Cover not available
Part of
Remedies against the Pandemic: How politicians communicate crisis management
Edited by Nadine Thielemann and Daniel Weiss
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 102] 2023
► pp. 256–275

Trump’s framing of Covid-19
as a war and conspiracy theories

| University of East Anglia

The use of war-related metaphors by Western political leaders to frame the COVID19 pandemic has drawn strong criticism, both in the media and among critical discourse analysts. A particular reference point in such criticisms has been the long-standing critique of the illness-as war metaphor because it frames patients’ bodies as battlegrounds and favours ‘radical cure’ solutions that prioritize elimination of the illness as an enemy. This paper investigates the links between the pandemic as war metaphor scenario and Covid-19-related conspiracy theories in the sense of flawed, i.e. empirically and/or logically unwarranted theories (UCTs), with special reference to the anti-Chinese Covid-19-UCT that was used by the former US President Trump and other conspiracists who pretended to be in a situation of self-defense that entitled them to commit acts of resistance against a perceived war enemy.

It is, however, important to distinguish routine uses of the war-metaphor from narratively elaborated, ideologically invested metaphor scenarios such as Trump’s appeal to fight the “China virus”. It is the latter that can best be exploited in conspiracy theories for their implications, e.g. the identification of supposed ‘culprits’ and ‘traitors’ and the legitimacy of ‘fighting back’ against them. For this reason, “reframing” efforts, which have been proposed for Covid-19 in terms of the pandemic as war metaphor, should not target whole source domains but concentrate specifically on critiquing those scenarios that lead to the stigmatization of social/national groups.

