Achieving Results for the American People. A corpus-assisted CDA of the White House website under Trump's precidnency.

The consequences of globalisation and financial crisis have generated a growing disillusionment with politics, favouring a wave of populism culminated in extreme manifestations such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in the United States. As our societies have become more religiously and racially diverse, many perceive subjects who are ‘Other’ from the original group as undermining their own legitimate rights and as a threat to an imaginary national ethnic ‘purity’. Trump empathised with the anger and frustration of the working class who felt neglected by the elites. He exploited many Americans’ discontent with a multicultural society, blaming migrants for stealing American jobs, portraying refugees as security risks and demonising Muslim communities. The paper analyses the political discourse constructed through official governmental communications during the current US Presidency. The site whitehouse.gov, in particular, is the official website of the White House which collects a variety of online resources such as press releases, executive orders and speeches, highlighting the most relevant issues in the presidential agenda. The present study considers the online texts published on the White House website from the beginning of Trump’s office (20th February 2017) about the ‘hot topics’ of national security and immigration. By integrating by combining Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, the paper examines how updates and information about the issues are conveyed online to support the Presidential policies. The investigation focuses on the representation and promotion of the US leader and political actions as a champion of the American people and of its will, in contrast with its enemies and ‘Others’.