Article published In:
Right-Wing Populism in Europe & USA: Contesting Politics & Discourse beyond ‘Orbanism’ and ‘Trumpism’Edited by Ruth Wodak and Michał Krzyżanowski
[Journal of Language and Politics 16:4] 2017
► pp. 619–639
Edited by Ruth Wodak and Michał Krzyżanowski
[Journal of Language and Politics 16:4] 2017
► pp. 619–639
Post-truth politics?
Authenticity, populism and the electoral discourses of Donald Trump
This paper focuses on aspects of the discourse of Donald Trump during his campaign for the U.S. Presidency. It argues that, although we can undoubtedly identify aspects of authoritarian populism in his campaign discourse, its appeal rested on more than its content. Indeed, although significant parts of the U.S. public sphere rejected many of his claims as lies, significant portions of the electorate found his words acceptable on some contrasting basis. By developing a comparison between Habermas’s notion of ‘validity claims’ and Aristotle’s distinctions between different kinds of rhetorical appeal, the paper suggests that a discourse of ‘authenticity’ rather than ‘truth’ provided a crucial cornerstone of Trump’s appeal to his electoral base.
Keywords: validity claims, discourse, sociolinguistic coding orientation, truth, truthfulness, sincerity, boasting, authenticity, rhetoric, orality and speaking style
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Trump’s electoral base
- 3.Trump’s electoral base and authoritarian populism
- 4.Trump’s distinctive rhetorical appeal
- 4.1Trump, truth, Aristotle, and different kinds of rhetorical appeal
- 4.2Trump, ethos and boasting
- 5.Trump’s speaking style: Orality, and vernacular folksiness
- 5.1Lexical repetition
- 5.2Trump’s conversational direct address
- 5.3Vernacular folksiness, restricted code and the language of solidarity
- 6.Trump’s rhetorical appeal: pathos, ethos and logos
- 7.Aristotle’s rhetoric and Habermas’s validity claims
- 8.Trump and appropriateness
- 9.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
References
Arendt, Hannah
1977a Between Past and Future. London: Penguin
1977b “Truth and Politics”. In Hannah Arendt 1977a Between Past and Future, 223–260. London: Penguin.
Aristotle
2012 Rhetoric. Oxford: Acheron Press.
Bernstein, Basil
1971a Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 1: Theoretical studies towards a sociology of language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 
1971b “A review of the language and lore of schoolchildren”. In Basil Bernstein 1971a Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 11, 54–58. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
1971c “Some sociological determinants of perception”. In Basil Bernstein 1971a Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 11, 19–30. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
Charteris-Black, Jonathan
2014 Analysing Political Speeches. London: Palgrave.
Habermas, Jurgen
1979a Communication and the Evolution of Society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
1979b “Universal Pragmatics”. In Jurgen Habermas 1979 Communication and the Evolution of Society, 1–68. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell
2016 Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and mourning in the American right. New York: The New Press:
McCarthy, Tom
2016 “The last-minute map: how to read each presidential candidate’s final stops”, Guardian, 8th November, 2016. Accessed 1 March 2017. [URL].
Montgomery, Martin
1999 “Speaking sincerely: public reactions to the death of Diana.” Language and Literature 8 (1): 5–33.
2001a “The uses of authenticity: ‘Speaking from experience’ in a U.K. election broadcast.” Communication Review 4 (4): 447–462.
2001b “
Defining ‘authentic talk
’”. Discourse Studies 3 (4): 397–405.
Schudson, Michael
2008 Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press. Cambridge: Polity.
Simpson, Paul
Trump, Donald J.
2004 How to Get Rich. London: BBC Random House.
Williams, Raymond
1961 The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
1977 Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wodak, Ruth
2015 The Politics of Fear: What right-wing populist discourses mean. London: Sage.
Cited by
Cited by 64 other publications
Bene, Márton, Andrea Ceron, Vicente Fenoll, Jörg Haßler, Simon Kruschinski, Anders Olof Larsson, Melanie Magin, Katharina Schlosser & Anna-Katharina Wurst
2022. Keep Them Engaged! Investigating the Effects of Self-centered Social Media Communication Style on User Engagement in 12 European Countries. Political Communication 39:4 ► pp. 429 ff. 
