From Narrative Closure to Prospective Action: Trump’s Discursive Construction of Foreign Adversaries in Post-Mortem Addresses

Presidential military addresses delivered in the immediate aftermath of an enemy leader’s death perform critical political functions, yet how the same leader discursively recalibrates enemy construction across contrasting military contexts remains insufficiently understood in critical discourse studies. This article presents a comparative critical discourse analysis of two pivotal post-mortem addresses by President Donald J. Trump: the 27 October 2019 announcement concerning the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the 28 February 2026 address declaring major combat operations against Iran following the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Anchored in Fairclough’s (2010, 2015) three-dimensional framework and van Leeuwen’s (2008) typology of discursive legitimation, the study examines how lexicogrammatical choices, discursive practices, and legitimation strategies construct adversarial identities and justify state violence across completed versus prospective military engagements. The analysis reveals distinct study-generated discursive configurations: the Baghdadi address deploys a "forensic triumphalism" marked by retrospective narration, vivid detail, and criminalising descriptors that degrade the enemy, framing the operation as a completed success. Conversely, the Iran address utilizes an "anticipatory grievance rhetoric" characterized by historical enumeration of transgressions and prospective threat construction to justify an ongoing campaign. Crucially, the reported legitimation strategies shift in alignment with these military contexts: the Baghdadi address relies primarily on moral evaluation and mythopoesis to frame enemy death as narrative closure, whereas the Iran address privileges authorisation and rationalisation to construct enemy death as a catalyst for prospective action. Despite these contextual divergences, ideological patterns of moral binary polarization ("us" versus "them") and personalized executive authority persist across both addresses.