Speaking "Transgressive Truth": Assessing the political extremism of Donald Trump’s campaign discourse during the 2015/2016 US Presidential Pre-primaries and Primaries

Abstract

Donald Trump’s use of language during the 2015-2016 US Presidential Elections sparked outpourings of commentary and analyses from media and academia alike, with many making correlations between Trump and a new radical anti-establishment, or ‘alt-right’, politics. Considering his uses of language during this period as political discourse , this study assesses whether Trump integrated this transgressive political ideology into his campaign rally speeches, from June 2015 to July 2016 during the US Presidential pre-primaries and primaries elections.Through critically analyzing a corpus of speeches from these periods, this study contends that Trump used ‘modular’ speeches premised upon an ideological foundation of competition, success, and failure. The modules of these speeches depend upon correlated and amalgamated reasoning and image association to argue for the necessity of Trump’s own candidacy as a ‘remedy’ to a ‘failed country’. His language tapped into existing discriminatory beliefs through the use of these correlated ‘spaces of projection’ and appealed to audiences through the use of simple narratives of problem and solution. This study has also found that Trump shared features but diverged from alt-right discourses in several respects, and identifies major discursive features of Trump’s language from this period.