Jennifer Jones, a doctoral candidate of political psychology at the University of California at Irvine, has combined these statistics into an index capturing the ratio of “feminine” to “masculine” words, and applied it to the language of 35 political candidates over the past decade. Hillary Clinton’s language falls above the average on this index—more feminine than George W. Bush’s, but less so than Barack Obama’s.
But Donald Trump is a stunning outlier. His linguistic style is startlingly feminine, so much so that the chasm between Trump and the next most feminine speaker, Ben Carson, is about as great as the difference between Carson and the least feminine candidate, Jim Webb. And Trump earns his ranking not just because he talks a lot about himself or avoids big words (both of which are true); according to Jones, he also shows feminine patterns on the more subtle measures, such as his use of prepositions and articles. The key then is not what Trump talks about—making Mexico pay for the wall or bombing the hell out of ISIL—but rather how he says it
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This makes it hard to draw any fast conclusions about what effect, if any, Trump’s feminine linguistic style has had given the content of his campaign (though it’s worth noting that Trump’s chief rival, Ted Cruz, a lawyer and college debater who is often celebrated for his oratorical gifts, has a linguistic style that skews heavily to the masculine). Still, Jones’ research casts doubt on the narrative that Trump’s supporters are attracted to a political icon of masculinity who is untainted by woman-like traits. On the contrary, it may be exactly these traits—and their associations with emotional connectedness and personal vulnerability—that help to counter the opposition’s portrait of Trump as a domineering misogynist who lacks empathy and concern for others
