Donald Trump has been arguably the most controversial and divisive president in the history of the US due to his unconventional rhetoric. Noticing the contrast in discursive style that Trump has in comparison with the established patterns shared among other Republican candidates, Jennifer Sclafani examines three television debates and four major speeches between 16 June 2015 and 21 July 2016 with the aim to gain insights into how Donald Trump discursively constructed a presidential image for himself during his primary campaign.
Sclafani begins the book in ch. 1 by identifying a gap in research on the political discourse of Donald Trump. She points out that the majority of coverage of Donald Trump's language has employed quantitative approaches, leaving a large research space for sociolinguists and discourse analysts to explore. Sclafani also outlines the framework she employs in the book, inspired by Deborah Shiffrin's model, which includes five planes or levels of discourse structure, namely, the ‘exchange structure’, ‘act structure’, ‘ideational structure’, ‘information state’, and ‘participation framework’. She rounds up the chapter by laying out her intentions to investigate the distinctive linguistic style of Donald Trump in terms of how, despite being an outsider, he used it to establish himself as a viable presidential candidate and how it worked both for and against him in front of the American public.
Chs. 2 and 3 explore Trump's idiosyncratic style of public speaking, which differentiates him from his opponents. Sclafani compares the frequency of the use of several discourse-marking strategies between Trump and his opponents, and explains how the use of a particular marker helps Trump structure his discourse and construct his presidential identity. She also examines the interactional devices used by Trump in the contexts of speech making and debates. Sclafani's analysis demonstrates how Trump managed to control debates and construct his unique brand of presidential persona.
In ch. 4 Sclafani moves the focus from the productive side of Trump's identity construction to its receptive side by conducting a metadiscourse analysis. Referring to the ‘partialness principle’ of Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, she examines a few parodies of Trump on Saturday night live during his campaign, from which she discovers how Trump's language is perceived; for example, how Trump uses style as a substitute for substance and his use of misogynistic and xenophobic language.
In the concluding chapter, Sclafani revisits the central questions raised and the subsequent findings from the perspective of sociolinguistics. Given the narrow scope of the study in that only Trump's primary campaign is analysed, she ends the book with a few recommendations for further research. One is a study of current US presidential discourse so as to compare Trump's style and presentation of self before and after taking office. This could be useful not only to sociolinguistics in grasping a fuller understanding of the co-constructed nature of identity, but also to practitioners of political communication in learning how to use language to effectively communicate with their target audience.
