Constructing Migrants as Threats: A Linguistic and Critical Discourse Analysis of Trump’s Rhetoric  

This paper critically examines U.S. President Donald Trump's immigration discourse between 2023 and 2025. It will pay particular attention to the way migrants are represented within the president`s broader populist communication. The analysis will draw on Critical Discourse Analysis, systemic functional linguistics, and political communication theory and it will aim to investigate how immigration is discursively constructed by Trump. Twelve campaign rallies, policy addresses, and international conferences will be taken into consideration and the focus will be the identification of five interrelated strategies in public speaking: securitization, criminalization, threat amplification through metaphor, populist moral polarization and globalization of the threat strategies. These five strategies will be discussed in five separate analytical sections of the paper and they will lead to the linguistic and discourse interpretation that follows each of them. The extended excerpts chosen for the study reveal how predication and nominalization, numerical inflation, metaphorical framing (invasion, contamination, destruction), and intertextual repetition elevate public threat perception, amplify perceived risks and justify state policy interventions towards immigration. In addition, the study demonstrates how Trump`s rhetorical discourse is spread across the national borders of the United States since the excerpts selected for analysis are taken from different countries and cities in the United States. It also shows that the use of threatening language places normative pressure on the sovereignty of the nations. Trump`s anti-migration discourse is famous for his way of criminalizing illegal immigrants and proposing hard laws and regulations against them. Thus, the combination between “micro-language” and “macro politics” will enable this paper to contribute in the continuous discussion about massive communication and migration discourses.

political discourse analysis; immigration; populism; securitization; metaphor, identity.

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