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Donald Trump and his opponents as represented in his 2016 US presidential campaign retweets: A critical discourse analysis

Document Type : Research article

Authors

1 Ph.D. Student, Department of Linguistics, Marvdasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Marvdasht, Iran.

2 Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, Marvdasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Marvdasht, Iran

3 Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, Marvdasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Marvdasht, Iran.

Abstract

Donald Trump’s 106 handpicked tweets of his supporters in terms of his retweets, during his 2016 presidential campaign starting from the day before his candidacy announcement, June 15th, 2015, until the day he took office on January 20th, 2017, were explored in accordance with the Fairclough’s approach to CDA: (1) to identify the specific linguistic, discursive, and social features employed in Donald Trump’s retweets; (2) to explore how Donald Trump is represented via his retweets; (3) and to examine how Donald Trump’s opponents are represented via his retweets. The findings revealed a severe authenticity issue regarding Trump’s retweets since numerous Twitter accounts from which he retweeted did not exist on Twitter. Additionally, his representation was mainly us vs. them. He was attributed with Godlike characteristics while his opponents were poorly portrayed. Moreover, his representation was concentrated on his personal character, his popularity, and his financial success. From the discourse perspective, his discourse was simplistic, populistic, informal, and repetitious filled with powerful words describing nationalistic and economic–oriented ideologies. Generally, the discourse struggled to legitimize Trump as the prime candidate and delegitimize his opponents due to the people’s discontent with the career politicians. This study indicated that Trump’s presence as a celebrity politician was due to the need in society for a novel character to relieve traditional politics while his language simultaneously transformed the existing social order in the realm of American politics

Keywords

References
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Journal of Language Horizons
Volume 8, Issue 1 - Serial Number 19
June 2024
Pages 63-91
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