Trump's Enthymemes

"Donald Trump speaks volumes in what he doesn't say.

The Republican presidential hopeful often fails to finish his thoughts during his speeches, abruptly breaking off a sentence or substituting a vague word for a more precise one.

Those half-finished sentences aren't throwaways. They're enthymemes, a rhetorical device at the heart of a persuasive speaking style that has helped catapult the billionaire to the top of national polls ahead of the November 2016 election.

To his supporters, Trump is a politician who doesn't sound like one: He says what he thinks, happily insults rivals and can appear unscripted, particularly when he leaves his thoughts to trail off unfinished or peppers sentences with ambiguities.

Take his comments during a recent Republican debate in which he defended his call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States: "I talked about Muslims," he said. "We have to have a temporary something, because there's something going on that's not good."

It was left up to the listener to decipher what Trump was saying. What this means in practice is that supporters can tailor his statements to their own beliefs, rhetoric professors said. It also allows Trump, consciously or not, to avoid boxing himself in with quotes that rivals can use against him." yahoo