Keywords: China virus, conspiracy theory, framing, metaphor, stigmatization
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Conspiracy theories and metaphorical discourse
  • 3.Trump’s war against the China virus
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 July 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.102.09mus
References
Augustyn, Rafał and Ewelina Prażmo
2020 “The Spread of Chinese Virus in the Internet Discourse: A Cognitive Semantic Analysis.” Gema Online Journal of Language Studies, November 2020 DOI logo. (Accessed 29/11/2020).Google Scholar
Avramov, Kiril
2018 “By another way of deception: The Use of Conspiracy Theories as a Foreign Policy Tool in the Arsenal of the Hybrid Warfare.” Information & Security: An International Journal, 39 (2): 151–161. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baider, Fabienne and Maria Constantinou
2022 “Are healthcare political responses gendered? A case study of several European leaders.” In Pandemic and Crisis Discourse. Communicating Covid-19 and Public Health Strategy, ed. by Andreas Musolff, Ruth Breeze, Kayo Kondo and Sara Vilar-Lluch, 285–306. London: Bloomsbury. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barkun, Michael
2016 “Conspiracy theories as stigmatized knowledge.” Diogenes, 62 (3–4): 114–120. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Benoit, William L.
1997 “Image repair discourse and crisis communication.” Public Relations Review, 23 (2): 177–186. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bergmann, Eirikur
2018 Conspiracy and Populism. The Politics of Misinformation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biden, Joe
2021a “Inaugural Address by President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., 20/01/2021”; [URL] (Accessed 29/11/2021)
2021b “Remarks by President Biden on the Fight to Contain the Covid-19 Pandemic, 26/01/2021”; [URL] (Accessed 29/11/2021)
2021c “Remarks by President Biden on the Covid-19 Response and the Vaccination Program, 18/06/2021.” [URL] (Accessed 29/11/2021)
2021d “Remarks by President Biden on the Covid-19 Response and the Vaccination Program, 06/07/2021.” [URL] (Accessed 29/11/2021)
Bruns, Axel, Stephen Harrington and Edward Hurcombe
2020 “ ‘Corona? 5G? or both?’: the dynamics of COVD-19/5G conspiracy theories on Facebook.” Media International Australia 177 (1): 12–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Buranyi, Stephen
2021 “Why the ‘lab-leak’ theory of Covid’s origins has gained prominence again.” The Guardian, 29/05/2021.Google Scholar
Butter, Michael and Peter Knight
(eds.) 2020 The Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Calvillo, Dustin P., Bryan J. Ross, Ryan J. B. Garcia, Thomas J. Smelter and Abraham M. Rutchick
2020 “Political ideology predicts perceptions of the threat of Covid-19 (and susceptibility to fake news about it).” Social Psychological and Personality Science 11: 1119–1128. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cap, Piotr
2013 Proximization: The Pragmatics of Symbolic Distance Crossing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chan, Hoi-Wing, Connie Pui-Yee Chi, Shijiang Zuo, Xue Wang, Li Liu and Ying-yi Hong
2021 “Not-so-straightforward links between believing in Covid-19-related conspiracy theories and engaging in disease-preventive behaviours.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 8: 104. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan
2013 Analysing Political Speeches: Rhetoric, Discourse and Metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
2022 Metaphors of Coronavirus: Invisible Enemy or Zombie Apocalypse? Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan.Google Scholar
Chiang, Wen-Yu and Ren-Fen Duann
2007 „Conceptual metaphors for SARS: ‘War’ between whom?“ Discourse & Society 18 (5): 579–602. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chilton, Paul and George Lakoff
1995 “Foreign Policy by Metaphor.” In: Language and Peace, ed. by Cristina Schäffner and Anita Wenden, 37–55. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Cienki, Alan
2005 “Metaphor in the ‘Strict Father’ and ‘Nurturant Parent’ cognitive models: theoretical issues raised in an empirical study.” Cognitive Linguistics 16: 279–312. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coady, David
2018 Conspiracy Theories. The Philosophical Debate. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Coleman, Michel P.
2013 “War on cancer and the influence of the medical-industrial complex.” Journal of Cancer Policy 1 (3–4): 31–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Croucher, Stephen M., Thao Nguyen and Diyako Rahmani
2020 “Prejudice Toward Asian Americans in the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Effects of Social Media Use in the United States.” Frontiers in Communication, 5. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Coninck, David, Thomas Frissen, Koen Matthijs, Leen d’Haenens Grégoire Lits, Olivier Champagne-Poirier, Marie-Eve Carignan, Marc D. David, Nathalie Pignard-Cheynel, Sébastien Salerno and Melissa Généreux
2021 “Beliefs in Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation About Covid-19: Comparative Perspectives on the Role of Anxiety, Depression and Exposure to and Trust in Information Sources.” Frontiers of Psychology 12: 646394. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Devakumar, Delan, Geordan Shannon, Sunil S. Bhopal and Ibrahim Abubakar
2020 “Racism and Discrimination in Covid-19 responses.” The Lancet 395 (10231): 1194. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Elwood, William N.
1995 “Declaring war on the home front: Metaphor, Presidents, and the war on drugs.” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10: 93–114. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Entman, Robert. M.
1993 “Framing. Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm.” Journal of Communication 43 (4): 51–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Evanega, Sarah, Mark Lynas, Jordan Adams and Karinne Smolenjak
2020 Coronavirus misinformation: quantifying sources and themes in the Covid-19 ‘infodemic’. Cornell University: [URL] (Accessed 29/11/2021)
Fillmore, Charles J.
1976 “Frame Semantics and the Nature of Language.” Annals of the New York Academy of Science 280: 20–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1985 “Frames and the Semantics of Understanding.” Quaderni di Semantica 6 (2): 222–253.Google Scholar
Filonik, Jakub
2018 “The European Family and Athenian Fatherland: Political Metaphors Ancient and Modern.” The European Legacy, 23:1-2, 25-46, DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Freeman, Daniel, Felicity Waite, Laina Rosebrock, Ariane Petit, Chiara Causier, Anna East, Lucy Jenner, Ashley-Louise Teale, Lydia Carr, Sophie Mulhall, Emily Bold and Sinéad Lambe
2020 “Coronavirus conspiracy beliefs, mistrust, and compliance with government guidelines in England.” Psychological Medicine 52 (2): 251–263. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garry, John, Rob Ford and Rob Johns
2020 “Coronavirus conspiracy beliefs, mistrust, and compliance: taking measurement seriously.” Psychological Medicine 52 (14): 3116–3126, DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haddad, Amy
2020 “Metaphorical militarisation: Covid-19 and the language of war.” The Strategist, 13/05/2020.Google Scholar
