An Exploration of Presidential Vocabulary by Year

During his 2020 State of the Union address, did President Trump use a vocabulary that was especially self-aggrandizing, or arising from insecurity or inferiority? Mining the historical records, I conducted a naïve analysis of presidential vocabulary from the founding to the present day. My conclusion is that Trump’s use of first-person pronouns is not notably different from his recent peers, but along the way some possibly meaningful patterns in how presidents speak of themselves and of us emerged.