Navigating the Audience: Trump’s Persona Management Processes Across Political Contexts

Speakers can project different personae when engaging in stylistic practices, which can be characterised by a consistent or variable use of linguistic features. This becomes relevant when addressing how politicians attempt to position themselves in communicative interactions through their use of language. The present study takes a third wave approach to the analysis of Donald Trump’s sociolinguistic behaviour across various speech events by focusing on the indexical mutability of PRICE/PRIZE and R-Dropping. The results evidence intra-speaker variation in Trump’s populist speech style used for interactional and political purposes in that he alters his use of + mainstream and non-mainstream forms as he operates across speech events. Thus, Trump exhibits a different sociolinguistic performance across different contexts, where he also takes a different approach towards the management and projection of his public persona, and therefore, transmits different social meanings through his language use. The results further suggest that the context, format and audience of the political event and the social meanings indexed by the selected linguistic features are what condition Trump’s sociolinguistic behaviour. We conclude that Trump’s speech style is characterised by the meaningful choices he makes about the linguistic resource to be used in a specific context and its corresponding social meaning.