LINGUISTIC MANIPULATIONS IN POLITICS: THE U.S. PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN 2024

The 2024 presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump provided a striking example of the use of diverse communication strategies in political discourse. This study examines in detail the rhetorical and linguistic tools used by both candidates, focusing on their methods of persuasion, audience engagement, and strategic argumentation. Kamala Harris emphasized empathy, consistency, and policy detail, which allowed her to portray herself as a compassionate and grounded leader capable of addressing complex social and economic challenges. Donald Trump, in turn, relied on the power of populist rhetoric, confidence, and simplicity of expression, which allowed her to effectively appeal to voters’ emotions and strengthen their loyalty. The analysis of the Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debates not only demonstrates the contrast between these two approaches but also allows us to identify key aspects of effective political communication in high-stakes situations. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the strategic use of language to influence public opinion. In addition, the study highlights important areas for further analysis, such as the long-term impact of rhetorical devices on voter behavior, as well as their role in shaping political culture, which allows us to assess how different approaches to communication can affect the stability of democratic processes and public trust across society.

After 56 years of internal armed conflict, Colombia undertook a transitional justice process and established the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (SJP or JEP in Spanish) as the court in charge of resolving cases related to the conflict. In 2018, the JEP opened a case to investigate gross violations committed against the Nasa Indigenous people and their ancestral territory during armed conflict. In the proceedings before the JEP, Nasa authorities and lawyers, most of whom are fluent in Spanish, have been purposely using linguistic constructions in Nasa Yuwe, their native language. This article explores the purpose behind this linguistic practice and its potential implication for the JEP and international law. Through critical discourse analysis and socio-linguistic analysis of legal documents, the article outlines different strategic uses of language by an ethnic minority, such as the Nasa, to strengthen and broaden their rights.

The article considers the way linguistic manipulation manifested itself in campaign speeches of Donald Trump. In order to be able to achieve the aim set, the author investigated the problem of political discourse in general, the nature of linguistic manipulation and, finally, found out how the latter was actualized by Donald Trump in his speeches within the presidential race. It is essential to clarify the notion of political discourse as a genre before looking into peculiarities of a presidential speech. This is due to the fact that political discourse has its comparatively established pattern of arrangement, its own style and structure. Manipulative functions of discourse create covert, disguised layer of linguistic data that is not easily separated from purely informational content. Linguistic manipulation is influence exercised by one person upon another or a group of people through speech and non-verbal means oriented toward achieving a certain goal that consists in changing of the addressee’s behavior, perceptions and intentions in the course of communicative interaction. The research shows that Donald Trump took an advantage of carefully constructed speeches aimed at manipulating the emotional sphere of the audience. The results of this scientific effort can be used for the further study of the problem of the linguistic manipulation strategies with the account of the non-verbal component of communication.

The present study reports on the latest and newest hot topic in the world, the United States Presidential Election. So, this is the newest attempt to explore and discover interrelation of discourse structures and ideological structures of Donald Trump’s acceptance speech in the United States Presidential Election, 2016 as a good sample of his language use in presidential campaign. In so doing, the current study utilizes Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) model to unmask the use of power and hidden strategies through language use. Also we analyze and uncover the experiential, relational and expressive values of the wordings, metaphors and grammatical structures of Trump’s language use. Furthermore, this study tries to show that there are linguistic traces that depict the strategy and ideology in the text as well. The findings of the present study can be provocative for English foreign language learners to promote their analytical skills. Therefore, findings of the present article can be applied to English Reading Comprehension and Reading Journalistic Texts classes.

We study the emergence of support for Donald Trump in Reddit’s political discussion. With almost 800k subscribers, “r/The_Donald” is one of the largest communities on Reddit, and one of the main hubs for Trump supporters. It was created in 2015, shortly after Donald Trump began his presidential campaign. By using only data from 2012, we predict the likelihood of being a supporter of Donald Trump in 2016, the year of the last US presidential elections. To characterize the behavior of Trump supporters, we draw from three different sociological hypotheses: homophily, social influence, and social feedback. We operationalize each hypothesis as a set of features for each user, and train classifiers to predict their participation in r/The_Donald.

Various speech constructions used in political discourse have repeatedly become the object of research in the framework of such sciences as linguistics, psychology, political science, etc. But modern linguists note that at this stage the problem of the lack of a unified universal classification of speech manipulative units is still relevant and there is no clearly defined terminology of speech strategies, tactics, techniques used for manipulation in various communicative situations. In this light, the authors of the following study set the goal: to identify scientific approaches to defining the notion of “speech manipulation”. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the authors carried out work to collect definitions of the phenomenon of “linguistic manipulation” in various fields of science, made a distinction between the definitions of “linguistic manipulation”, “persuasion”, “suggestion”, “informative influence”, “phatic influence”, “ linguistic demagogy”. As a result, when studying the problem in an interdisciplinary manner and in the works of both domestic and foreign authors, a difference is revealed in approaches to the definition of the term; the most complete definition of the phenomenon under study is revealed; a distinction is made between the term “speech manipulation” and terms that occur in related meanings or meanings close to manipulation.

