Anti-Immigration Rhetoric in Donald Trump’s Presidential Speeches: A Corpus-Assisted Comparative Analysis of U.S. Presidential Discourse (1946–2021). Populist and Emotionally Charged Language versus Constructive, Policy-Oriented Framing

The United States of America is often referred to as being a nation of immigrants. The latter have played an important role in its population growth and shaped its cultural identity. Immigration-related topics, therefore, have been integral part of the US political discourse and governmental communication, including in the US presidential speeches. However, no other president has faced as much criticism for raising issues related with immigration than Donald Trump, current president from Republican party. We apply a Corpus-based discourse analysis, to analyse large amounts of language data with the aim to identify and examine repetitive linguistic patterns of language uses in the context of immigration by all former US presidents in the years between 1946 and 2021, including, Trump (2017–2021).After studying Trump’s speeches via a Corpus-based discourse analysis (CDA) and comparing them with other presidential speeches, both quantitative and qualitative analysis showed that the use of lexical terms such as “immigra,” “immigration” and “immigrants” by Donald Trump was overwhelmingly more frequent than in the case of any other US presidents. In addition, his speeches revealed more populistic approach as well as negative connotation, while all the other 13 preceding US presidents used the semantic area for immigration very carefully and avoided engaging with negative connotations and narratives.