The representation of Muslims in Donald J. Trump's 2015-16 presidential campaign: A discourse-historical analysis

The aim of this thesis is to explore how Donald J. Trump, represents and evaluates Muslims in the 2015-16 presidential campaign discourse on Muslim immigration, mainly in his discourse on terrorism, vigilance, and policing. To this end, I analyse the nominations, actions, and qualities Trump attributes to Muslims and the arguments he employs to defend his attributions. I selected data from a variety of genres, i.e., I selected 5 campaign rallies, 11 TV interviews, one statement, one campaign ad and 28 tweets, from a timeline of 12 months, viz., from November 2015 to October 2016. To analyse the selected data, I adopted the discourse-historical approach (DHA) (Wodak, 2001b). The latter proposes five methods for the analysis of the representation of social actors, nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivisation, and mitigation and intensification, and incorporates van Leeuwen’s (1996) socio-semantic analytical categories and van Dijk’s (1991) strategies of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation. In this thesis, I consider nomination, predication, and argumentation as the main methods of analysis and perspectivisation, and mitigation and intensification as aspects influencing the nomination, predication, and argumentation, following KhosraviNik (2010, pp.57-8).

The analysis of the selected data indicates that Trump represents the Muslims of Muslim majority countries and Muslim Americans as violent religious extremists and associates them to terrorism to position them as a threatening ‘Other.’ ‘The Politics of Fear’ (Wodak, 2015, n.p), dominates Trump’s discourse because he represents immigrants from Muslim-majority countries and Muslim Americans as threats to the security and ‘cultural values’ of non-Muslim Americans. He associates President Barack H. Obama and the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom he refers to by ‘the Obama-Clinton administration’, to represent their admissions of Muslim immigrants as the source of these threats. He represents the presidential candidate Hillary Clinton as an extension of ‘the Obama-Clinton administration’, arguing that she supports the admission of Muslim immigrants. To differentiate his potential future administration from ‘the Obama-Clinton administration’ and the Clinton potential future administration and represent himself as the saviour and the protector of non-Muslim Americans from Muslims, he engages in ‘Border Politics’ (Wodak, 2015, n.p.), i.e., he suggests measures to restrict Muslim immigration such as the so-called ‘the Muslim Travel Ban.’