‘Heart’, ‘Hope’, and ‘Tombstones’: Donald Trump and Populist discourse
Like other actors in the public sphere, politicians manipulate our emotions to achieve an “emotional re-framing of reality”[i]. Either in their spontaneous or prepared addresses, those in public office usually trigger a myriad of emotions ranging from fear, anger, frustration, resentment, happiness, grief to nostalgia. This chameleonic communication is often vital to any successful politician’s career, and its legacy is vast. The use of conceptual metaphors that invoke emotions in political discourse has been the subject in many classical fields of study. It lies in Ancient tradition when emotions, or Pathos in Aristotelian terms, were one of the three persuasive appeals. Emotions have always been central to political communication. “Few would deny that political rhetoric often has an explicitly emotional purpose”, wrote James Martin[ii]. President Lincoln, President D. Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr are examples of politicians who were invested in cultivating positive emotions. Martha Nussbaum[iii] calls these figures […]