Pre-election debates in times of COVID-19: how the virus is used as a weapon in the war for the US presidency

Abstract

This paper proposes a pragma-rhetorical analysis of discourse-in-interaction, focusing on several ironic and sarcastic COVID-related verbal exchanges between the finalists to the most recent presidential election in the US. The sequences submitted to analysis were extracted from the first of the two debates that took place before the election. With a general “negative tone”, according to post-debate tolls, repeatedly labelled by commentators and journalists as “the worst presidential debate ever seen”, the confrontation between the candidates to presidency has numerous moments of reference to COVID-19, all turning the virus into a verbal weapon (Jankélévich 1964) of attack against the opponent. As the presidential ethos (Charaudeau 2005) and the formalised setting of pre-election debates (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2013) require, in this genre of discourse in interaction protagonists often resort to highly sophisticated forms of attack, which are aimed to damage the image of the opponent and benefit the one of the attackers, at the same time (Charaudeau 2015). The COVID-19 pandemic crisis represented a pivotal aspect of the election campaign strategies of the finalists to the 2020 run-off, presenting contrastive, conflicting perspectives, and is an extensive subject of controversy all through the interaction, despite having been dedicated one of the six sections of the debate. Candidates present strong opposing positions on basically all aspects concerning the novel coronavirus. When it comes to how it had been handled up to the moment of the debate, protagonists trace a clear line between praising the “phenomenal job” the actual president claims to have done and blaming the total lack of plan and basically no effective action for mitigating the spread of the virus, accused by the democrat candidate. The then president’s repeatedly expressed short shrift to wearing masks, as opposed to his opponent’s fervour towards it, the country’s present economic situation, or its borders policies, as they have been affected by the pandemic, are only a few of the contexts in which COVID-19 becomes a motive alleged in order to disqualify the other, up to the point where appellatives such as “clown” are being employed. Considering that talk-in-interaction, and especially face-to-face interaction, are defined by the particularity of discursive co-construction, as well as the negotiation of social and contextual identities (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2005), given the high percent of fresh talk (Goffman 1981), despite the permanent efforts put into face-work (Goffman 1967), pre-election debates are always an interesting space for undertaking any investigation, from a linguistic point of view, even more so in these undoubtedly “perilous times”, as the press likes to refer to the current phase of our history.