The Return to the American Golden Age

The global geopolitical situation has been characterised by numerous crises in recent years, posing new challenges to EU governments and the US. Owing to the ensuing international instability, Trump’s inflammatory 2024 presidential campaign turned traditional rhetoric into an attempt to restore what he portrayed as the golden age. Set against this context, the present work analyses three main issues highlighted by the tycoon during the 2024 US campaign: the deteriorating effects of Biden’s administration, transgender people and immigration. To this end, 61 speeches delivered by Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign have been collected into a corpus and examined through the tools provided by Sketch Engine, with the purpose of discussing the semantic and metaphorical aspects of keywords and collocational clusters. Subsequently, drawing on Wodak’s (2011) theoretical frameworks, this research dwells on Trump’s employment of disclaimers, rhetorical strategies used to justify policies of exclusion in the name of national safety and identity. The identification of a specific lexicon offers insights into Trump’s metaphors, examined from the perspective of the conceptual blending theory suggested by Charteris-Black (2018) and developed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002). The analysis of linguistic and rhetorical elements builds on Wodak’s (2011) theories of discursive strategies to determine how Trump frames American society in dichotomic terms (Fairclough 2003). Finally, the study aims to demonstrate that, in spite of the tycoon’s replication of many rhetorical and linguistic strategies from his first campaign, his ‘bombastic’ 2024 campaign enabled him to gain momentum as a political celebrity and to be regarded as the forerunner of a return to the golden age.