I, Trump

Abstract

This paper contextualizes Donald Trump’s political “Message” (Lempert and Silverstein 2012) within the current anti-intellectualism phenomenon in the Post-Truth era. Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech marks the beginning of the Trump era, as it introduces critical traits of his persona, message and political agenda to the general audience. From a Discourse Analysis approach, this paper considers Aristotelian modes of persuasion and the multimodal concept of “Message” (ibid.), to contribute to the literature on Trump’s political communication by focusing on the cult of personality and self-representation (i.e. non-politician, overachieving businessman, great leader). Trump built his candidacy and presidency around his persona, distancing himself from the Republican Party and traditional politicians. These strategies allowed Trump to evoke an Ethos capable of saving America. His personal fight against every enemy and threat encapsulates a simple and ingenuous dichotomy “I vs. them” with the populist intention of completing a hyperbolic task: Make America great again.

Commentary—Much ado About Something Else. Donald Trump, the US Stock Market, and the Public Interest Ethics of Social Media Communication

“…This emotional desensitization process applies to the general public opinion, and more specifically to stock markets, but for Trump’s supporters, on the contrary, emotional hyping has succeeded in turning political support into something closer to a personality cult (Reyes, 2020). Unsurprisingly, Twitter has emerged as a powerful political marketing tool for emotionally focused communication which is best exploited by neo-populist movements, which make use of a prevalently negative emotional tone (Calderón-Monge, 2017).…”

Dinamismo e identificación de participantes en la construcción discursiva de la nación estadounidense

“…The recent presidential administrations in the United States have drawn abundant research attention due to their disruption of the narratives that cemented the political constitution of the American nation (Hidalgo-Tenorio & Benítez-Castro, 2021;Khan et al, 2021;Reyes, 2020;Wang & Liu, 2018). Trump's rise as a political leader featured overt challenges to the pluralist constitutional order, combined with public displays of racist nativist rhetoric (Haverda & Talley, 2019;Holland & Fermor, 2021).…”

“…The transition from Trump's to Biden's administration represents a critical context for investigating the discursive construction of the nation through language. Although the construction of national discourses is a multimodal process involving various semiotic systems (van Leeuwen, 2008), language plays a privileged role in producing, advancing, and resisting representations of national subjects and national narratives (De Cillia et al, 1999;Reyes, 2011Reyes, , 2020. The connection between language and the nation is most patent in sociologically grounded linguistic theories, such as Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), where social order is conceived of as emerging out of the dialectic between meaning and social value (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2006;2014;Lukin, 2019).…”

‘If you do hold them to account, are you going to find yourself hitting more brick walls later?’: Royal Correspondents and royal news production

“…This takes on particular resonance in the current populist media landscape, where ‘post truth’ and ‘anti-expert’ sentiments are influencing people’s engagement with global news. Due to social media and other digital platforms restructuring how we engage with news (Fletcher, and Park, 2017), and populist world leaders who rely on a ‘cult of personality’ (Reyes, 2020), there is generally more public distrust in news organisations because they are seen as elitist. What is notable and somewhat contradictory here is that RC1 claims the public are investing their trust in another institution : the monarchy, which is perhaps the most elitist institution of all.…”