"They're killing us!" - Critical Discourse Analysis of Donald Trump's Tweets

Abstract

This article focuses on the linguistic aspects of Trump's political discourse, as reflected in some of his tweets targeted at specific countries, political groups and immigrants, posted on Twitter between 2015 and 2019. A qualitative research design, using a descriptive and interpretative analysis, has been applied in this study, which is part of a broader research on Trump's discourse. The underlying theoretical framework is the one provided by Norman Fairclough's 3-dimensional model of discourse. The current study, thus, aims to critically explore both the main linguistic features present in the corpus analysed and the ideological aspects possibly associated with Trump's selection of linguistic means. One of the underlying considerations in this research endeavour is that the ideological standpoint is a particularly important one, since presidential discourses are typically molded by their authors' status and authority. It is hoped that this work will make a contribution to the field of Critical Discourse Analysis applied to political discourse, in the current period.