Rhetorical Physics and the Laws of Language: A Comparative Analysis of President Trump and President Macron at the United Nations 2025

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.