Presidential rhetoric

This study provides a comparative perspective on the ways U.S. presidents have communicated the idea of American exceptionalism for American and international audiences. I argue that U.S. presidents strategically highlight this culturally potent idea in both domestic and international speeches, but in different ways. To examine these dynamics, I content-analyzed presidential speeches delivered in domestic and foreign contexts since 1933. The study provides comparative perspectives on (a) how themes of American Exceptionalism have been used in domestic versus international speeches and (b) how U.S. presidents seek out diplomatic ways to “translate” American exceptionalism to communicate this potent national idea to foreign audiences.

To understand Trump’s populist appeal we must go beyond linguistic form to focus on the semiotic and ideological dimensions of language use. The rise of populist and anti-intellectual discourses have many scholars and educators concerned about the state of academic freedom. Since the election of Trump, the rise of anti-intellectualism has become a more urgent reality. Unfortunately, the vast majority of political scientists and media pundits took a major credibility hit when they wrongly predicted a Trump loss. This was partially due to their narrow assumptions and methods for gauging people’s attitudes and beliefs, reflected in a restrictive
understanding about the nature and function of how language works, namely relying on linguistic form. A reliance on polls and transcript splices proved limited.

Razfar, Aria. 2017. “Process the Trump.” Anthropology News website, May 18, 2017. doi: 10.1111/AN.460

In this essay, I argue through analysis of the genre of campaign announcements that third-party presidential candidates have rhetorical norms of their own that address their unique challenges as political outsiders. Specifically, I contend that their announcements are a variant of the announcement genre and are warranted by the recurring situational barriers, perceived strategic constraints, and overall purposes for minor-party presidential campaigns. In addition to offering an alternative theory of third-party announcements based on analysis of over 40 such statements, I provide three case studies—including statements by Progressive Henry Wallace, Independent Eugene McCarthy, and Reform Party nominee Patrick Buchanan—to demonstrate this variant of the genre. Finally, I conclude by discussing the implications of this study for understanding third-party rhetoric.

From content analyses to effects studies to rhetorical and critical analyses, we have a growing body of scholarship exploring political humor on United States late night television. The growing body of political humor scholarship reveals how late night comedy characterizes politics and politicians. What has not yet been explored, however, is how United States’ politicians characterize late night television humor. Recognizing Saturday Night Live (SNL) as a unique type of late night television political humor in the USA, this essay turns to SNL mentions in United States’ presidential remarks, including mentions by Presidents George Bush, George W. Bush, Gerald Ford, and Bill Clinton. Directions for future scholarship in this area are also proposed.

The United States has long grappled with the question of how to maintain an appropriate combination of religion and politics in the public sphere. The current electoral cycle is no different, as Presidential candidates attempt to negotiate both the political and religious landscapes. This essay introduces a special forum on rhetoric and religion in contemporary politics and touches on some recent instances of how religious differences have played out in the current political environment. Some of the issues discussed include the separation of church and state, Mitt Romney’s membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), Rick Santorum’s conception of the “war on religion,” and the controversy over contraceptives at religious institutions and Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on a Georgetown law student.

The purpose of the current study is to identify the readability and simplicity of Donald J. Trump's speech in his media interviews and debates during the 2016 U.S. presidential primary campaign. Ten interviews and debates broadcast on different television networks were analyzed using three of the most commonly used readability formulas: Flesch-Kincaid, SMOG and Gunning-Fog. The analysis revealed that a fourth-to fifth-grade level of education (9-11 year-olds) is required to understand Trump's language. Ten additional interviews and debates of other candidates in the presidential election of 2016, from both the Republican and the Democratic parties, were analyzed, using the same readability formulas, in order to shed additional light on Trump's results. This analysis showed that the average score of all the other candidates was at a ninth-grade level (14-15 year-olds). Furthermore, the study reveals that Trump's sentences and words were significantly shorter and less complex than those of any other candidate. This study suggests that Trump uses low readability and simplicity of language as a rhetorical strategy to gain popularity, in accordance with the trend of anti-intellectualism.

This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the political dimensions of civil religion in the United States. By employing an original social-psychological theory rooted in semiotics, it offers a qualitative and quantitative empirical examination of more than fifty years of political rhetoric. Further, it presents two in-depth case studies that examine how the cultural, totemic sign of ‘the Founding Fathers’ and the signs of America’s sacred texts (the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence) are used in attempts to link partisan policy positions with  notions that the country collectively holds sacred. The book’s overarching thesis is that America’ s civil religion serves as a discursive framework for the country’s politics of the sacred, mediating the
demands of particularistic interests and social solidarity through the interaction of social belief and institutional politics like elections and the Supreme Court. The book penetrates America’s unique political religiosity to reveal and unravel the intricate ways in which politics, political institutions, religion and culture intertwine in the United States.

