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 analysed the mechanisms of power in his speeches as discussed by Foucault. So the present research fills up the gap by analysing Trump’s speeches using Foucault’s Power and Knowledge Theory. The researcher aims to answer the problem of mechanisms of power such as politics of exclusion in the concerned speeches, the way Trump employs to create discourse and knowledge. In order to discuss and analyse 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, he also makes use of purposive, explanatory, and descriptive designs of research to collect and analyse data using the above given theory. Thus, the study explores Trump's mechanisms of exclusionary politics as used in his presidential speeches.

Keywords: Power, Knowledge, Discourse, Exclusion, Politics, Applied Linguistics