Persuasive Strategies in Trump’s Final Presidential Debate: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The present research aims to analyze the linguistic tools used by Trump in the third and final presidential debate in order to persuade the audience with his political views and enhance his positon as a presidential nominee. Trump deploys pragmatic and stylistic devices with the purpose of manipulating the minds of the audience. Presupposition and conversational implicature are explored in the course of the analysis, in addition to some rhetorical tools such as metaphor, hyperbole, irony, repetition and syntactic parallelism. Critical Discourse Analysis constitutes the theoretical framework for the analysis and van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach is employed as it emphasizes the relationship between social interaction and discourse. The analysis of these linguistic features prove that Trump always depicts the Americans as victims of the former government, exploits the situation in Iraq, the economic decline and the national insecurity to launch an attack at Clinton's political short-sightedness, and finally avows that a bright future is ahead under his reign.