A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF TRUMP’S NEOLOGISMS AND BIDEN’S RHETORICAL STYLE IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

This paper uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) based on Fairclough (1995) to explore how political language is used as a tool of ideological construction and power enactment in the public speeches of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Six speeches three from each leader, were selected to capture a range of rhetorical contexts, including campaign launches, national conventions, and presidential addresses. The results indicate that Trump’s discourse is marked by the use of populist language and the rejection of the traditional rules of political decorum with performative and disruptive neologisms strengthening the polarizing and anti-establishment identity. By contrast, Biden uses rhetoric based on the themes of unity, democratic tradition and institutional legitimacy, with inclusive language and intertextual references to historical American ideals. The findings reveal that both rhetorical modes construct distinct leadership personas: Trump as a populist outsider and Biden as a reconciliatory institutionalist. This study advances CDA by theorizing neologisms as ideological tools and by contrasting populist and democratic rhetoric across multiple speech genres.