Projection as a Political Weapon: From Unconscious Defense to Conscious Offense (original) (raw)

Diagnosing the Blinding Effects of Trumpism: Rejoinder to Pluta (CRITICAL REVIEW)

Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society, 2019

Anne C. Pluta’s reply to my critique perpetuates the errors that undermined the article I criticized. Pluta dismisses out of hand my suggestion that her mistakes are the result of the particular lens through which she and much of the political science community view the American presidency. Yet this suggestion has the merit of explaining why she contends that piling up nineteenth-century instances of presidential public “speech” undermines Jeffrey Tulis’s contention that the nature of presidential speech changed decisively at the beginning of the twentieth century, such that rhetorical, often-demagogic appeals over the heads of Congress displaced public speech that affirmed the values of republican, constitutional government.

On Metapragmatic Gaslighting- Truth and Trump’s Epistemic Tactics published

Signs and Society. 11, pp. 173 – 200. ISSN:2326-4489; eISSN:2326-4497, 2023

This article focuses on the nexus between political discourse and contemporary concerns about the arbitration of truth to argue that Trump’s way of using speech about speech (i.e., his metapragmatic discourse) resembles the manipulation tactic commonly called gaslighting. Based on examples drawn from 2020 (i.e., White House press conferences and electoral presidential debates), I explore Trump’s metapragmatic gaslighting both as an epistemic tactic for the manipulation of information and as an effective style of polit- ical self-presentation. By analyzing specific instances of Trump’s metapragmatic com- mentaries that blatantly contradict shared pragmatic principles for the interpretation of utterances’ illocutionary force and denotational content, I show how Trump is able to pre- sent himself as a champion of semantic and moral candor and simultaneously promote a highly personalist view of the meaning-making process. In so doing, I also propose a metapragmatic approach to the epistemological and political predicaments posed by the “post-truth” epistemic regime.

The form and design of United States President Donald Trump's rhetorical ploys and positioning

This study explores the rhetorical ploys that President Donald Trump employed across selected rallies and State of the Union Addresses in 2018 and 2019. The analyses illuminate how adroitly Trump positions himself enlisting various persona (e.g., advocate, protector, victim and savior) as he orchestrates people, ideas and symbols to resonate with and fortify his following. In so doing, the study builds upon the previous efforts of sociolinguists, communication theorists, investigative journalists and political scientists who have explored Trump's tweets and speeches-especially, how Trump situates ideas, himself and his audiences including the antecedents to his pronouncements from warrants and claims to attacks on critics and opponents to testimonials and identification by association.