Pragmatic deviation of politeness principle in Trump’s political speeches

Abstract

The current study aimed to pragmatically explore the deviation from Leech’s (2014) politeness maxims in the former president of the US, Donald Trump’s political speeches. A qualitative approach was followed to collect and examine the data. Two oral documents; an interview and a speech that were taken from YouTube were adopted in this study as an instrumentation. These documents, which were selected purposefully to saturate the data, were Trump’s interview with Fox News Channel reporters, Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier in Scranton on March 6, 2020, and Trump’s direct Speech to the crowd in Illinois on June 25, 2022, in support of his candidates to win the Congressional election. A discourse analysis method was used to examine the data. The findings showed that Trump deviated from all Leech’s (2014) politeness maxims. Moreover, the findings revealed that Trump deviates from the maxims to convince the people that his opponents are unacceptable, elect his candidates instead, influence the crowd to change their views of the world, ruin his rivals’ image, show his period as a US president incomparable and better than other US presidents, deny accountability and reject to release others from blame, influence the public that the election was stolen to invoke wrath among his supporters, express his hatred towards others, and vent his own feelings to make people sympathetic to him.