Trump's Electoral Speeches and His Appeal to the American White Working Class (original) (raw)
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Classism: Trump's Appeal to The White Working Class and its Relationship to Race in
Abstract In the wake of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, the intersection of class and race emerged as a central theme in American politics. This essay delves into the insightful perspectives offered by two prominent sources: Nancy Isenberg's "Class in America and Donald Trump" and Charles Blow's "The Lowest White Man." Against a deeply polarized American electorate, these sources provide invaluable insights into the appeal of "Trumpism" and the broader implications of President Lyndon Johnson's poignant 1960s quote. The Trump campaign garnered substantial attention for its resonance with a significant segment of the white working class, prompting us to explore the rationale behind this phenomenon. Specifically, I will dissect how Isenberg's historical analysis elucidates the persistence of Trump's appeal within this demographic and assess whether Johnson's prescient quote regarding racial division and economic manipulation in American politics foreshadowed the ascent of Trump's popularity. By scrutinizing the intersection of class and race as delineated by Isenberg and Johnson, this essay aims to provide a nuanced understanding of the underpinnings of Trump's political success and its implications for contemporary American democracy.
The Emotional Politics of Making America Great Again: Trump's Working Class Appeals
Real estate developer and reality TV star Donald Trump's election to the presidency of the U.S. was a departure from politics as usual in many ways. Most notably, Trump received more white working-class support than any Republican presidential candidate since 1980. Using data from 44 Trump campaign rallies, we analyze Trump's emotional messages encoded in his working class appeals. We find that Trump's language (1) temporarily oriented audiences towards feeling shame or fear as a nation, (2) reoriented them towards feeling anger at the elites he blamed, and (3) ultimately promised they would feel safe and proud if he was elected. Trump's emotional scripting seemed crafted to resonate with working class audiences feeling left behind from decades of bipartisan neoliberalism. We conclude by discussing limitations and potential avenues for future research.
This article argues that the discourses and techniques of political journalism worked to make White working class identity sensible as an assumed norm in American politics during the 2016 US presidential campaign. Throughout the campaign, many news organizations sent journalists to small towns and various Donald Trump rallies to understand what was driving a burbling resentment among his base of White working class voters, and by interrogating the explanatory and long-form reporting produced by these journalists, we can come to understand how the White working class began to cohere as a particular political subjectivity. By documenting the economic decline and social peril borne from neoliberal policies, acts of journalism substantiate the conditions that animate White working class identity and legitimate its resentments. However, that same journalism also failed to adequately deal with the consequences of policy and the way economic conditions and cultural identities reflexively constitute one another, instead focusing on the ways class-and race-based resentments formed a well of political support, constraining any sense of agency to the discursive bounds of a political campaign. This article concludes by arguing that in order to decenter the primacy of whiteness in American politics, it is incumbent upon scholars and observers alike to attend to the various cultural discourses and techniques that render it simultaneously central and invisible.
Critical Discourse Analysis of President Trumps Speeches About Immigrants
Journal of Critical Reviews, 2020
Racism is defined (Van Dijk, 1993a) as a specific social system of domination in which ethnic groups and their members (i.e.majority) abuse their power in various ways in interaction with other ethnic groups and their members (i.e. minority). Modern racism is hidden, so finding racism needs special strategies in new texts and discourses. Elites have power, control, and access to media and they influence people. Van Dijk represents Structures and strategies (reproduction of racism theory, 1993a) finding racism which consists of surface Structures and meaning (deep) Structures. In this research, Donald Trump's speeches about immigrants in the election (2016, SEP) taken from New York Times were analyzed based on Van Dijk ' s structures and strategies to find these structures in Trump ' s speeches. The findings of this research show that Trump considers religion, nationality, and culture of immigrants as well. Moreover, many surfaces and meaning structures are found in Trump ' s lectures with different frequencies. The results of this research are concordant with Van Dijk ' s researches on racism.
Critical Discourse Analysis of Trump Across Time
Sustainable Multilingualism
Summary This study explores the discourse of Trump as a businessman and as a president regarding the topic of immigration. Data for this research were gathered from four speeches and four interviews delivered by Trump in the eighties-nineties and four speeches and four interviews after being elected president. The analysis focuses on the way Trump represents US (ingroup) versus THEM (outgroup) at the local semantic level through the use of pronouns and implicatures and, at the local form through the use of syntax, that is, the formal relationship between clauses and sentences. In particular, I want to shed light on the following research questions: (1) How does Donald Trump represent the topic of immigration as a businessman? (2) How does Donald Trump represent the topic of immigration as a president? On the basis of the results of this research, it can be concluded that the period in which the discourse was uttered seems to have a strong bearing on the discursive strategies employe...
Sedimented Practices and American Identity in Donald J. Trump’s Election Campaign
Populism and World Politics: Exploring Inter- and Transnational Dimensions, 2019
This chapter makes the case for increased attention to the discourse theoretical notion of sedimented practices in populism research and International Relations (IR). Sedimented practices circumscribe the domain of credibility and intelligibility of a society’s socio-economic setting. In contrast to previous studies in both populism research and IR that stress populists’ radical break with traditional policy, a focus on sedimented practices shifts our attention to the need for any successful project to resonate with established discursive patterns to gain credibility. We illustrate the theoretical argument drawing on an example that, at least at first glance, seems to be a prime example for populists’ proneness to break with tradition – Donald J Trump’s campaign statements on foreign policy. We argue that the notion of sedimented practices helps tease out how even Trump’s foreign policy vision draws on deeply established traditions of US foreign policy for legitimacy.
Legitimizing Racism: Critical Discourse Analysis of White Supremacy in Trump’s Political Speeches
International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 2021
Nowadays, the concept of racism has been frequently used by people and more specifically by political figures as a social phenomenon that has been utilized as a"legitimising ideological tool". It is exploited to persecute an addressed group/s and to dispute them access to some social, cultural and political rights (Miles, 1993: 28). Moreover, it has been considered as “a special variety of ‘heterophobia’, bearing a co-hyponymical relation to ‘antisemitism’ or ‘Jewphobia’, ‘Arab-phobia’, ‘black-phobia’, ‘sexism’, ‘homophobia’, ‘youth-phobia’ and ‘phobia against differently-abled persons’, etc.”(Reisigl and Wodak, 2001: 5-6). However, this study aims to identify the use of racism in the political arena (more specifically in the political speech of Donald Trump) and illustrate the functional use by analyzing three American political speeches given by the former American presidents. The analysis is based on the qualitative research method and the discursive strategies proposed...
Social Identities, 2020
Trump’s use of the words Hispanic, Latino and Mexican during his campaign carried enough meaning to be used in racist contexts. However, those words are also used in a bureaucratic sense. The divergence of meaning protected Trump from being criticized for the words he used even though they carried as much meaning as some of the statements that were challenged. This is so because of the fundamental othering process that the use of the words Latino/Hispanic depicts. Those words, as boundary objects, allow for multiple meanings to be used at the same time and in the same contexts. The difficulty in defining ethnicity as a valid concept to explain cultural differences creates situations in which the concept does not explain anything other than stereotyping processes by the user, particularly when used by groups in power. These stereotyping ideas, the other, are an integral part of Trump’s campaign.