An analysis of Donald Trump´s strategies in the 2016 elections

Abstract

The micro-blogging platform Twitter, besides serving as a personal content sharing platform, has become an instrumental tool of political propaganda in the last few years. This dissertation aims at constructing a linguistic profile of Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States of America, based on the argumentation theory framework to identify linguistic factors and strategies used in Donald Trump’s social media communication and assess how they effectively appealed to the public’s emotions and influenced the electors’ vote in 2016. The study was carried out on a corpus of tweets, which was analyzed in terms of the nature and quality of the arguments used, fallacies committed, and most frequently used and manipulated emotive words. A quantitative analysis is performed for identifying the most common argumentative and manipulative strategies, which are described in detail through a qualitative analysis. The combination of these methods can show and assess how Trump manipulated language to successfully exert an influence on American citizens and direct their interests and attitudes.