Blasch, Lisa
2021. Indexing authenticity in visual political (social media) communication: a metapragmatics-based analysis of two visual registers of the authentic. Multimodal Communication 10:1 ► pp. 37 ff.
Cairns, George & George Wright
2019. Making scenario interventions matter: Exploring issues of power and rationality. FUTURES & FORESIGHT SCIENCE 1:1
Chun, Russell Scott
2018. Visual rhetoric of the Presidency: an analysis of the Trump and Obama White House messaging in their first 100 days in Flickr images. Journal of Visual Literacy 37:1 ► pp. 18 ff.
Cremer, Tobias
Csehi, Robert
2019. Neither episodic, nor destined to failure? The endurance of Hungarian populism after 2010. Democratization 26:6 ► pp. 1011 ff.
Anna De Fina & Alexandra Georgakopoulou
2020. The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies,
Demasi, Mirko A.
2020. Post‐truth politics and discursive psychology. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 14:9
Dobkiewicz, Patryk
Dobkiewicz, Patryk, Agnieszka Chmiel & Małgorzata Fabiszak
2023. Source text ideological load modulates ideological shifts in interpreting right-wing and left-wing political discourse, but interpreters’ political orientation does not. Ampersand 11 ► pp. 100151 ff.
Dunn, R. Chase
2019. “You sir are a hypocrite”: responses to Pence’s MLK Day tweets as attention intervention. Atlantic Journal of Communication 27:5 ► pp. 354 ff.
Ekström, Mats, Marianna Patrona & Joanna Thornborrow
2018. Right-wing populism and the dynamics of style: a discourse-analytic perspective on mediated political performances. Palgrave Communications 4:1
Enli, Gunn
2024. Populism as “Truth”: How Mediated Authenticity Strengthens the Populist Message. The International Journal of Press/Politics
Gill, Martin
2024. Chapter 5. Hypocrisy, authenticity, and the rhetorical dynamics of populism. In The Pragmatics of Hypocrisy [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 343], ► pp. 98 ff.
Green, Avishai
2019. Speaking Bullshit to Power: Populism and the Rhetoric of Bullshit. SSRN Electronic Journal
Gross, Jonathan, Tine Davids, Anneke Sools & Yashar Saghai
2023. Covid-19 and the politics of hope: A comparative analysis of Greek and Ecuadorian letters from a desired post-pandemic future. Futures 149 ► pp. 103115 ff.
Haksever, Oğuz Ufuk & Ahmet Sözen
2024. The instrumentalization of post-truth politics in Turkey: the case of the 2023 elections. Turkish Studies ► pp. 1 ff.
Hamo, Michal, Zohar Kampf & Naama Weiss-Yaniv
2019. Populism as a keyword and as a meta-discursive resource for positioning in mediated political discourse. Discourse, Context & Media 29 ► pp. 100283 ff.
Harris, Dylan M.
2020. Telling Stories about Climate Change. The Professional Geographer 72:3 ► pp. 309 ff.
Hoffmann, Christian R.
Holtz-Bacha, Christina
2022. Strategic Political Authenticity: How Populists Construct an Authentic Image. In Cultures of Authenticity, ► pp. 273 ff.
Hummel, Joshua R.
2022. “American Defenders Against an Illegal Invasion”: Dual Racialization Processes in Collective Identity Formation. American Behavioral Scientist 66:12 ► pp. 1688 ff.
Hynek, Nik & Aleš Karmazin
2020. Contemporary Revisionism in the Multilayered Political Order: Operationalisation, Techno-Social Conditions, Dilemmas. Europe-Asia Studies 72:6 ► pp. 940 ff.
