Discourse and Power in Contemporary Political Contexts: Donald Trump and the “Day of Liberation” Speech
Pragmalinguistic Strategies of Affective Bonding and Legitimation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26422/aucom.2026.1503.cafKeywords:
Political discourse analysis, affective engagement, legitimation, assertiveness, Donald TrumpAbstract
This article examines the elements of political discourse in which persuasion operates as a communicative strategy. Specifically, it analyzes affective bonding on the basis of the proposals developed by Nieto and Otero (2012, 2018) and legitimation according to Van Leeuwen’s model (2007) in the speech entitled “Liberation Day”, delivered by Donald Trump on April 2, 2025, on the occasion of the announcement of his new tariff policy.
A mixed-methods approach is adopted, combining pragmalinguistic analysis with the quantitative treatment of categories through descriptive statistics and correlation analysis, using both Pearson’s and Spearman’s coefficients.
The results show that discursive acts containing a greater number of affective bonding strategies (ABS) also tend to contain a greater number of legitimation strategies (LS). The convergence between the two coefficients strengthens the consistency of this finding and confirms that ABS and LS tend to co-occur within the same discursive acts, although the strength of the association is low to moderate. Together, these strategies construct a positive interpretive framework that facilitates acceptance of the political decisions communicated by the president.
The findings should be interpreted in light of the limitations associated with the size of the corpus, which is restricted to a single speech and a specific event, as well as being subject to the ongoing refinement of the AI-based coding protocol. Future research should expand and diversify the corpus in order to assess the stability of the trends identified.
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