“I'm the Most Transparent President in the History of this Country”: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Donald Trump's Use of Twitter

Authors

  • Giulia Magazzù Università di Roma Tor Vergata

Abstract

In the rise of the social media era, political communication has expanded past traditional methods of study. Donald Trump’s unprecedented use of Twitter signifies the beginning of a new type of presidential discourse. This study will consider a set of tweets as a case study on how Trump’s discourse functions in modern society, particularly as a response to a significant event: the California wildfires of November 2018. The case study in question was selected to exemplify discourse produced in response to a non-partisan environmental issue. The rhetorical exigence of this set of wildfires called for a response and, amid 50 other tweets, Trump did respond to this issue via his preferred discursive method: Twitter. Through Critical Discourse Analysis, Trump’s tweets about the California Wildfires of 2018 will be critiqued as a new form of political (particularly presidential) discourse.

Author Biography

Giulia Magazzù, Università di Roma Tor Vergata

Giulia Magazzù (Messina, 1987) ha ottenuto una laurea triennale in Lingue e letterature straniere presso l’Università di Messina e una Laurea Magistrale in Traduzione Specializzata presso la SSLMIT di Forlì-Università di Bologna. Attualmente sta completando il dottorato in Lingue e letterature straniere presso l’Università di Roma Tor Vergata, dove lavora a una tesi sulla traduzione di serie televisive multilingue. Inoltre, è docente a contratto di Lingua e Traduzione Inglese presso l’Università degli studi “G. d’Annunzio” di Chieti e Pescara. Le sue aree di ricerca sono: teoria della traduzione, traduzione audiovisiva, analisi critica del discorso. Tra le sue pubblicazioni: "The Representation of Immigrants in the Italian Press: Exploring visual discrimination", in InVerbis, 2018; “'Dottore, dottore!' Subtitling dialects and regionalisms: the case of “'Inspector Montalbano'”, in Corrius M., Espasa E., Zabalbeascoa P. (eds) Audiovisuals in a Kaleidoscope of Languages (Peter Lang, 2019).

Published

15-06-2020

How to Cite

Magazzù, G. (2020). “I’m the Most Transparent President in the History of this Country”: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Donald Trump’s Use of Twitter. Elephant & Castle, (22). Retrieved from https://elephantandcastle.unibg.it/index.php/eac/article/view/285

Issue

Section

Articoli