Hyvönen, Ari-Elmeri
2018. Careless Speech: Conceptualizing Post-Truth Politics1. New Perspectives 26:3 ► pp. 31 ff.
Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Jens
2024. The Voice of the People: Populism and Donald Trump’s Use of Informal Voice. Society
Lacatus, Corina & Gustav Meibauer
2022. ‘Saying it like it is’: Right-wing populism, international politics, and the performance of authenticity. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 24:3 ► pp. 437 ff.
Lacatus, Corina & Gustav Meibauer
2023. Crisis, Rhetoric and Right-Wing Populist Incumbency: An Analysis of Donald Trump's Tweets and Press Briefings. Government and Opposition 58:2 ► pp. 249 ff.
Maiba, Vita, D. Rudoy, A. Olshevskaya & N. Ugrekhelidze
2021. Fake discourse in the space of mass media and media linguistic practices. E3S Web of Conferences 273 ► pp. 11033 ff.
Markowitz, David M., Maryam Kouchaki, Francesca Gino, Jeffrey T. Hancock & Ryan L. Boyd
2023. Authentic First Impressions Relate to Interpersonal, Social, and Entrepreneurial Success. Social Psychological and Personality Science 14:2 ► pp. 107 ff.
Meibauer, Gustav
2023. Populist Bullshit in International Politics. In Political Communication and Performative Leadership [The Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communication, ], ► pp. 225 ff.
Montgomery, Martin
Montgomery, Martin, Michael Higgins & Angela Smith
2019. Political Offensiveness in the Mediated Public Sphere: The Performative Play of Alignments. In Media and the Politics of Offence, ► pp. 23 ff.
Moradi-Joz, Rasool, Saeed Ketabi & Mansoor Tavakoli
Nai, Alessandro, Elizabeth L. Young & Linda Bos
2023. Pop populism: ethno-traditionalism beyond national borders and the populist radical right. Acta Politica 58:4 ► pp. 737 ff.
Patrona, Marianna
2018. Mediated conversation and political propaganda: A discourse analysis of news practices on Greek prime-time news. European Journal of Communication 33:2 ► pp. 185 ff.
Perreau, Bruno
2018. Sélection bibliographique. In Qui a peur de la théorie queer ?, ► pp. 295 ff.
Quan, Lihong & Jinlong Ma
Regnier, Cindy
2023. Preparing for War: wargaming the NATO-Russia confrontation in the Baltics. Critical Studies on Security 11:3 ► pp. 230 ff.
Reyes, Antonio
Reyes, Antonio & Andrew Ross
2021. From the White House with anger: Conversational features in President Trump's official communication. Language & Communication 77 ► pp. 46 ff.
Rheindorf, Markus
2020. Rhetorics, Discourse and Populist Politics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies, ► pp. 622 ff.
Russo, Federico, Terri Mannarini & Sergio Salvatore
2020. From the manifestations of culture to the underlying sensemaking process. The contribution of semiotic cultural psychology theory to the interpretation of socio‐political scenario. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 50:3 ► pp. 301 ff.
Sample, Char, Michael J. Jensen, Keith Scott, John McAlaney, Steve Fitchpatrick, Amanda Brockinton, David Ormrod & Amy Ormrod
2020. Interdisciplinary Lessons Learned While Researching Fake News. Frontiers in Psychology 11
Sbaraini Fontes, Giulia & Francisco Paulo Jamil Marques
2023. Defending democracy or amplifying populism? Journalistic coverage, Twitter, and users’ engagement in Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Journalism 24:8 ► pp. 1634 ff.
Schlesinger, Philip
2020. After the post-public sphere. Media, Culture & Society 42:7-8 ► pp. 1545 ff.
Schneider, Ulrike
2021. How Trump tweets: A comparative analysis of tweets by US politicians. Research in Corpus Linguistics 9:2 ► pp. 34 ff.
