Self-Framing and Other-(Re)framing in Institutional Political Discourse: The Case of Donald Trump’s Final Speech Before the UN

The goal of this study is to provide a sociocognitive critical discourse analysis of Donald Trump’s 75th UNGA (The UN General Assembly) speech 2020 to demonstrate how Trump (re)framed America and other political actors. The study’s methodology has been divided into three stages: (a) identifying the speech’s macrostructures (major themes) embodying the speech’s global meanings, (b) analyzing the speech’s explicit and implicit local meanings, and (c) laying out Trump’s subjective context model. Findings revealed that (1) the semantic (cognitive) structure and textual arrangement of Trump’s speech are meant to draw attention to two ideologically opposed discourse worlds with skewed, hegemonic intergroup and outgroup representations; (2) a polarized context model, based on the WE/THEY schema, has motivated and controlled Trump’s speech for the purposes of persuading the audience, stigmatizing other social actors, and managing opinion formation; and (3) Trump’s context model has been shown to control the production of specific microstructures that correspond with a variety of discursive strategies.