Ideology and Power in Presidential Speech

Abstract

Despite the fact that he frequently produced controversial statements in the public domain, Donald Trump has attracted researchers’ attention to investigate his political speech. His controversies may be seen as a potential area that brings linguistic currency, which may trigger ideological implications due to its condensed power. This paper aims to report how such a controversial speech served a certain degree of power that represented a particular ideology. Wodak’s discursive strategies were applied to analyze 15 data derived from Trump’s speech as his response to the idea of proposing Jerusalem as the capital city. The results show that nomination or referential, predication, perspectivation, argumentation and intensification strategies were applied and essentially framed within positive self-presentation. The fact that positive self-presentation mantles ideology and power via controversial statements galvanizes propositions, strengthening the acceptance of controversy in a different fashion. Based on the findings, it is recommended to further investigate power and ideology representation, which transpires ironical expressions as positive self-representations. Such ironical expressions may conceptualize the nature of ideological power in various patterns in different contexts.