Donald J. Trump’s surprising victory in the 2016 American presidential election requires analysis: what brought it about, and what might it portend? This paper explores these and other questions: how have Trump’s victory and his communicative strategies compromised the culture’s notions of “truth” – via a continuum from “lie” through “post-truth,” “truthiness,” and “alternative facts” to “truth”? Is Trump – judging from his language and other communications – really a populist? And how are we to understand his many idiosyncrasies of discourse, as well as his supporters’ unwillingness to worry about them?
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Robin Tolmach Lakoff (2017) studied this question.
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