Schwarz, Ori
2023. Why did Trump call prayers politically correct? The coevolution of the PC notion, the authenticity ethic, and the role of the sacred in public life. Theory and Society 52:5 ► pp. 771 ff.
Scotto di Carlo, Giuseppina
Sheng, Xiayan, Zhenhua Zeng, Wen Zhang & Yuanhui Hu
2022. Vlogger's persuasive strategy and consumers' purchase intention: The dual mediating role of para-social interactions and perceived value. Frontiers in Psychology 13
Smith, Angela
2020. “Enough of this PC-crazed Nonsense”: The Backlash Against Gender Equality as Personified by Emma Watson. In Gender Equality in Changing Times, ► pp. 131 ff.
Smith, Angela & Michael Higgins
2020. Tough guys and little rocket men: 
Realdonaldtrump’s Twitter feed and the normalisation of banal masculinity. Social Semiotics 30:4 ► pp. 547 ff.
Realdonaldtrump’s Twitter feed and the normalisation of banal masculinity. Social Semiotics 30:4 ► pp. 547 ff. Soto-Vásquez, Arthur D. & Andrew J. Hazelton
2023. Latinos for Trump: 2020 US Election Results: Why Did So Many Latinos Back Trump?. In The Perils of Populism [Springer Studies on Populism, Identity Politics and Social Justice, ], ► pp. 221 ff.
Soóky, Roman
2022. How (Un)Freedom is Being Developed: The Linguistic World of One Political Party in Slovakia Concerning Liberalism. Journal of Linguistics/Jazykovedný casopis 73:3 ► pp. 329 ff.
Swain, Spencer
2021. Pugilism, Power, and the Cultural Politics of Celebrity: Charting Vitali Klitschko’s Rise from Heavyweight Champion to Mayor of Kiev. Journal of Global Sport Management ► pp. 1 ff.
Temmerman, Martina, Renée Moernaut, Roel Coesemans & Jelle Mast
2019. Post-truth and the political: Constructions and distortions in representing political facts. Discourse, Context & Media 27 ► pp. 1 ff.
Trancossi, Michele, Jose Pascoa & Stefano Mazzacurati
2021. Sociotechnical design a review and future interdisciplinary perspectives involving thermodynamics in today societal contest. International Communications in Heat and Mass Transfer 128 ► pp. 105622 ff.
Tsygankov, Andrei, Pavel Tsygankov & Haley Gonzales
2023. Putin’s “Global Hybrid War”: The Anti-Russian Bias of the Atlantic Council. In Russiagate Revisited, ► pp. 133 ff.
Venizelos, Giorgos
2023. Donald Trump in Power: Discourse, Performativity, Identification. Critical Sociology 49:4-5 ► pp. 647 ff.
Venturelli, Gustavo, Eduardo Ryô Tamaki & Matheus Gomes Mendonça Ferreira
2023. The Sharp-Tongued Loudmouth: Incivility and Debasement in Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro's YouTube Livestreams. In Debasing Political Rhetoric, ► pp. 73 ff.
Wodak, Ruth
2018. Vom Rand in die Mitte – „Schamlose Normalisierung“. Politische Vierteljahresschrift 59:2 ► pp. 323 ff.
Wodak, Ruth
2020. ‘The boundaries of what can be said have shifted’: An expert interview with Ruth Wodak (questions posed by Andreas Schulz). Discourse & Society 31:2 ► pp. 235 ff.
Wodak, Ruth
2022. Shameless normalization as a result of media control: The case of Austria. Discourse & Society 33:6 ► pp. 788 ff.
Yanchenko, Kostiantyn
2023. Making Sense of Populist Hyperreality in the Post-Truth Age: Evidence from Volodymyr Zelensky’s Voters. Mass Communication and Society 26:3 ► pp. 509 ff.
Yesil, Bilge
2020. Performing nationalist populism in Turkey: an exploration of anti-Western, anti-elite and Muslim conservative undercurrents. Celebrity Studies 11:3 ► pp. 336 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.