В монографии впервые в отечественной лингвистике представлено систематическое исследование инаугурационных речей российских президентов и их посланий Федеральному собранию. Анализ ведется преимущественно в когнитивных и риторических аспектах. Автор предлагает оригинальную методику выявления идеологических взглядов политического деятеля в современных условиях. Книга предназначена для лингвистов, политологов, журналистов, спичрайтеров, специалистов по общественным связям.

This essay examines how President Trump's vacillations between overt and colorblind racism represent the intensifıcation of white racial anxieties in anticipation of an impending demographic shift toward a nonwhite majority. Trump's contradictory rhetoric on race becomes legible in the context of white ambivalence, a condition that entails that white identity, history, and culture be respected as morally superior but, at the same time, not be characterized as white supremacy. Examining a selection of Trump's campaign and postelec-tion rallies, I show how white ambivalence constitutes a perverse mixture of overweening and explicit valorizations of people of color and, simultaneously, a forceful disavowal of racial conversations that might otherwise implicate white identity in the legacy of white supremacy.

I argue that Barack Obama’s immediate, imaginary, and discursive deictic references to the actions and character of ordinary citizens, specific geographical markers within the “landscape of American history,” and sacred moments in U.S. history extended and enlarged the relational, spatial, and temporal contours of the national narrative in his 2015 speech on the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday. In so doing, the president offered a compelling (re)definition of patriotism, civic responsibility, and “the true meaning of America.” More broadly, I argue for an expanded notion of deixis within rhetorical scholarship. Beyond a linguistic “pointing” to bodies, places, and objects within the audience’s immediate vicinity, I detail how indexicals bring various images before the eyes of the audience, link individual texts to their political, historical, social, and cultural contexts, and direct our attention to the most important parts of the national narrative even as they deflect our attention from other parts of the story. Ultimately, I suggest that deixis illuminates theories of rhetorical vision in ways that have gone unnoticed, and it is only when we recognize the psychological and cognitive effects of deictic speech that we can fully appreciate the central role phantasia plays in persuasion, deliberation, and moral judgment.

Senator Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) presidential prospects have been the subject of media speculation from the moment of his election to the Senate in 2010, and these discussions only intensified when Rubio was considered a potential candidate for vice-president in the 2012 election and then was an actual candidate in 2016. This essay analyzes these discourses—including comparisons between Rubio and Obama, discussion about Rubio’s appeal to Hispanic/Latinx voters, and his potential to be the first Hispanic/Latinx vice-president or president—and the competing and sometimes problematic ways that they figure the representational power of the presidency, ethnic political candidates, and Latinidad and Latinx communities. The study helps to grasp shifts in racial presidentialities in the post-Obama era and to discern some of the ways that Latinidad is deployed in political and electoral discourses.

Автореферат диссертации на соискание ученой степени
доктора филологических наук (2005 год). Актуальность исследования обусловлена недостаточной изученностью речевых аспектов профессиональной деятельности политика, устных форм взаимодействия власти с народом, а также необходимостью разработки принципов лингвистического описания политического текста для мониторинга тенденций в сфере общественного сознания.

Analyzes John F. Kennedy's popular history book, "Profiles in Courage," and its various spinoff products, as part of an effort to position himself and the Democratic party as neoliberal centrists moving away from New Deal liberalism.
Full citation: Jeffrey L. Pasley, “Profiles in Triangulation: John F. Kennedy’s Neoliberal History of American Politics,” in Historian in Chief: How Presidents Interpret the Past to Shape the Future, ed. Seth Cotlar and Richard J. Ellis (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019), 205–29.

This essay argues that the insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, can be partially explained by the rise of what we call presidential eschatology, a religious master narrative that represents a historic shift from presidents appealing to God to presidents becoming a messiah figure. More specifically, we trace President Trump's embrace of this kind of religious discourse-which we contend is a form of weaponized political communication aiming to undermine democracy-to his acceptance of a millennialist narrative fashioned by QAnon conspiracy theorists. Through a close reading of primary sources from the movement, the study illustrates how these eschatological themes surfaced in QAnon's discourse and were exploited by Trump and his allies as they sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

