LANGUAGE OF PERSUASION: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THE VICTORY SPEECH OF DONALD TRUMP’S 2024 ELECTION

Abstract

Victory speeches in politics are important tools that elected leaders use to legitimize their power, build collective identity, and gain support. This paper offers a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Donald Trump’s victory speech following the 2024 presidential election, with a focus on the language of persuasion and its ideological role. Using the three-dimensional model of CDA proposed by Norman Fairclough, this research analyzes the victory speech in terms of its textual, discursive, and social dimensions, exploring how the linguistic, media, and socio-political factors interact to enhance the persuasive role of the speech. The research reveals important textual features, such as the use of inclusive pronouns, repetition, modal verbs, metaphors, and binary oppositions, which work together to build a sense of unity, moral authority, and nationalist ideology. At the discursive level, intertextual cohesion with previous campaign speeches and extensive media coverage enhance the ideological role, promoting audience identification and emotional involvement. At the social level, the victory speech is a performative act of populist communication in politics, presenting politics as a moral struggle between “the people” and elites, and at the same time, legitimizing Trump’s leadership and gaining support. The findings of this research show that victory speeches are not only celebratory texts but also important tools of persuasion, ideological reproduction, and power consolidation. This research contributes to the study of political discourse analysis, providing a more nuanced understanding of the role of language in shaping political perception and maintaining leadership in contemporary populist politics.