DISCURSIVE STRATEGIES OF POPULISM IN DONALD TRUMP’S RHETORIC

Abstract

This article focuses on the complex study of Donald Trump’s political rhetoric during his presidencies. It gives a brief overview of modern research in this area. The politician’s rhetoric is understood as a unique personalized system of idiolect and idiostyle, as an inseparable complex of lexical, grammatical, stylistic, and pragmatic means employed to construct and entrench ideologically charged meanings aimed at influencing the audience. Drawing on a corpus of speeches, debates, and interviews from the current decade, the study analyzes the individual characteristics of Donald Trump’s political discourse that distinguish it from the discursive practices of other Republican politicians. The analysis identifies a set of semantic, grammatical, stylistic, and pragmatic markers of the politician’s rhetoric, including ideologically loaded vocabulary, the use of informal colloquial language, fragmented and simplified syntax, highly expressive stylistics dominated by evaluative and affective markers, as well as the frequent use of directive, commissive, and expressive speech acts. Taken together, these features testify to the dominance of populist strategies in Donald Trump’s political discourse. This present study also argues that Donald Trump’s rhetoric may be characterized as a specific form of rally-style political rhetoric, that is an emotionally charged, performative mode of communication employed at large public gatherings to establish strong affective bonds with the audience, mobilize supporters, and present the politician as an authentic and charismatic leader. Trump’s narratives are cognitively and linguistically simplified, often lacking logical coherence and exhibiting a high degree of theatricality; they appeal primarily to shared identity rather than to detailed policy debate, foregrounding spectacle and direct emotional engagement with the audience.