During the period between his election as the Turkish president in August 2014 and the constitutional referendum that introduced a presidential system in Turkey in April 2017, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tried to demonstrate that he would not be a symbolic political figure in Turkish politics as many former Turkish presidents had been. Instead, he would keep shaping the domestic and foreign agenda of the country, as it would happen in a presidential system. One of the main ways he did this was through a series of mukhtars' meetings, which began in January 2015. From that point, until the desired changes to the constitution were approved through public referendum, Erdoğan held thirty-seven mukhtars' meetings. In these meetings he gave speeches about Turkish domestic and foreign policy directly to a group of mukhtars but, more importantly, indirectly to the Turkish public and foreign actors. This article will analyze Erdoğan's foreign policy messages through his discourse in the mukhtars' meetings and try to answer two controversial questions regarding his foreign policy ideology: Whether he is an Islamist and whether he is shifting the foreign policy axis of Turkey.

In this article, I explore presidential candidate Trump’s rhetoric concerning America’s role in the world. I argue Trump’s rhetoric broke with the post-World War II consensus of maintaining and extending U.S.  globalism. I further assert that Trump modified America’s exceptionalist arguments that served as rhetorical support for this consensus. Trump’s rhetoric suggested the United States’ current path in foreign policy was in a state of chaos that needed to be curtailed. His rejection of this postwar consensus and turn toward an “America First” foreign policy would restore order to the United States’ foreign policy universe. Trump’s rhetoric set to redefine the United States’s role in the 21st century but has serious implications for the leadership position it has taken for the past 75 years.

This paper will explore the political terrain leading to the 2010
presidential election. It seeks to understand the nature of presidential
campaigns in post-authoritarian Philippines. Utilizing survey data,
it will trace trends that reflect continuity and change in Filipino
voting behavior. Moreover, it will apply the analytical tools of political
marketing, such as market segmentation and candidate positioning,
in identifying the key elements that contributed to a successful
presidential campaign in the three most recent electoral cycles.
The paper notes that electoral campaigns in the post-authoritarian
period have been waged with competing narratives of reformism,
populism and clientelism. The tradition of Filipino-style reformist
politics has been revived in the issue-based anti-corruption and good
governance campaigns. Meanwhile, continued clientelism and money
politics have manifested themselves in the machine-based campaigns
that have eroded the gains of reformism. The failure of reform
politics to address the problem of poverty, coupled by the ascendancy
of the mass media, has fueled the image-based populist campaigns.
Ultimately, the rise of media and public opinion polling as influential
conduits between national candidates and the electorate underscores
the need to find the right mix and astute use of image, issues and
machinery.

Rankings of presidential leadership based on retrospective surveys of experts are a staple of the literature on American politics. We develop an alternative method—the Editorial Opinion Score (EOS)—for ranking the leadership of the modern presidents based on content analyses of editorials published in African American newspapers between 1901 and 2016. The advantage of the EOS method over retrospective surveys is that it provides real time evaluations of presidential leadership over multiple issue areas. We make leadership in the areas of civil rights policy and race relations the key component of our ranking of the modern presidents. Finally, we use regression analyses to determine the contextual factors shape editorial opinions of presidential leadership in these areas. The end result of our analyses is a significant reordering of extant presidential rankings.

تهدف الدراسة إلى التعرف على الأطر الخبرية  للخطب الرئاسية في مصر في الفترة من 2010م حتى 2013 م ، وتم اختيار هذه الفترة الزمنية لما شهدته من حراك سياسي واتصالي كبير تمثل في قيام ثورتين شعبيتين في 25 يناير 2001 م  و30 يونيو 2013 م وكان لوسائل الاتصال دور كبير في الثورتين، وتنتمي هذه الدراسة إلى الدراسات الوصفية، واستخدمت  الدراسة منهج المسح الإعلامي،  كما استخدمت الدراسة المنهج المقارن في المقارنة بين بعض خطب الثلاثة رؤساء

Trump's leadership on Covid-19 for Phased 1 of American pandemic was  filled with mendacious claims, assertions, and aggressive denials.  This "during action" report is an assembly of the public record to  reveal 7 paths taken by Trump that lead to a defeat in the virus battle.

Hace un par de días el presidente Andrés dijo en una de sus conferencias mañaneras que repetía y repetía que la corrupción ya se acabó allá arriba, en el círculo legal que conforma al ejecutivo. Dio a entender que ya estaba cansado de repetirlo, que es como si no dijera nada al respecto, que no lo quieren escuchar.

Tiene usted razón, señor presidente, no nada más no se le quiere escuchar: no vale la pena escucharlo. Es pura pérdida de tiempo auditivo. Es un ejercicio inútil hacerlo. Desgaste irracional de neuronas.

