Performing Covid-19: Trump’s Shift of Rhetoric During the Coronavirus Crisis in the Usa

Abstract

The article studies American President Donald Trump’s discourse within the period between January and March, 2020, when he had to respond to the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak in the USA. The material of the research was collected through continuous sampling and contains the president’s tweets, interviews and White House briefing conferences. The method applied to analyze the sample is three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) that ensures achieving the purpose of the study, namely to explore Trump’s discursive strategies employed to address the coronavirus crisis, to preserve the politician’s domination in the public discourse and to react to the criticisms of his opponents and oppositional mass media that pictured the virus as a dire threat and accused the president of inefficacy and negligence. The analysis has revealed a shift in Trump’s discursive strategies starting from the middle of March, 2020: while in January the president attempted to maintain the social order by presenting the coronavirus as ordinary, emphasizing US authorities’ success in curbing its spread and accusing opponents of alarmism, in late March, however, Trump admitted the sweeping scope of the pandemic and even claimed his prior knowledge of its danger. Thus, the research has uncovered the president’s strategies used to recontextualize his actions towards the ongoing events and to create new representations of social reality aimed at hegemonizing his opponents’ discourse that conquered the US public sphere.