Power and Dominance in Donald Trump’s 2024-2025 Speeches: A Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Aim of the study: The major source of influencing people and shaping their opinion, as well as the channel of expressing political power, is through the political campaign speech. The speeches by the 2024 campaign by Donald Trump reveal the creation of influence through language. This research is primarily aimed at studying systematically how the semantics of power and dominance are semantically constructed in the speeches on the 2024-2025 campaigns of Donald Trump.  

Methodology: This paper employs the corpus-based qualitative method to analyze the rhetoric of power and dominance by Trump as a word frequency, collocations, and concordance. The dataset will consist of speeches made in the period between January 2024 and January 2025 and obtained in Roll Call / Factbase (https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump), and processed through the use of Wordsmith. The keywords were clustered into six themes, namely, nationalism and patriotism, political leadership and opponents, elections and power, border and immigration, global affairs and influence, and economy and trade. The collocate analysis disclosed fixed and emotionally charged phrases to show that Trump has been dependent on slogans, adversarial framing, and crisis language.

Findings: The results reveal that Trump was an invariable tough-talker, portrayer of decline, and aggressor who sought to use these characteristics to seek political influence and power. His rhetoric is trying to paint the impression of him being the only leader capable of halting what he characterizes as the disintegration of America and this is a move to instill more loyalty in his followers.

Conclusion: The work under consideration helps us gain a better insight into how the language of political speech is used to create identity, exert authority, and gain a following.