Argumentation in Donald Trump’s political discourse about immigration

Abstract

On August 31st, 2016, in campaign to the United States presidency, the candidate Donald Trump delivered a speech about illegal immigration in Phoenix, Arizona. The speech, which lasted for about 1h13min, is considered the speech that gave Trump the victory on that election process. In this study, we analysed parts of this speech in light of the Theory of Argumentation appointing the resources and factors inherent to this based on authors like Koch (2011), Koch and Travaglia (1999), Oliveira (2002, 2004), among others who have been researching argumentation throughout the years. We focus our analysis on three argumentative aspects: intentionality, lexical selection and the ideologies embedded in the political discourse. We selected this corpus based on the representativeness of the political discourse as a genuinely argumentative genre. The excerpts selected highlight Trump’s main ideas on the matter and the way he views the problem. The results show how effective the argumentative strategies used by politicians can be in convincing voters.