STRATEGIES AND TACTICS OF VERBAL MANIPULATION EMPLOYED BY D. TRUMP (ON THE TOPIC OF THE US IMMIGRATION CRISIS ON THE SOUTHERN BORDER)

Abstract

The article describes the strategies and tactics of verbal manipulation used by the 45th President of the United States Donald Trump on the social networks “Facebook”, “Twitter” and “Instagram” during the summer of 2019. The empirical basis was made up of the posts of the politician on the topic of the immigration crisis on the US-Mexico border. A total of 20 posts had been analyzed. The aim of the study was to describe the most frequent strategies and tactics of verbal manipulation in the political Internet discourse of D. Trump and to identify the means of their representation. The urgency of the study could be explained by the growing interest in Internet communication. Special attention is drawn to the interaction of politicians with the electorate in virtual environment. The paper uses the methods of comparison and analysis of scientific literature and interpretation of the data of the discourse analysis of the posts. The theoretical analysis and the generalization of literature are carried out in order to reveal the currently existing definitions of strategies and tactics of verbal manipulation in political discourse and their classifications. The main task was to classify utterances according to the strategies and tactics used by the speaker. In the process of classification, it was necessary to identify certain characteristics according to which an utterance can be referred to a particular tactic belonging to a specific strategy. The study was conducted within the framework of the concept of communicative strategies and tactics in the mainstream of pragmalinguistics. Structural intent and content analyses were used to identify the typical features of strategies and tactics. The critical discourse analysis was used within the framework of the contextual approach. Each tactic was analyzed on the lexico-semantic, lexico-grammatical, syntactic and pragmatic levels. The study showed that the strategies of self-presentation, discrimination, self-defense and agitation were the most numerous. The manipulative strategy and the strategy of forming the emotional mood of the addressee were presented as concomitant due to their application to reinforce other strategies.