Introduction to Special Forum on the Geographies of the Presidential Election Hilda E. Kurtz As the U.S. Presidential campaigns grew increasingly turbulent in the midwinter of 2016, the editorial team at Southeastern Geographer began to wonder how different geographers might make sense of the complex socio-spatial dynamics shaping the election season. Viewing the journal as a forum in which to wrestle with the complex geographies of the southern region of the U.S., we were particularly interested in the implications of the growing relevance of southern voters to presidential elections, as evidenced in stacking of Super Tuesday primaries to include four southern states (Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia) among the 12 states voting. At the same time, viewing the region relationally, we were interested to bring together voices that could iterate between a regional and national perspective on the presidential campaigns. To that end, we reached out to geographers from across the discipline and across the country whose work could help us make some sense of the twists and turns of this campaign season. We invited seasoned political geographers John Agnew and Fred Shelley and urban/cultural/political geographers Caroline Nagel Winders to draw on their respective areas of expertise. Together, these essays offer textured perspectives on the voting patterns and political discourses which distinguish the current presidential campaign season. John Agnew and Michael Shin, having drawn powerfully on geographical analysis to shed light on the rise and fall of Sergio Berlusconi in Berlusconi’s Italy: Mapping Contemporary Italian Politics (2008, Temple University Press), consider the parallels between Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump. Their essay offers a critical reflection on the dramaturgy of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, reading Trump’s ascendance in part against re-alignments of party politics. Dr. Agnew has invoked the concept of political dramaturgy as a way to consider the staging of political parties’ interests at different geographical scales (Agnew 1997), and the term resonates here in a way that sheds light on the “Theater of and Jamie Politics”. Fred Shelley and Ashley Hitt blend traditional techniques of electoral analysis (which Shelley helped pioneer, see Archer and Shelley 1986; Shelley 1984) [End Page 262] with data derived from social media to tease apart the demographics of support for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. It is well known by now that Sanders plays especially well to millennial voters. In an innovative and iterative approach, Shelley and Shin combine social media data with exit poll data to offer insight into the demographics of support for the candidate who has, by many accounts, used social media more effectively than any other candidate for U.S. office, ever. In an exploratory mode, and with caveats in mind about large but biased samples, Shelley and Hitt juxtapose the results of exit polls with the geography of face-book “likes” for Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in overwhelmingly Republican Alabama and Oklahoma. Caroline Nagel’s essay offers an historical lens on the mixed reception of immigrants into Southern communities (Winders 2013; Ehrkamp and Nagel 2014; Steusse and Coleman2014), and the deep ambivalence with which the U.S. as a whole has received refugees over recent decades. In an essay which richly situates conditions in southern states in relation to national discourses and anxieties, Nagel considers how it is that President Obama’s decision to admit a mere 10,000 refugees from critically war-torn Syria “create[d] such a fuss”. Nagel draws on her ongoing research into the reception of immigrants and refugees (Ehrkamp and Nagel 2012, 2014; Nagel 2013) in southern communities to unpack the appeal of national scale anti-Muslim, pro-border control discourses to Southern voters. Finally, Jamie Winders draws on her past work examining the figure of the immigrant within political and organizational discourse (Winders 2011) to sift through the “headlines, debate zingers, and soundbites” of the fractious presidential campaign season. She examines the immigration policy statements of the leading (remaining) candidates for the highest office in the U.S. tracing differential emphases on immigrants as sources of threat, as members of families, and as workers. Winders also notes a temporal dimension to the competing immigration stances of the presidential candidates, evaluating candidates...

Language plays a crucial role in shaping meaning, yet the same words can convey different messages depending on context, intent, and audience perception. This phenomenon is particularly evident in political discourse, where leaders strategically use language to persuade, influence, and control narratives. While extensive research has examined political rhetoric, there remains a gap in understanding how key political figures manipulate discourse to align with their agendas. This study aims to analyze the underlying themes in the speeches of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak during the 2011 Arab Spring Uprising and British politician Andrea Leadsom’s Prime Minister campaign speech on July 4, 2016. Using a discourse analysis methodology, the study examines how linguistic choices, rhetorical strategies, and implicit messaging shape audience interpretation. The findings reveal a significant disparity between the explicit content of these speeches and their underlying political intentions, highlighting the strategic use of language in crisis and leadership narratives. This research contributes to the field of political communication by offering insights into how discourse is employed as a tool of persuasion and control, emphasizing the need for critical analysis in interpreting political rhetoric. Keywords: Discourse; political discourse; speech; topic identification.

