Exploring the Use of Covid-19 as a New Pre-Text in Trump’s Political Discourse

Abstract

With the rise in the spate of deaths in America and the failure of Trump in containing coronavirus pandemic, the president is losing his hopes of winning the coming presidential election. Amidst Trump’s confusion, Covid-19 becomes a pre-text in his political rhetoric in an attempt to blame China for the pandemic, raise tension between U.S. and Beijing, and regain credibility from the public. Accordingly, the research paper aims to explore how Trump’s outrageous language unveils his ideological hegemony and contributes to the spread of xenophobia towards China. A multidisciplinary qualitative analysis was adopted to analyze one of Trump’s blunt political discourse. The analysis was based on Fairclough and Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) model, along with Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) Model. The findings of the study are significant in raising the public’s awareness of the manipulative social function of language in enhancing racism and inequality of power between nations.