A new academic study analysing six books written by figures who later held top roles in Donald Trump’s governing coalition finds a striking, shared rhetorical toolkit. The research argues that these authors lean heavily on war, decline, disease and betrayal as metaphors, with domestic enemies framed as the primary threat rather than foreign adversaries.
Published in Frontiers in Psychology, the study examined full-length books written before their authors joined public office, including Hillbilly Elegy by Vice-President J. D. Vance; Decades of Decadence by Secretary of State Marco Rubio; For Love of Country by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard; Battle for the American Mind by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth; Government Gangsters by FBI Director Kash Patel; and The Real Anthony Fauci by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. After removing non-narrative material, the researchers divided the texts into individual paragraphs for analysis.
Using a machine-learning clustering method, the team mapped the six books into 16 primary topics spread across seven broad issue areas, ranging from public health and education to national defence and immigration. In total, 3,660 candidate keyword hits were identified, of which 2,074 were judged to be metaphorical expressions across the six main metaphor categories: war and conflict, decline and fall, corruption and disease, invasion and infiltration, betrayal and abandonment, and revival and reconstruction.
The authors then assessed how these metaphors positioned political groups as “us” versus an internal or external “them,” and evaluated accompanying emotions across 12 categories, including anger, fear, disgust, nostalgia, humiliation and hope. A second coder independently checked samples with substantial agreement on whether a phrase was metaphorical and on category assignment, though not on every emotional label.
The analysis showed a pronounced tilt toward threat-focused language. Overall, 90.55 per cent of the metaphorical expressions described threats or damage, while only 9.45 per cent referred to revival or reconstruction. War and conflict dominated as a metaphor category, accounting for 47.1 per cent of all metaphors, followed by decline and fall at 19.7 per cent and corruption and disease at 14.0 per cent. Invasion and infiltration and betrayal and abandonment were less common but persistent, at 5.6 and 4.2 per cent respectively.
Across the six authors, the use of metaphor categories was broadly similar, the researchers say, with only modest differences in proportion suggesting a shared toolkit rather than identical messaging. War and conflict were especially prominent for Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth, who leaned most heavily on that frame. By contrast, Kash Patel and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood out for their frequent use of corruption and disease imagery, Kennedy also showing the highest rate of invasion and infiltration metaphors.
In their comparative spread, the metaphors frequently cross policy boundaries to cast domestic policy disputes as existential battles. War imagery dominated discussions of global order and defence, and also figured prominently in debates over education and culture, as well as political and judicial institutions. For example, in Battle for the American Mind, Hegseth described schooling from kindergarten through to the end of secondary education as a “16,000-hour war” and a “battlefield” for children’s minds, where conservative parents confront “fortified machine-gun nests.”
Several categories served specialised roles in particular policy areas. Decline and fall metaphors were especially prevalent in economic discourse, portraying manufacturing decline as both physical collapse and moral decline for working-class communities. Corruption and disease metaphors linked political institutions with public health concerns, portraying agencies as rotted from within and justifying forceful intervention. Invasion and infiltration metaphors appeared most in public health and immigration, using flood imagery to depict migrants and viruses as overwhelming forces breaching sensitive boundaries.
The study also traced how advocates defined “us” versus “them.” A striking 82.4 per cent of the 1,704 paragraph–category pairings included some form of collective identity. The most common arrangement framed insiders as an internal “them”—elites or institutional authorities who had betrayed or infected the country from within—appearing in 31.7 per cent of pairings, with a further 25.4 per cent focusing on an internal threat alone. External enemies were rarer, comprising only 4.6 per cent of pairings against an external “them.”
Emotion played a shaping role in how these crises were framed. Fear and anxiety appeared in nearly all pairings, colouring the rhetoric with urgency. Within that backdrop, individual metaphor categories bore distinct emotional textures: war metaphors tended to evoke anger and pride, while corruption and disease imagery triggered disgust and humiliation; decline metaphors summoned nostalgia and loss; betrayal metaphors combined humiliation, disgust and anger. Revival and reconstruction, though less frequent, carried potent signals of hope, sacredness, pride and appeals to justice.
The authors note that these patterns align with a separate 2025 analysis of Donald Trump’s speeches and social media, which observed a shift from personal grievance toward national victimhood and punitive policy justification. While the current study looks at book-length arguments produced by coalition insiders rather than Trump’s own public statements, both strands point to threat- and conflict-oriented storytelling as a recurring feature of the movement’s rhetoric.
As with any study, there are caveats. The researchers emphasise that analysing published books maps the architecture of political arguments rather than the intimate thoughts of the authors, and that books can be shaped by co-writers and editors. The study cannot determine whether these metaphors cause readers to change beliefs or actions, and the six books were selected for prominence rather than as a random sample of political literature.
Moreover, the six volumes vary in length—most hover around 70,000 to 80,000 words, while Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s The Real Anthony Fauci totals 190,132 words and dominates nearly a third of the metaphor counts. The authors acknowledge that this disparity could skew overall totals, with Kennedy contributing about 35 per cent of all metaphors counted. They also acknowledge that inter-coder reliability, while reasonable, leaves room for subjectivity in distinguishing metaphor from literal language.
The researchers propose avenues for future work, including normalising metaphor counts by book length, comparing these works with writings by mainstream conservative or Democratic figures, and investigating whether coalition figures continued to employ the same metaphorical framework in official speeches after taking office.
The study, titled From threat to repair: metaphorical architecture and cognitive mobilization in Trumpist governing-coalition texts, was authored by Xuhai Chen, Zhiheng Zheng and Jiaxuan Lv.