This study critiques President Bush’s speeches on the Iraq war and terrorism through the lens of Chilton's emotional theory, highlighting the complex relationship between language emotion and politically persuasive belief. The study, which deconstructed five significant speeches between 2001 and 2003, reveals how Bush used emotional rhetoric to stir public sentiment and justify military action. Using a rigorous approach to discourse analysis, the study identified eight vital emotional components, such as fear of attack and safety. It showed. It showed that 59% of the sentences analyzed were designed to evoke specific emotional responses. The findings underscore the strategic use of language in political discourse, demonstrating how emotional manipulation serves as a means to influence public opinion and legitimize the legitimacy of controversial policies. Moreover, Political speech is a powerful linguistic tool in world politics that can identify the destiny of countries under the conditions of war. Therefore, it is worth investigating the strategies that politicians apply in their political speeches to achieve their political goals. This study critically examines President Bush's speech on the Iraq war and terrorism through Chilton's emotional theory. The study shows that political discourse is not just a means for information but a powerful tool for shaping public sentiment and guiding decision-making. Using emotional language, Bush effectively instilled feelings of fear and belief that were critical to winning public support for military action. The dominant themes of lingering memories of 11 served to incite fear, while assertions about American military strength and security boosted confidence.

(1) The study investigated the social network surrounding the hashtags #maga (Make America Great Again, the campaign slogan popularized by Donald Trump during his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns) and #trump2020 on Twitter to better understand Donald Trump, his community of supporters, and their political discourse and activities in the political context of the 2020 US presidential election. (2) Social network analysis of a sample of 220,336 tweets from 96,820 unique users, posted between 27 October and 2 November 2020 (i.e., one week before the general election day) was conducted. (3) The most active and influential users within the #maga and #trump2020 network, the likelihood of those users being spamming bots, and their tweets’ content were revealed. (4) The study then discussed the hierarchy of Donald Trump and the problematic nature of spamming bot detection, while also providing suggestions for future research.

This paper looks at the use of African indigenous languages in social media as a positive mechanism to decolonise the Internet. Specifically, the study analysed the use of Gikuyu language as an indigenous language to establish whether Kenyan youths use indigenous languages on social media platforms, with an aim of highlighting the need to promote African languages on social media as a means to decolonise the Internet. The case-based study used a mixed-method research design. Using purposive sampling, the study employed focus group discussions to gather qualitative data, while employing stratified sampling to conduct a survey using a questionnaire for quantitative data. Random sampling was used to identify 300 high school participants aged between 15 and 25 years in a public school in rural Kenya. Using Herman Batibo’s African Linguistic Dynamism Theory to capture the diversity and dynamism in language use and Blumler and Katz’s Uses and Gratifications Theory to account for the strategic use of language to meet one’s needs, the study found that Gikuyu language is rarely used by the youth on social media. This prompts the need to promote the use of African languages through policy, electronic media, publishing of fictional books and adoption of youth speaks fora.

This chapter delves into the theorization of political discourse and its role in democratic politics. It discusses two main lines of thinking which are deliberative action and the discourse theory (or agonistic pluralism); then, it adopts the critical realist theory of hegemony as the third position to understand the nature of political discourse. It first defines democratic politics as moments of overt conflict and, in so doing, proposes a conflictual understanding of politics. In the second part, it questions if either deliberative action or discourse theory is compatible with the aims of this study and discusses some of their shortcomings. In the last part, the critical realist theory of hegemony (Joseph, 2000) is taken as the basis and the operationalization of it with the analytical tools of critical discourse analysis is proposed. The first line of thinking sees rational deliberation as the core of a democratic political system, it tries to define the rules for ideal communication and proposes a theory of communicative action and discourse ethics to approximate to this ideal condition (Rawls, 1971; Habermas, 1984; Cohen, 1997; Fishkin, 2011), while the second line sees antagonism and dissensus as necessary components of a democracy and therefore adopts a conflict-based understanding of politics (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Mouffe, 2000; Rancière, 1998; Arditi, 2007). In the first part, a definition for democratic politics in terms of a conflictual understanding of politics is provided. This will be the key aspect as conflict stands at the centre of the analysis. In the second part, the premises and weaknesses of deliberative action are discussed on the basis of a conflictual understanding of democratic politics. This conceptualization benefits from the agonistic view which is championed by Laclau and Mouffe. Then, it is also questioned whether the discourse theory is compatible for the selected case, although we partly benefit from it in order to show the weaknesses of the deliberative approach. In the third and last part, the critical realist theory of hegemony is discussed and adopted in order to champion the view that the political discourses of the governing party are based on the structural hegemony of neoliberalism and the chance of maintaining the executive power depends on its capacity to sustain a discursive hegemony through the strategic use of language.

