A Critical Pragmatic Study of Nastiness in Trump’s Talk during the US 2020 Presidential Debates

Abstract

This study examines the notions of nastiness, conflict talk, persuasive strategies, critical pragmatics, personal attack argument and impoliteness. How words are weaponized to influence the general public and to attack the opponents personally and also attack their argumentations is a main focus in this study. Utterances are analyzed from two perspectives; once as arguments and once again as speech acts. When taken as arguments, two models are applied; Walton’s Informal Logic and Aristotle’s Persuasive Strategies Trinity, and when taken as speech acts, Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory is to be applied to examine the level and strategies of impoliteness in the political context. In this research, critical pragmatics proved to be a reliable tool to study political discourse; also nastiness is a necessity in the world of politics as one way to manifest power and control; it is very important to get weaponized with nastiness during conflict talk and political debates. It is the weapon that would reveal the defects of the opponent and would direct a coup de grace to the opponent. Quarrels, direct threats, swears, badmouthing, foxy questions, ironic style, loud voices, hints and association clues, monkey-playing with numbers and statistics, chaos, etc. let the inborn character of every candidate appears ostensibly.