Y mire, tómelo de un académico aspiracionista, que en su momento hasta votó por usted. No vale la pena escucharlo por dos razones. Primo. La dura realidad y la más elemental racionalidad tienden a destruir su mágico discurso cúralo-todo. Secondo. Aparentemente usted cree que por el simple hecho de decir las cosas, éstas se arreglan de manera automática. Cero acciones y harto verbo, como en los mejores tiempos de los corruptos gobiernos priistas. En ese sentido usted es más de lo mismo.

Presidential and administration rhetoric over a nuclear missile de-targeting agreement with Russia is misleading because the narrative creates the false impression that the nuclear threat is over. Dr Waller details an explanation of this false narrative in his 1997 testimony to a congressional panel.

Building on the notion of post-truth, this essay suggests that Donald Trump - both as a candidate and president - has crafted a notion of post-presumption argumentation. While there are many theories of how presumption functions in argumentation, scholars agree that it is largely a procedural device meant to promote deliberation. The essay suggests that post-presumption argumentation has become a new model - rising partly from a cultural shift triggered by rampant conspiracy theorizing by political and social elites - that undercuts the presumption of veracity, undermines faith in institutions that give presumptions force, and rejects deliberation as a communal goal.

Argues that a key factor in Barack Obama‟s ability to mobilise support for his successful 2008 presidential campaign was his use of multicultural intertextual references in a hybrid discourse with which different ethnic audiences could identify. Obama‟s rhetoric drew on two discursive traditions in particular: that of Abraham Lincoln and the Founding Fathers on the one hand, and that of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement on the other. By combining explicit and implicit references to both traditions in his speeches, and by interweaving the white myth of an America founded in freedom and equality with the black narrative of a journey towards freedom and equality, Obama was able to persuasively present a unifying metanarrative that embodied an inclusive rewriting of the American story and the American Dream, offering Americans a common future that connected with their various pasts. In addition to examining Obama‟s “Yes We Can” and victory speeches, the study illustrates how he created a dialogical relationship with diverse audiences by referring to examples of the many YouTube videos – some themselves hybrid creations which combined music and images with samples from his speeches – that he inspired during the course of his campaign.

Keywords: Obama; hybridity; identity/identification; intertextuality; interdiscursivity; rhetoric."

To understand how jokes have functioned as part of U.S. presidents' strategic communication, this project examined every available White House Correspondents' Dinner (WHCD) speech over the last century, documenting various presidents' approaches to humor. I argue that the ability to talk about difficult or taboo subjects through jokes' deeply enthymematic ways of communicating has offered presidents expanded rhetorical spaces during crises, providing insights into why they started using humor with such routine frequency. Working with multiple factors shaping the modern presidency, presidents have used the elastic and inventive nature of enthymematic joking in attempts to move pressing issues outside immediate lines of criticism. The use of jokes in presidential communication is charted through three periods of WHCD. Several implications are drawn from this analysis, including the risks of humor as a rhetorical strategy.

This article analyzes commemorative speeches on the May 18 Kwangju Democracy Movement (1980) by South Korean presidents to investigate how the historical events have been interpreted across alternating political camps in power. Among various other issues regarding the interpretation and evaluation of the country’s political history the May 18 Kwangju Democracy Movement is still not fully accounted for its causes and consequences, and remains contested by conservative forces 40 years after the events occurred. While there is a rich body of research on the May 18 Kwangju Democracy Movement including the topic of memory politics, presidential commemorative speeches so far have been neglected despite the fact that they represent an important mode of political communication in modern societies regarding the production of authoritative remembrance narratives. This article contributes to filling this void by examining all past May 18 Memorial Day addresses by presidents between 1993 and 2019, that is a total of 11 speeches. The study finds a clear tendency in conservative presidents’ speeches toward rhetorical tactics that aim to depoliticize still-contested issues surrounding the May 18 Kwangju Democracy Movement with the effect of potentially forestalling critical engagement with its causes and consequences, and thus frustrating reconciliation.

This essay examines President Donald Trump's responses to the tragic events in Charlottesville that took place on August 10 and 11 of 2017. It argues that Trump failed to fulfill his role as mourner-in-chief because he engaged in " uncivil mourning. " The essay establishes a theoretical framework for understanding mourning and then examines the three responses Trump gave after Heather Heyer was killed and others were injured by a white supremacist. It argues that rather than mourning Heyer or the values of protestors who confronted " Unite the Right " rally participants , Trump mourned the cultural erosion of whiteness. This follows a pattern well established in Trump's speeches and tweets.