Try this assignment yourself—pick one of the four puzzlers or do all four, use an AI tool to research the context, and share your analysis in the comments. What rhetorical strategies did you discover? How did the AI research process change your understanding? Let's collectively explore how these tools can sharpen rather than dull our critical thinking.
Introduction to Rhetorical Puzzlers
This assignment challenges you to analyze four quoted statements through contextualizing them historically and situationally using rhetorical analysis techniques. You can find the quotes used in the puzzlers using an AI search engine Perplexity. Just cut and paste the quote and fiddle a bit. You'll examine how public figures craft language to shape perception, deflect criticism, and achieve strategic goals.
By identifying specific rhetorical elements in each puzzler, you'll develop critical skills for analyzing contemporary public discourse. By using Perplexity or an equivalent search engine, you’ll apply AI language literacy in a task that asks you to develop your own understanding and then share it with your community.
Core Task
For each of the four puzzler quotes, using a Perplexity-quality AI to uncover information sites, you will identify and analyze:
Scene: The context/situation in which the statement was made
Speaker: Who is speaking
Mood: The emotional tone or atmosphere
Mode: The rhetorical grammatical strategy being employed
Tensions: Contradictions, ambiguities, gaps, or conflicts within the statement
Rhetorical Function: What the statement aims to accomplish
The Four Puzzlers
Puzzler 1: The Television Persona (from 1984)
"If I were portrayed on television, I hope I'd come across as somewhat of a nice gentleman. But I don't know, necessarily, that that particular series would do very well."
Scene: The context/situation in which the statement was made
Speaker: Who is speaking
Mood: The emotional tone or atmosphere
Mode: The rhetorical grammatical strategy being employed
Tensions: Contradictions, ambiguities, gaps, or conflicts within the statement
Rhetorical Function: What the statement aims to accomplish
How does this use of the word “television” in its time period differ from the same word in 2025? HINT: Any good LLM would offer the opportunity to discuss this historical difference for a few minutes. How do public figures craft language to shape perception, deflect criticism, and achieve strategic goals in today’s rhetorical reality?
Puzzler 2: The Responsibility Chain
"I hire a contractor. The contractor then hires the subcontractor. They have people. I don't know. I don't remember, that was so many years ago, 35 years ago."
Scene: The context/situation in which the statement was made
Speaker: Who is speaking
Mood: The emotional tone or atmosphere
Mode: The rhetorical grammatical strategy being employed
Tensions: Contradictions, ambiguities, gaps, or conflicts within the statement
Rhetorical Function: What the statement aims to accomplish
Examine how this statement uses temporal layers to create distance from responsibility. How do public figures craft language to shape perception, deflect criticism, and achieve strategic goals? Find other figures who demonstrate this rhetorical profile more subtly. Find the exceptions that prove the rule, the politician who accepts responsibility.
Puzzler 3: The Media Spotlight
"I hire a general manager to help run a billion-dollar business and there's a squib in the papers. I hire a coach for a football team and there are 60 or 70 reporters calling to interview me."
Scene: The context/situation in which the statement was made
Speaker: Who is speaking
Mood: The emotional tone or atmosphere
Mode: The rhetorical grammatical strategy being employed
Tensions: Contradictions, ambiguities, gaps, or conflicts within the statement
Rhetorical Function: What the statement aims to accomplish
Analyze what this comparison reveals about media values and public attention—and how powerful people use their power to get attention (whose wedding was that recently in Venice was it)?. How do public figures craft language or other symbols to draw media attention? Find other figures who demonstrate this rhetorical strategy.
Puzzler 4: The Strategic Denial
"I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it. The Radical Left Democrats are having a field day, however, trying to hook me into whatever policies are stated or said. It is pure disinformation on their part."
Scene: The context/situation in which the statement was made
Speaker: Who is speaking
Mood: The emotional tone or atmosphere
Mode: The rhetorical grammatical strategy being employed
Tensions: Contradictions, ambiguities, gaps, or conflicts within the statement
Rhetorical Function: What the statement aims to accomplish
Tease out what the speaker "must have known" even to produce this denial. Consider how strategic ignorance functions as a rhetorical device. What figures use a related but different strategy—flooding the zone with esoteric, fast-paced gobbledygook?
