Covering Trump’s ‘Carnival’: A Rhetorical Alternative to ‘Objective’ Reporting

Abstract

Donald Trump’s communication style–replete with grotesquery, mockery, boasts, and lies–diverges radically from past US presidents and disrupts normative politics in ways that threaten democratic institutions. Yet journalists covering Trump often fail to capture the uniquely damaging nature of his rhetoric, instead reconstructing Trump’s speech into coherent, “presidential” narratives. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of carnival, a medieval festival of multivocal ridicule and renewal, this analysis of two reporters’ live tweets from a 2018 Trump rally unpacks competing approaches to framing Trump’s post-normative rhetoric: a dominant approach representing traditional “objectivity” that squeezes his speeches into expected patterns of presidential communication, and an alternative approach that exposes Trump’s hybridization of carnivalesque subversion with his official role as head of state. The analysis renders unnatural the dominant reporting style and raises possibilities for contemporary reporting that could disrupt the existentially toxic political environment in the US and many Western democracies.