A Critical Analysis of Persuasive Strategies Used in Political Discourse: A Case Study of Donald Trump and Joe Biden

Abstract

The present study aimed to explore the persuasive strategies used by Donald Trump and Joe Biden during their 2020 Presidential campaigns. Persuasion may take various forms and, in this study, we focused on how each candidate positively represent themselves while negatively representing their opponents. A corpus was created from six speeches delivered by each candidate with a total of 8 hours and 55 minutes and 42 682 words. AntConc was used to analyze data quantitatively by counting the occurrences of certain linguistic elements and help extract excerpt from the speeches. Later on, data was analyzed qualitatively using two theoretical frameworks: Van Dijk’s (1997) was used to detect the persuasive strategies used by each candidate and then these strategies were classified according to the general scope of Aristotle’s persuasive appeals. Results indicated that both candidates relied heavily on strategies which drew on pathos and ethos appeals such as metaphor, irony, victimization, actor description, comparison and categorization, with appeal to logos being less used. Results also showed that Joe Biden was able to persuade people which helped him win the 2020 presidential election and this was attributed to his neutral stance and wise use of strategies to promote justice and equality which his opponent did not focus on