Quantifying the uniqueness and divisiveness of presidential discourse.

Do American presidents speak discernibly different from each other? If so, in what ways? And are these differences confined to any single medium of communication? To investigate these questions, this paper introduces a novel metric of uniqueness based on large language models, develops a new lexicon for divisive speech, and presents a framework for assessing the distinctive ways in which presidents speak about their political opponents. Applying these tools to a variety of corpora of presidential speeches, we find considerable evidence that Donald Trump's speech patterns diverge from those of all major party nominees for the presidency in recent history. Trump is significantly more distinctive than his fellow Republicans, whose uniqueness values appear closer to those of the Democrats.