Hate Speech in Political Discourse

The speeches delivered by Former U.S. President Donald Trump during his last presidential campaign (2015–2016) included hateful remarks against Muslims and immigrants. This study explored strategies of hate speech used in Trump’s political discourse against out-groups. The data consisted of a corpus of Trump’s speeches and interviews. Our analysis was based on Whillock’s [48] criteria of hate speech and Erjavec and Kovačič’s [13] strategies of hate speech. The results revealed that Trump employed re-articulation of meaning and renaming by attributing any problem to immigrants and Muslims to express hatred against them, using direct hatred words. His overt use of hate speech strategies stemmed from his legitimate power and social authority as a successful businessman in his field.