An Ideological Analysis of the Former President Donald Trump’s Tweets During COVID-19

This study aimed to explore the former US President Donald Trump’s representation of “us” and “others” in his tweets related to COVID-19 and how he portrayed the representation of “us” and “others”. In this study, the sample related to COVID-19 which ranged from January to May 2020, consisted of the tweets posted by the former US President Donald Trump. To analyze the ideological discourse of the former President Donald Trump’s tweets during COVID-19, the ideological framework proposed by Van Dijk (Approaches to Media Discourse. Blackwell Publishing, 1997) was adopted to reveal the underlying intentions and ideologies of us-representation and others-representation. The results of this research indicate that Donald Trump portrayed a positive us-group and a negative others-group. Moreover, argumentation/authority, comparison, repetition, capitalization, and metaphors are the typical strategies that former President Trump used to portray both groups. It was also found that the positive opinions about the us-group and the negative ones about the others-group were not always consistent. For example, there were also changes when the same descriptions were given to both groups, which may well be coherent concerning the basic interests of the groups (Van Dijk, in: Approaches to Media Discourse. Blackwell Publishing, 1997). The findings of this study may contribute to an analysis of the president’s discourse on Twitter, which is a relatively recent channel for political information (Kerbleski, in: Trump, Twitter, and the trees: a critical discourse analysis of Donald Trump's tweets surrounding the november 2018 California Wildfires. Doctoral dissertation, Northern Arizona University, 2019).