Author Identifier (ORCID)
Abstract
The paper features a textual analysis of the UN speeches made by the US President Donald Trump and by France’s President Macron. President Trump’s speech was made in the absence of a teleprompter and lasted almost an hour. President Macron’s speech was representative of a more standard diplomatic speech. Both speeches are analyzed using a variety of models and techniques. The analysis incorporates an exploration of Manin’s link of Zipf’s law to concepts from information theory and algorithmic complexity, Tao’s concepts applied to power laws, ‘E pluribus unum’, out of many, one, plus a completely new application of Villermaux’s universal law of fragmentation, applied in a lexical context. All theories are found to be supported. The comparative study shows that a ‘rhetorical physics’ approach can capture the “universality” of the Zipf–Mandelbrot law while simultaneously identifying “speaker-specific” rhetorical fingerprints. Macron uses “high-complexity” signaling for elite diplomatic audiences, while Trump uses “low-complexity” fragmentation for broader impact.
Keywords
Kolmogorov complexity, NLP, populism, rhetorical physics, sentiment analysis, Tao Universality, Trump and Macron 2025 UN speeches, Villermaux fragmentation, Zipf–Mandelbrot power law
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
7-1-2026
Article Number
447
E-ISSN
20760760
Volume
15
Issue
7
Publication Title
Social Sciences
Publisher
MDPI
School
School of Business and Law
RAS ID
101939
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Allen, D. E. (2026). Rhetorical physics and the laws of language: A comparative analysis of President Trump and President Macron at the United Nations 2025. Social Sciences, 15(7), https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci15070447