The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research Volume 5 Article 1 2-15-2020 President Trump’s First Term: The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research, Volume 5 Robert X. Browning Purdue University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ccse Part of the American Politics Commons Recommended Citation Browning, Robert X. (2020) "President Trump’s First Term: The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research, Volume 5," The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research: Vol. 5 , Article 1. Available at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ccse/vol5/iss1/1 This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. President Trump’s First Term: The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research, Volume 5 Cover Page Footnote To purchase a hard copy of this publication, visit: http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/titles/format/ 9781557538826 This article is available in The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ccse/vol5/iss1/1 “For almost 25 years I have watched the C-SPAN Video Library evolve into the nonpareil of data on congressional institutional behavior. Most instructors of the legislative process have utilized the C-SPAN’s material in the classroom with great success. Here, in this volume, Robert X. Browning once again demonstrates the myriad ways scholars can advance conventional wisdom on the U.S. Congress and institutions with the C-SPAN Video Library’s seemingly unlimited data. Debates, hearings, and floor speeches are just a few fascinating resources that are brilliantly used in this volume. These research studies offer several exiting new directions for scholars to consider in the future.” —Jonathan S. Morris, Department of Political Science, East Carolina University “The value of the C-SPAN Video Library as an incredibly rich research resource shines through in the breadth of analysis and insight on display in this latest collection of studies in the Year in C-SPAN Archives Research series. The range of congressional, presidential, and procedural footage of American political life available in the library is simply unparalleled in its depth and scope. What re- searchers make of these archives, and the insights they continue to yield, is only limited by their collective imagination and analytical ingenuity. Series editor and archives maestro Robert X. Browning must be commended for his tireless efforts to make these materials accessible to the wider research community.” —Erik P. Bucy, Marshall and Sharleen Formby Regents Professor of Strategic Communication, Texas Tech University, coauthor of Image Bite Politics: News and the Visual Framing of Elections PRESIDENT TRUMP’S FIRST TERM THE YEAR IN C-SPAN ARCHIVES RESEARCH Robert X. Browning, Series Editor The C-SPAN Archives, located adjacent to Purdue University, is the home of the online C-SPAN Video Library, which has copied all of C-SPAN’s television content since 1987. Extensive indexing, captioning, and other enhanced online features provide researchers, policy analysts, students, teachers, and public offi- cials with an unparalleled chronological and internally cross-referenced record for deeper study. The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research presents the finest inter- disciplinary research utilizing tools of the C-SPAN Video Library. Each volume highlights recent scholarship and comprises leading experts and emerging voices in political science, journalism, psychology, computer science, communica- tion, and a variety of other disciplines. Developed in partnership with the Brian Lamb School of Communication and with support from the C-SPAN Education Foundation, this series is guided by the ideal that all experimental outcomes, in- cluding those from our American experiment, can be best improved by directed study driving richer engagement and better understanding. Other titles in this series: The C-SPAN Archives: An Interdisciplinary Resource for Discovery, Learning, and Engagement Exploring the C-SPAN Archives: Advancing the Research Agenda Advances in Research Using the C-SPAN Archives The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research: Volume 4 PRESIDENT TRUMP’S FIRST TERM THE YEAR IN C-SPAN ARCHIVES RESEARCH Volume 5 edited by Robert X. Browning Purdue University Press • West Lafayette, Indiana Copyright 2020 by Robert X. Browning. Individual contributions are copyright of their respective authors. