. In addition, the six books were chosen because they were prominent bestsellers, and the study did not compare them with similar books by other politicians, so it cannot show whether this crisis-heavy pattern is unusual for Trump-aligned writers or typical of commercial political nonfiction, which often relies on dramatic, conflict-heavy storytelling.
The sample was also limited to six books of uneven length, with Kennedy’s 190,132-word volume more than twice as long as each of the other five books, which ranged from roughly 70,000 to 80,000 words. His book alone supplied about 35 percent of all the metaphors counted, giving public health debates outsized weight in the overall totals.
Determining where literal language ends and metaphor begins also involves subjective judgment: the 80.0 percent agreement rate between coders on whether a candidate word was metaphorical reflects only moderate reliability once chance agreement is accounted for (with a Cohen’s kappa of 0.556), the coders agreed 65.1 percent of the time on the exact seven-category group-positioning label, and the emotion labels were not checked by a second coder.
Future studies could normalize metaphor counts by book length, compare these works against books written by mainstream conservative or Democratic politicians, and examine whether these officials continued to use the same metaphorical framework in their official speeches after taking office.
The study, “From threat to repair: metaphorical architecture and cognitive mobilization in Trumpist governing-coalition texts,” was authored by Xuhai Chen, Zhiheng Zheng, and Jiaxuan Lv.