8 January 2020

Acting presidential: Donald Trump’s rally speeches before and after

Monika Kavalir

Ever since his decision to enter the US presidential race, many aspects of Donald Trump’s language have been examined – and ridiculed – by the public. The talk will use a corpus approach to compare Trump’s speeches in the campaign and the post-election periods using transcripts from his rallies. While there is admittedly a scarcity of data regarding the first rallies in 2015, when Trump was not yet considered a serious candidate, the corpus tracks Trump’s speech from the early period before the primaries (June 2015–June 2016) and the general election season (June–November 2016) to the post-election period including the so-called victory rallies (December 2016) as well as later post-inauguration rallies (February–December 2017) and the midterm election season (March–November 2018).