Donald J. Trump’s Discursive and Neurocommunicational Playbook

The present article employs a discursive and neurocommunicational lens to analyze Donald J. Trump’s discursive playbook. By means of a qualitative approach founded upon Critical Discourse Analysis and framing theory, the present study examines the manner in which the tactics of denial, deflection, and discrediting have structured the politician’s political communication since 2016, throughout his new presidential term. The corpus under scrutiny encompasses a range of sources, including official speeches, social media posts, media coverage, and academic literature. A particular emphasis is placed on the Epstein case, which serves to expose the structural limitations of his rhetorical strategy. The findings demonstrate the efficacy of these tactics in polarized contexts, characterized by the mobilization of emotions such as fear, anger, and victimhood, while reinforcing cognitive biases such as dissonance and confirmation bias. However, in situations involving crises that are characterized by strong social consensus—such as sexual abuse, corruption, or demands for transparency—discursive saturation has been shown to generate contradictions, cognitive fatigue, and psychological reactance, leading to a so-called ‘boomerang effect’. From a neurocommunicational perspective, this phenomenon elucidates the process by which emotional triggers, which initially serve to strengthen audience cohesion, can subsequently act as factors of disaffection and internal fragmentation. The study posits that Trump’s rhetorical populism is contingent on a delicate equilibrium between emotional mobilization and perceived credibility, whose disruption threatens to undermine the stability of his leadership and facilitate the emergence of alternative leadership figures within the MAGA movement.