E-Thesis 362 views
The Forging of a Brand Presidency: An analysis of Oratories by Donald Trump that Disrupted the Picture of Politics / JOHN BOLANDER
Swansea University Author: JOHN BOLANDER
DOI (Published version): 10.23889/SUthesis.65716
Abstract
The 2016 election of Donald Trump, as America’s first President without military or public office experience, was a surprise for most of America, as it represented a change to how voter’s viewed politics. This research studies the business rhetoric, branding and marketing techniques used to support...
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Swansea, Wales, UK
2023
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| Institution: | Swansea University |
| Degree level: | Doctoral |
| Degree name: | Ph.D |
| Supervisor: | Rees, R. F; Rydzewska J; Sharp, B. |
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa65716 |
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| Abstract: |
The 2016 election of Donald Trump, as America’s first President without military or public office experience, was a surprise for most of America, as it represented a change to how voter’s viewed politics. This research studies the business rhetoric, branding and marketing techniques used to support Trump’s election campaign and proposes that his business approach is an important feature of Trump’s campaign success. This thesis incorporates discourse analysis with textual analysis of a corpus of stump speeches selected from the Trump campaign. The analysis explores how Trump used business marketing techniques and rhetoric to connect him to the lower and middle-income voters to persuasively convince them that he understood their needs. The methodology embraces Kenneth Burke’s Dramatistic Pentad (dramatism) to explore the construction and techniques of Trump’s business branding and propaganda in his rhetoric. In pursuance of the idea of purpose in Burke’s pentad, the study for this thesis intersects with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as a generative marketing theory to underpin a more in-depth analysis of the notion of motive in Trump’s speeches. The approach identifies ten stump speeches which focus on Trump’s Make America Great Again movement toward neoliberalism and his grievances toward existing globalism policies of the United States government. This was used to identify if Trump’s populist grievance driven marketing rhetoric could persuade the population to vote for him and be a repeatable process. It has been concluded that in campaigning this approach is successful and repeatable. |
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| Item Description: |
Part of this thesis has been redacted to protect personal information |
| Keywords: |
Branding, Donald J. Trump, Hillary Clinton, Populism, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Kenneth Burke's Dramatism, Critical Discourse Analysis, Grievance Rhetoric |
| College: |
College of Arts and Humanities |