Discourse,Power And Truth In The Post-Truth Era

Since Trump’s inauguration as American president and British referendum to leave EU—the two most sensational Black Swan events in Western politics in 2016—has opened an incredible ‘post-truth’ era.In the United States,‘Twitter Governance’ has gradually become a new political reality.Leaders are no longer committed to providing truth,but turn to a completed political persuasion,and Twitter has provided a new discourse system for power expression.Adopting metadiscourse analysis--a special mythology in linguistics—this paper investigates the rhetoric features of Trump’s tweets that address political opponents,international relationship and media relationship.Then,the paper further revealed how president power in American political communication creates emotional content in social media to dissimilate truth,disseminate prejudice,establish identity,attract users’ attention and exert its political influence.To be specific,this paper begins with a brief introduction which covers the research background,the theoretical framework,the review of existing literature and research approaches adopted in this paper.The second part describes in detail the linguistic mythology and establishes the analytical framework of this essay by addressing the definition,function,categorization and application of the theory of metadiscourse.The third chapter conducts a descriptive analysis of the overall features and metadiscourse features found in Trump’s Twitters,and examines their functions.Chapter four reviews sample content for metadiscourse analysis and summarizes the logic of discourse in Trump’s power expression.The characteristics and connotation of the times of Trump’s discourse politics are further discussed in chapter five,and the last chapter presents a reflection on ‘post-truth’ politics.This research demonstrates that the U.S.president Trump’s Twitter discourse reflects the basic strategy of ‘post-truth’ politics which can,on one hand,be attributed to the synergy between politics of debasement and emotional contagion under new media technologies and Trump’s narrative identity.On the other hand,it also reflects the decline of American liberalism and the rise of populism.From the point of critical discourse,the ‘post-truth’ communication of American politics is not only a communicative phenomenon but also a kind of discourse system which provide the protection for power.It has betrayed the rules of semantics,and overturned and rebuilt traditional codes for interpersonal communication,and gradually become a potential method to suppress different opinions and safeguard partisan interests.In a word,the "truth" in the "post-truth" era is falling into the quagmire of political disputes and becoming a tool of political show and power penetration.Here,power prevails over truth,prejudice and anger permeate the political discourse of national leaders under the cloak of "nationalism",and the charm of ignorance,boasting,ridicule and narrow is far better than before.Therefore,it is urgent to establish a new "truth system" and to break the monopoly of power.