The New Faces of Political Discourse: President Trump’s Tweets

Former President Trump’s unique form of political discourse has attracted a lot of attention from academics, especially his unconventional use of Twitter. As a new form of communication, Twitter has allowed politicians to communicate without the intervention of traditional newspaper media. In this context, a traditional semiotic border was changed to a new form of political communication, and thus a new semiotic border. This chapter aims to analyze this political discourse style through the lens of rhetorical, discursive, and pragmatic strategies, such as ad populum and ad hominem arguments, as well as intensifiers and attenuators to appeal to audience emotions. The study incorporates a semiotic perspective, regarding Lotman’s notions of semiotic border, unpredictability, and text (Semiosfera I, 1996). It also includes a section with a conservative point of view.