Political discourse can be understood as the language and communication strategies used by politicians, political parties, government, and media to articulate their perspectives, promote their interests and shape public opinion. In achieving these, political actors leverage the foregrounded knowledge of their audience by alluding to various existing texts and themes that frame their speeches in a way that presents them in a good light to their audience. This concept, known as intertextuality, arms the textual and thematic repertoire of various political actors and provides the basis for an ideological connection between politicians and the masses. This study employs Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics to scrutinize the intertextual dimensions in Peter Obi's political discourse, focusing on linguistic choices at the levels of metafunction (ideational, interpersonal and textual), lexicogrammar, register genre, and context of the situation. Gathering data from online newspaper publications, Facebook and Twitter posts, as well as campaign and conference speeches, the research reveals how Obi strategically deploys intertextual references to convey goodwill and position himself as a transformative figure—a "Messiah" addressing Nigeria's multifaceted challenges. The analysis underscores Obi's adeptness in tailoring linguistic choices to specific contexts and audiences, portraying him as intimately connected to the concerns of the masses. Significantly contributing to a sparse literature on the intertextual analysis of Obi's speeches, this research sheds light on the intricate dynamics of Nigerian political discourse, offering valuable insights into the strategic use of language in shaping political identity and fostering connections with the public.

Knowledge of the laws of manipulation, analysis of the mechanism of this phenomenon in conjunction with a proper understanding of the state and demands of society can help any political leader in the struggle for power and the promotion of their own political interests. The key to successful manipulation in political discourse is the realization of the paramount importance of the ultimate goal. Depending on it, the strategy, tactics and methods of manipulation will be chosen. Careful selection of linguistictools will help to keep manipulative processes out of the realm of awareness and ensure their effective effectiveness. Manipulation is understood as hidden coercion, programming of thoughts, intentions, feelings, and so on. The main purpose of manipulation is to create a profitable policy of the world in the minds of potential voters and reduce the ability of recipients to think critically, creating the illusion of free choice and more. Language manipulation should be understood as the purposeful use of thepeculiarities of language use, which contributes to the emergence in the minds of recipients of illusions and delusions that motivate him to act in a way that is beneficial to the manipulator. It should be noted that any successfully completed communication in which the speaker does not express his intentions openly, is a successful act of language manipulation. The very phenomenon of manipulation in political discourse is given a special place, as it can cause long-term consequences and have a strongeffect on society. Obviously, further study of the phenomenon of manipulation in the linguopragmatic aspect is needed, describing not only the different types of manipulative influence, but also how they contribute to the success / failure of policies and for what reason one or another effect is achieved. The main approaches to the definition of "speech manipulation" and highlights and systematizes the dominant approaches inthe Ukrainian scientific linguistic tradition to it, namely: narrow and broad approaches, and at the same time considers scientific linguistic approaches that consider speech manipulation from different angles. . The main focus is on different classification approaches to this issue, as well as the main criteria for classifying types of speech manipulation (by the nature of the interaction of the addressee and the addressee; by the criterion of awareness of speech actions of the addressee and the addressee; by theorientation of the addressee; by the nature of information transformations) . Modern approaches to their delimitation are highlighted. At the same time, the levels at which speech manipulation is performed (phonetic, lexical and grammatical) are considered.

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation had been investigating the relationship between Russian agents and members of Trump’s presidential campaign since July 2016 out of suspicions that the President-elect worked with Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which became a major news event in American media. The headlines from news media outlets illustrate the strategic use of language to shape opinions and frames. Conducted with the tools of System Functional Linguistics, in particular, the appraisal and ideation resources, based on the framing theory of Journalism Studies, this research aims to answer the two research questions: (1) What frames did The New York Times and Fox News construct in their coverage of the Mueller investigation? (2) What linguistic strategies did The New York Times and Fox News use respectively to construct their frames? It was found that The New York Times uses fewer evaluative tools than Fox News, but the expression of attitudes draws on the context in which they are presented and evaluation is expressed in a more sophisticated and refined manner. Fox News is more straightforward without hiding its own opinion and biases. This research is important in further understanding of the American media and their linguistic strategies in forming manipulative frames.