Politics of Exclusion through Language in the Presidential Speeches of Donald Trump

Abstract

The current research is an attempt to define and discuss the mechanisms of power as used by Trump in his presidential speeches that he has made during the year, 2017, in accordance with Foucault’s Theory of Power/Knowledge. However, a number of research articles have been published on the speeches of Trump but no one has analyzed the mechanism of power in his speeches as discussed by Foucault. So, the present research fills up the gap by analyzing Trump’s speeches using Foucault’s power and knowledge theory. The researcher aims to answer the problem of mechanism such as politics of exclusion in the concerned speeches, the way Trump employs to create discourse and knowledge. In order to discuss and analyze the speeches, the study embraces the qualitative method that enables to answer the question related to power mechanisms. The discussion and analysis consist of the mechanisms such as American nationalism, Islam and politics of exclusion and paranoia. Besides it makes use of purposive, explanatory and descriptive designs of research to collect and analyze data using the above given theory. Thus, the study proves the way Trump uses discursive mechanisms of exclusionary politics in his presidential speeches.