Biden’s Inaugural Speech Was the Least Upbeat in Decades
The president used more personal words and expressed more negative emotion than his recent predecessors, a language expert finds.
President Biden delivers his inaugural address on Jan. 20.
Photographer: Patrick Semansky/AFP/Getty Images
The inaugurations of Joe Biden on Jan. 20 and Donald Trump on Jan. 20, 2017, were very different, for obvious reasons. Their inaugural addresses also struck different themes, with Trump vowing to end “American carnage” and Biden promising that his “whole soul” was in unifying the country. Although Trump’s speech struck many commentators at the time as dark, Biden’s was the least upbeat in a generation, according to social psychologist James Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin.
Using the natural-language processing software LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) to analyze first inaugural speeches from Ronald Reagan’s onward, Pennebaker found that Biden’s had more expressions of negative emotion than average, and of anger in particular. Biden talked less about money or work than Trump or any president since the 1970s, and—not surprisingly during a pandemic—more about death, asking Americans to join him in a silent prayer for those lost to the coronavirus. An analysis provided to Bloomberg using another tool, Diction, created by Roderick Hart, finds Biden favored personal language (“I,” “mine”) and everyday words (“highway,” “groceries”).