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Paper ISBN: 978-155753-882-6 ePDF ISBN: 978-161249-619-1 ePUB ISBN: 978-161249-618-4 Cover: National Archives Building (Png-Studio/iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images) To my river friends, who provide friendship and support CONTENTS FOREWORD ix PREFACE xi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv PART 1: C-SPAN AND HISTORICAL RESEARCH 1 Edited by Kathryn Cramer Brownell CHAPTER 1 Congressional Election Debates: Between the National and the Local 7 Stephen M. Llano CHAPTER 2 Political Gaslighting in the Climate Change Discourse Surrounding the 2016 Election 39 Farah Latif CHAPTER 3 Exploring the Oral Histories of African Americans Who Support Donald Trump 67 Ray Block Jr. and Christina S. Haynes PART 2: USING THE C-SPAN VIDEO LIBRARY TO STUDY CONGRESSIONAL RHETORIC 99 Edited by Logan Strother CHAPTER 4 Congress and Immigration Policy: Use of Moral Language Surrounding the Trump Presidency 103 Jennifer Hoewe and Mohammed Ziny viii CONTENTS CHAPTER 5 Building the Border Wall: Congressional Efforts to Support Trump’s Immigration Legacy 129 Carly Schmitt and Matthew L. Bergbower CHAPTER 6 Using the Judiciary: C-SPAN, Judicial Activism, and the Constitutive Function of Law in the Trump Era 157 Joseph Sery PART 3: C-SPAN IN CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP 185 Edited by Diana Zulli CHAPTER 7 Talking Half Answers: Examining President Donald Trump’s Joint Press Conference Equivocation During His First Year 191 Nichole A. Russell, Alexandra Johnson, and Patrick A. Stewart CHAPTER 8 Ignore the Hoaxsters and Unleash American Energy: President Trump’s Rhetoric on Climate Change 221 Heather W. Cann and Janel Jett CHAPTER 9 Nonverbal Cues in Congressional Speeches: A Wink and a Nod to Twitter Engagement 241 Amber Williams Lusvardi and Terri L. Towner CONCLUSION 267 ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS 269 INDEX 275 FOREWORD With the publi cation of this fifth collection of essays whose video analysis and data are derived from the C-SPAN Archives, we have the opportu- nity to once again appreciate and assess the contribution the Archives has made to our understanding of the political process, as well as to appreci- ate the changes that have occurred over time. As with the creation of the C-SPAN networks themselves, the nation and the scholarly community are indebted to the vision of Brian Lamb. Lamb recognized the potential of archiving C-SPAN programming and the power of making the archive available to the public. He presented his idea to Professor David Berg, the then head of the Department of Communication at Purdue University, who consulted with me, and we agreed that Professor Robert Browning, a specialist on Congress, would be an excellent fit to meet with Lamb and a group of Purdue faculty. At the time, I daresay none of us realized that Lamb’s successful recruitment of Browning as a willing collaborator would result in not only the enormous growth and success of the Archives but also a more than 30-year partnership. The C-SPAN Video Library began within the Purdue University School of Liberal Arts in 1987 under the leadership of Dr. Browning, who sought a way to archive and index the thousands of hours of congressional cover- age produced by the network every year. In the early days of the archive, because of the nature of the technology of the time, this meant physi- cally inserting and ejecting each videotape and tagging the contents for future retrieval. Currently, the Video Library records all three C-SPAN networks 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. The digitalization of video re- cording has dramatically transformed the recording, encoding, retrieval, and distribution processes, with the result that hundreds of thousands of hours of video have been made available to the public and the database ix x FOREWORD of C-SPAN programming has become an unparalleled chronological re- source on Congress and governmental affairs, with more than 250,000 digital hours of recording available. As of this writing, in this year alone more than 35 million videos have been viewed. C-SPAN’s achievements have not gone unrecognized. In 2010, following Peabody Awards in 1992 for its “ongoing service” of “providing access to information indispensable to an intelligent citizenry” and in 2000 for the series American Presidents: Life Portraits, C-SPAN received a third Peabody Award, this one for the Video Library. Reviewing the contributions to this volume and the four previous volumes, one cannot help but be impressed by the variety of scholarship included. The volumes feature contributions on discovery, learning, and engagement. Authors from a wide variety of epistemological approaches and disciplines employ the Video Library to explore an extraordinary range of subjects — for example, presidential debates, climate change, gen- der, judicial appointments, immigration, and crises — in a wide variety of contexts, floor debates, committee hearings, and town halls. And they do so with the full panoply of methodological approaches: traditional dis- course analysis, linguistic text analysis, video bite analysis, experiments, framing, and media effects, among others. This latest volume is no ex- ception,