Key Writing Strategies
Map or bubble wrap what you learned from each puzzler about the core question: How do public figures craft language to shape perception, deflect criticism, and achieve strategic goals?
Consider other material to elaborate or extend your map.
Explore sources to understand the full context of each statement
Assignment Options
Option 1: Academic Analysis
Approach the puzzlers as scholarly texts, applying formal rhetorical frameworks and terminology. Structure your analysis systematically, using concepts like "performative humility," "plausible deniability," and "rhetorical distancing." Develop and illuminate a thesis statement.
Option 2: Investigative Approach
Treat the puzzlers as statements requiring fact-checking and contextualization to tell a story about a breed of politician. Broaden the scope to include enabler figures (e.g., Roy Kohn). Present the historical context of each statement, create relevant timelines, and assess claims against documented facts. Create a rhetorical profile of the modern politician, using evidence uncovered via an AI search engine.
Option 3: Socratic Method
Use a question-answer format to demonstrate a thought tool your peers can use to detect rhetoric that tries to shape perception, deflect criticism, and achieve strategic political goals. EXAMPLE: What does it mean when a politician says good things about somebody else? Birds of a feather? Use the example utterances in this assignment and find others by the same or by other politicans. Verify and document thoroughly.
Assessment Criteria
Your project will be evaluated based on:
Depth and specificity of rhetorical analysis (25%)
Clarity, Coherence, Creativity, Genre Conventions (10%)
Insights into how these rhetorical strategies function in public discourse (15%)
Quality of your project log and reflective analysis (50%)
Choose an approach that best showcases your analytical strengths working in an AI Nexus with peers while revealing the sophisticated rhetorical maneuvers at work in these seemingly simple statements that shape our nation.
Labor intensive indeed.
Donald Trump’s statement about Project 2025 is a textbook example of how grammatical structure and rhetorical strategy can be used to distance oneself from controversy while simultaneously attacking political opponents. The language he employs is saturated with negation and denial, beginning with the categorical assertion, “I know nothing about Project 2025.” This opening not only asserts ignorance but establishes a tone of complete disassociation. The subsequent clauses reinforce this distance through a cascade of negative constructions: he claims not to have seen the project, professes ignorance as to who is responsible for it, and insists he “had nothing to do with it.” Each phrase is carefully constructed so that Trump is always the subject of verbs expressing ignorance or non-involvement, never of verbs that would suggest agency or complicity.
This distancing is further cemented by the way Trump contrasts Project 2025 with the “very well received Republican Platform,” which he describes as “our” platform. By drawing this contrast, he not only distances himself from Project 2025 but also aligns himself with the official and presumably more legitimate party agenda. The effect is to create a clear grammatical and conceptual boundary between himself and the external initiative, placing all responsibility for Project 2025 elsewhere.
Having established this distance, Trump pivots to the offensive, using the opportunity to attack his opponents. He attributes the controversy to “Radical Left Democrats,” a phrase loaded with negative connotations, and accuses them of “having a field day” by trying to associate him with the policies of Project 2025. This move shifts the agency away from himself and onto his adversaries, portraying them as the true actors in this narrative. He further escalates the attack by labeling their efforts as “pure disinformation,” framing the entire controversy as a dishonest and manipulative ploy rather than a legitimate policy debate.
The grammatical relationships in Trump’s utterance consistently reinforce his lack of accountability. Project 2025 is always the object of negated verbs or is described in terms that emphasize Trump’s ignorance and lack of involvement. The agency is shifted to unnamed others—those in charge of the project—or to his political opponents, who are depicted as orchestrating a campaign of misinformation. This cumulative effect of repeated denial, indefinite references, and adversarial labeling is to construct a rhetorical shield around Trump, ensuring that he is not seen as the agent of any controversial action. Instead, he is positioned as the target of unfounded attacks, a stance that not only absolves him of responsibility but also rallies his supporters against a common enemy.
In sum, Trump’s grammatical and rhetorical choices in this statement are not accidental. They are carefully orchestrated to maximize distance from Project 2025, to avoid any semblance of accountability for its contents, and to turn the controversy into an opportunity to delegitimize and attack his political opponents. Through this sustained pattern of negation, contrast, and blame-shifting, Trump crafts a narrative in which he is both uninvolved and unfairly targeted, a familiar posture that has characterized much of his public communication.