Ideological Manipulation in Twitter Communication: A Critical Stylistic Analysis of Donald Trump's Tweets

Donald Trump’s use of Twitter as a modality to defame opponents, antagonize media outlets and even glorify violence is an enduring legacy for political campaigns, presidential rhetoric and argumentative debates. This nontraditional use of social media as a political communication tool has invited Twitter’s fact-checking editorial decisions, alienated some of Trump’s supporters and attracted worldwide criticism. Using purposive sampling, the present paper employs the ten textual-conceptual functions of critical stylistics to analyze a dataset of Trump’s tweets on domestic and international political issues published between 2011 and 2020 and assembled from the monitor corpus Trump Twitter Archive. The critical stylistic analysis aims at uncovering Trump’s ideological outlook by identifying the extra layer of meaning in which the ideological evaluation is structured and exposing the way in which the resources of language are strategically deployed to influence and ideologically manipulate Trump’s followers’ experience of reality. Analysis reveals a network of lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic choices underlying Trump’s seemingly simple rhetoric. It signposts his ideological evaluation and constructs a world for his followers to desire, believe or fear. The study extends the application of critical stylistics to microblogging channels, with implications both for the linguistic make-up of political communication in Web 2.0 contexts and for the explanatory power of critical stylistics.

The Politics of the President’s Immigration Rhetoric

Although research on immigration politics is extensive, few scholars have systematically connected immigration politics to the president’s rhetoric over time. This is surprising since all modern presidents have referenced immigration in their public statements and presidents play a central role in setting the policy agenda. The primary purpose of this paper is to explain the president’s immigration rhetoric since 1953. Thus, we collect all presidential speeches on immigration through the Obama Administration, calculating the president’s monthly attention to immigration, and the relative negativity of the president’s remarks. We theorize that presidents’ motivation to speak about immigration policy is driven by the attention others devote to immigration policy, and key interventions in the immigration policy debate. Rhetorical tone, we think, is a function of the changing policy definition of immigration generated by Prop 187 and the Post-911 era. Our results show that the content of presidential rhetoric on immigration is indeed a product of these factors, providing us with clear evidence as to when the president devotes public attention to one of the central issues of American politics.

“A New and Coherent Strategy?” Presidential attention and rhetoric in the era of Indian self-determination

This paper explores the dynamics of presidential attention and rhetoric on Native issues and peoples during the self-determination era. Using data from all public statements and papers of the presidents from 1969 to 2016, the work analyzes the level of attention and rhetorical frames of each president from Nixon to Obama, with additional comments on Trump. The analysis reveals that most presidents have given relatively little attention to Native issues compared to their overall volume of public statements, with Democratic Presidents Clinton and Obama offering the most attention. In addition, presidents have used very different rhetorical frames to address Native issues and peoples in their public statements. Presidential rhetoric has been characterized by fluctuating attention and frames, and presidents have not consistently supported Nixon's “new and coherent strategy” throughout the self-determination era.

Trump’s Immigration Legacy

From the moment that he first announced his presidential candidacy until his final days in office, Donald Trump’s signature personal political cause was the restriction of immigration. Media coverage and public debate often focused on Trump’s rhetorical invocation of this issue and emphasized his opposition to undocumented immigration in particular, as symbolized by his famous proposal to build a wall across the southern border of the United States. But while the wall itself was not completed, the Trump administration worked aggressively through the federal bureaucracy to reduce all forms of immigration. The Trump administration’s record on immigration should therefore be understood as extending far beyond charged presidential rhetoric and sporadic wall-building efforts, leaving a much more consequential substantive legacy in American immigration policy that will not be quickly or easily reversed by future presidents.

Presidential Rhetoric in the COVID-19 Pandemic Era: Jokowi’s Aristotelian Rhetorical Leadership Models Before and After Implementation of Semi-Lock Down Policy

Presidential rhetoric evolved across the globe. Knowledge regarding the ways the presidents in democratic countries, which followed the presidential government system, such as Indonesia, advanced Aristotelian rhetorical leadership models in the covid-19 pandemic era, has, however, under-developed. Selecting president Joko Widodo (Jokowi) as a study case, this work raises the following question: what types of Aristotelian rhetorical leadership models performed by Jokowi before and after semi-lock down policy (PSBB) and how did he advance such rhetorical leaderships models? Focusing on such questions, this work adopts the president’s rhetorical leadership models, posited by Teten (2007) and Aristotelian rhetoric models, formulated by Gottweis (2007), as a conceptual framework. The materials posted in official Facebook pages of president Joko Widodo were extracted using the classic content and the qualitative and thematic content analyses. The findings are follows. Soon after the covid-19 pandemic outbreak took place in Indonesia, he attempted to develop the following types of rhetorical leadership, which are the identification, the authority and the directive rhetoric and the etho -logo-, and patho-centric Aristotelian rhetoric. Based on Indonesia case, this work offers the following knowledge contribution. It gives us new knowledge of 9 Aristotelian rhetorical leadership models, which are the etho-, logo- and patho-centric identification rhetoric, the etho-, logo- and patho-centric authority rhetoric and the etho-, logo- and patho-centric directive rhetoric models. Not merely the presidents, but also the local governments’ leaders could adopt such rhetoric models when they want to resolve diverse issues resulting from the pandemic.

Evolution of Russia’s ‘Others’ in Presidential Discourse in 2000–2020

In this chapter, the Others of Russia, reoccurring in the presidential discourse in 2000–2020, will be analysed. The key speeches reveal three distinctive ‘Others’ of the Russian state and nation, evolving in space and time: first, an ineffective politician in the 1990s, and, later, a corrupt bureaucrat, is framed as historical and internal Other, whose figure legitimizes the current power. Second, the metaphor of constant competition in the international relations describes the Other as economically stronger developed Western country, against which Russia’s ‘backwardness’ is mirrored, especially in the early 2000s. As the economic competition becomes harder to win and the quest for national unity intensifies, the emphasis turns to the third Other, the one holding fundamentally different values than the Self. Thus, it is argued that the metaphor of competition/conflict between Russia and its Others has undergone a qualitative transformation in the presidential rhetoric, reflecting change in Russia’s relative strength: instead of the previously admired economic performance, the times of conflict show that Russia’s true strength vis-à-vis its Others resides in the conservative, moral values and military might.

Presidential Rhetoric on Foreign Crises: George W. Bush on Georgia and Barack Obama on Ukraine

Presidential Rhetoric on Foreign Crises: George W. Bush on Georgia and Barack Obama on Ukraine This article offers a critique of the rhetorical responses of President George W. Bush to the 2008 Russia-Georgia conflict and of President Barack Obama to the 2014 Russia-Ukraine conflict. Its central objective is to identify parallels and differences between the situations calling for presidential rhetoric on the crises in Georgia and Ukraine and determine how the president’s reactions to the conflicts were similar or different, judging the responses against Theodore Otto Windt, Jr.’s analytical framework for foreign crisis rhetoric.