War Rhetoric: language that wields power
Militarized language using terminology like "wartime," "sacrifice," "enemy," and "victory" act as mobilization tactics, mechanisms for inspiring individual duty, national coping mechanisms, and approaches to accepting death. Through briefings from President Trump and President Biden, the language used to discuss COVID-19 emphasizes how illness and death gain value through the metaphor of war and asserts an adversarial and violent approach to disease.
President Trump
March 22nd, 2020
"I'm a wartime President. This is a war. This is a war. Different kind of war than we've ever had… as long as I am your President, you can feel confident that you have a leader who will always fight for you, and I will not stop until we win. This will be a great victory. It's now attacking—the enemy is attacking 144 countries at this moment…But we will be totally victorious."
President Biden
January 26th, 2021
"I’ve said before: This is a wartime effort. When I say — when I say that, people ask, “Wartime?” I say, “Yeah, more than 400,000 Americans have already died.” I think it’s four hundred eleven or twelve [thousand] have died in one year of this pandemic — more than all the people who died in all of — Americans who died in World War Two. This is a wartime undertaking; it’s not hyperbole"
War Rhetoric has fundamentally shaped perceptions of the Pandemic
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Illness takes on and wields power through metaphor; if COVID-19 is only viewed as a war, what is the impact of this metaphor?
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This metaphor has a paradoxical framing in which wartime efforts (associated with violence) are mobilized to stop disease (associated with saving lives)
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This rhetoric interacts with legislation, much of the efforts to contain COVID-19 have utilized the Defense Production Act (an act created during the Korean War to uphold "national defense")
Historical & Theoretical Background
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American society inherently operates under "attachments to war" and thus disease and fear of disease are naturally militarized
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Two specific events: "venereal disease" during the World Wars and the HIV/AIDS epidemic provide context how disease and war have been historically linked
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Venereal disease during the World Wars was perceived as threat to health of soldiers and avoidance of infection was socially constructed as a required patriotic duty
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One educational lecture stated: "venereal disease had caused the War Department ‘more anxiety in many respects than have the bullets and bayonets of German soldiers"
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HIV/AIDS was presented as a national security threat and the "war on AIDS" was designed to galvanize action and outrage
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One author critiques: “war imagery is a way of shaping that chaos, or feeling that we are or soon will be in control."
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This historical context builds into current theoretical frameworks for war metaphors during the COVID-19 pandemic, where militarized language represents mobilization and the valorization of essential workers is omnipresent
Analyzing Presidential Rhetoric
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54 transcripts (22 from President Biden and 31 from President Trump were searched by 10 key terms: “wartime/war,” “battle,” “defeat/fight,” “frontline,” “defense production act/DPA,” “sacrifice,” “enemy,” “weapon,” and “normal/normalcy.”
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Figure 1 displays the percentage of briefings in which each of the terms related to war was used (excluding "normal/normalcy). Figure 2 displays the absolute number of terms used by President Trump (excluding "normal/normalcy) mapped by date of briefing.
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President Trump's rhetoric escalates from insisting on "normalcy" to declaring a "war" on an "invisible enemy" after COVID-19 is an official pandemic on March 11th
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His war rhetoric is marked by claims of authority through war and an adversarial approach structured by claims of potential "victory" and "defeat"
Figure 2
Figure 1.
Figure 1.
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Figure 1 displays the percentage of Biden's briefings in which each of the terms related to war was used (excluding "normal/normalcy). (a time mapping of briefings was not used because of the shorter time frame Biden has been in office)
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President Biden never used the term “invisible enemy” or a primarily adversarial approach
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Biden utilized war rhetoric instead as a method of understanding loss and highlighting the scope of death during the pandemic through consistent appeals to wartime, using the term war/wartime in 70% of his briefings
Conclusions & Impacts
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Both President Trump and President Biden consistently utilized war rhetoric to describe Coronavirus, but had different types of specific rhetoric
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President Trump’s language focused on the oppositional and victorious aspect of war and highlights the authority war provides; he utilized the metaphor when he wanted to demonstrate not only the urgency of the pandemic, but the merits of his own plans
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Biden’s approach utilized war rhetoric to add value and create urgency for the scope of death, displaying the ways that war is a metaphor to control chaos and “valorize” deaths
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By structuring perceptions of COVID-19 through war, societal and medical attachments to war are further engrained, where military notions of enemy, sacrifice, and victory are misused to mobilize duty and valorize sacrifice when the impacts of the virus should already have inherent value
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This description of COVID-19 as war implies that national duty and sacrifice are shared, when in reality, war is inherently unequal and violent
Works Consulted
Bates, Benjamin R. 2020. “The (In)Appropriateness of the WAR Metaphor in Response to SARS-CoV-2: A Rapid Analysis of Donald J. Trump’s Rhetoric.” Frontiers in Communication 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2020.00050.
Brandt, Allan M. 2020. No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880- 35th Anniversary Edition. Oxford, UNITED STATES: Oxford University Press, Incorporated. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vand/detail.action?docID=6236249.
Craig, David. 2020. “Pandemic and Its Metaphors: Sontag Revisited in the COVID-19 Era.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 23 (6): 1025–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549420938403.
Oyarzun, Yesmar. 2020. “Plantation Politics, Paranoia, and Public Health on the Frontlines of America’s COVID-19 Response.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 34 (4): 578–90. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12623.
“Remarks by President Biden on the Fight to Contain the COVID-19 Pandemic.” 2021. The White House. January 27, 2021. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/01/26/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-fight-to-contain-the-covid-19-pandemic/.
“Remarks at a White House Coronavirus Task Force Press Briefing.” March 22, 2020.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/DCPD-202000180/html/DCPD-202000180.htm.
Ross, Judith Wilson. 1989. “THE MILITARIZATION OF DISEASE: Do We Really Want a War on Aids?” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 72 (1): 39–58. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41178464.
Sontag, Susan. n.d. “Illness as Metaphor.” Accessed February 24, 2021. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/01/26/illness-as-metaphor/.
Terry, Jennifer. 2016. “Introduction to Attachments to War: Violence and the Production of Biomedical Knowledge in Twenty-First Century America.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2 (1): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v2i1.28833.