An Analysis Of Donald Trump’s Performance Of Crisis On Immigration Issue During 2016 Presidential Campaign

In the 2016 American presidential election,Donald Trump’s election is an important manifestation of the growing power of populist politics in the US.Many scholars argue that it is his stance on the then-current immigration policy in the United States that wins him the leverage in the election.Given the importance of the immigration issue to Trump,s election,a more detailed study on Trump’s stance on migration issue during the 2016 campaign is very necessary.Borrowing the theoretical concept—performance of crisis,this paper attempts to analyze Trump’s rhetoric on immigration in the 2016 election from the perspective of Trump’s elevation of peoples’ sense of immigration crisis.To generate a deeper understanding of Trump’s election stance on immigration,this paper builds a corpus using his 11 immigration speeches and 140 immigration tweets during the 2016 campaign about the immigration issue.This paper analyzes the corpus using the method of Fairclough’s three-dimension analysis and corpus linguistics.Three-dimension analysis is an analytical method from critical discourse analysis,which comprises three stages—description,interpretation,and explanation.In the description stage,through coding,this thesis discovers the discourse strategy and rhetoric devices used in Trump’s speech on immigration issues.The interpretation stage studies the role played by Trump’s language.The explanation stage analyzes the social background of Trump’s speech and the American public’s response to the speech.And to make the research results more objective and convincing,this research uses the method of corpus linguistics to analyze the same data.It is concluded that Donald Trump’s speeches manipulated people’s emotions including appealing to anger at politicians represented by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama,appealing to fear of immigrants,and showing his credibility.He used repetition,exaggeration,parallelism,contrast,and metaphors to achieve the goal.The speech effectively manufactured a psychological crisis on the US immigration issue.So how did he create an immigration crisis to obtain huge political benefits?It is found that he successfully located the campaign issue that has largely been the Democrats’ oversight-the immigration issue.Then he pitted politicians represented by Hillary Clinton and the "terrible" immigrants against the American people and assured his voters that he has a simple and effective solution to this problem.He took advantage of the public’s search for ontological security to convince the voters to believe his rhetoric and support his "strong leadership".This paper uses the theoretical concept of performance of crisis to analyze Trump’s stance on immigration issues during the 2016 campaign,challenging the argument that Trump won the election because he responded to the economic,security and cultural problems that American people urgently needed to solve,which were caused by the then-current immigration policy.This thesis reminds us that the audience of political speeches should maintain independent thinking and self-awareness.