Hall Jamieson, Kathleen
2021 “How conspiracists exploited Covid-19 science.” Nature, 01/11/2021: Nature Human Behaviour 5: 1464–1465.Google Scholar
Harris, Keith
2018 “What’s Epistemologically Wrong with Conspiracy Theorising?” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 84: 235–257. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hartman, Todd K., Michael Marshall, Thomas V. A. Stocks, Ryan McKay, Kate Bennett, Sarah Butter, Jilly Gibson Miller, Philip Hyland, Liat Levita, Anton P. Martinez, Liam Mason, Orla McBride, Jamie Murphy, Mark Shevlin, Frédérique Vallières and Richard P. Bentall
2021 “Different Conspiracy Theories Have Different Psychological and Social Determinants: Comparison of Three Theories About the Origins of the Covid-19 Virus in a Representative Sample of the UK Population.” Frontiers in Political Science, 02 June 2021. DOI logo (Accessed 13 December 2021)Google Scholar
Hodges, Adam
2011 The ‘War on Terror’ Narrative: Discourse and Intertextuality in the Construction and Contestation of Sociopolitical Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hofstadter, Richard
1964 “The paranoid style in American politics.” Harper’s Magazine, November 1964: 77–86.Google Scholar
Imhoff, Roland and Pia Lamberty
2017 “Too special to be duped: Need for uniqueness motivates conspiracy beliefs.” European Journal of Social Psychology 47: 724–734. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018 “How paranoid are conspiracy believers? Toward a more fine-grained understanding of the connect and disconnect between paranoia and belief in conspiracy theories.” European Journal of Social Psychology 48: 909–926. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2020 “A bioweapon or a hoax? The link between distinct conspiracy beliefs about the Coronavirus disease (Covid-19) outbreak and pandemic behavior.” Social Psychological and Personality Science. 11 (8): 1110–1118. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jane, Emma A. and Chris Fleming
2014 Modern Conspiracy: The Importance of Being Paranoid. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Keeley, Brian L.
2018 “Of Conspiracy Theories.” In Conspiracy Theories. The Philosophical Debate, ed. by David Coady. London and New York: Routledge, 45–60. (First published in: Journal of Philosophy, XCVI, March 1999, 109–126)Google Scholar
Koley, Tapas Kumar and Monika Dhole
2021 The COVID-19 Pandemic. The Deadly Coronavirus Outbreak. London & New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Koschorke, Albrecht, Susanne Lüdemann, Thomas Frank and Ethel Matala de Mazza
2007 Der fiktive Staat. Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George
1996 Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson
1980/2003 Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George and Elisabeth Wehling
2016 Your Brain’s Politics. How the Science of Mind Explains the Political Divide. Exeter: Imprint Academic.Google Scholar
Mallapaty, Smiriti
2021 “Where did COVID come from? Five mysteries that remain.” Nature, 26/02/2021. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Markowitz, David M., Brittany Shoots-Reinhard, Ellen Peters, Michael C. Silverstein, Raleigh Goodwin and Pär Bjälkebring
2021 “Dehumanization during the Covid-19 Pandemic.” Frontiers in Psychology 12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maxmen, Amy and Smiriti Mallapaty
2021 “The COVID lab-leak hypothesis: what scientists do and don’t know.” Nature, 08/06/2021. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Momtaz, Rym
2020 “Inside Macron’s coronavirus war.” Politico, 12 April 2020. [URL] (Accessed 20/04/2020)
Musolff, Andreas
2006 “Metaphor Scenarios in Public Discourse.” Metaphor and Symbol, 21(1): 23–38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust. The Concept of the Body Politic. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
2021 National Conceptualisations of the Body Politic. Cultural Experience and Political Imagination. Singapore: Springer Nature. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2022 “War against Covid-19’: Is the pandemic management as war metaphor helpful or hurtful?” In Pandemic and Crisis Discourse. Communicating Covid-19 and Public Health Strategy, ed by Andreas Musolff, Ruth Breeze, Kayo Kondo and Sara Vilar-Lluch, 307–320. London: Bloomsbury. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Olmsted, Kathryn S.
2011 Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Olza, Inés, Veronika Koller, Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Paula Pérez-Sobrino and Elena Semino
2021 “The #ReframeCovid initiative.” Metaphor and the Social World 11 (1): 98–120. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Oprysko, Caitlin and Susannah Luthi
2020 “Trump labels himself ‘a wartime president’ combating coronavirus.” Politico, 18/03/2020.Google Scholar
Parkinson, Justin
2020 “Coronavirus: Why do we talk about ‘fighting’ illness?” BBC, 09/04/2020, [URL] (Accessed 20/20/2020)
Pei, Xin and Deval Mehta
(2020) ‘# Coronavirus or# Chinesevirus?!: Understanding the Negative Sentiment Reflected in Tweets with Racist Hashtags across the Development of COVID-19’, arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.08224.Google Scholar
Popper, Karl
2018 “The Conspiracy Theory of Society.” In Conspiracy Theories. The Philosophical Debate, ed. by David Coady, 13–15. London: Routledge. (First published in Karl Popper 1963, Conjectures and Refutations, 123–135. London: Routlege and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Renfro, Paul
2020 “War Has Been the Governing Metaphor for Decades of American Life. This Pandemic Exposes Its Weaknesses.” Time, 15/04/2020.Google Scholar
Semino, Elena
2021a “Fire, waves and warfare: the way we make sense of Covid.” The Guardian, 05/07/2021.Google Scholar
2021b “’Not Soldiers but Fire-fighters’ – Metaphors and Covid-19.” Health Communication 36 (1): 50–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Serhan, Yasmeen
2020 “The Case Against Waging ‘War’ on the Coronavirus.” The Atlantic, 31 March 2020.Google Scholar
Steen, Gerard J.
2008 “The paradox of metaphor: Why we need a three-dimensional model of metaphor.” Metaphor and Symbol 23 (4): 213–241. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 “What does ‘really deliberate’ really mean? More thoughts on metaphor and consciousness and action.” Metaphor and the Social World 1 (1): 53–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taylor, John R.
1995 Linguistic categorization. Prototypes in Linguistic Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tessler, Hannah, Meera Choi, and Grace Kao
2020 “The anxiety of being Asian American: Hate crimes and negative biases during the Covid-19 pandemic.” American Journal of Criminal Justice, 45(4): 636–646. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tian, Yew Lun
2020 “In ‘People’s War’ on coronavirus, Chinese propaganda faces pushback.” Reuters. [URL]. (Accessed 20/10/2020)
Tisdall, Simon
2020 “Lay off those war metaphors, world leaders. You could be the next casualty.” The Guardian, 21 March 2020.Google Scholar
Trump, Donald J.
2020a “Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Conference, 26/02/2020.” [URL] (Accessed 20/12/2020)
2020b “Trump’s Oval Office speech on the coronavirus outbreak, 11/03/2020.” [URL] (Accessed 20/12/2020)
2020c “Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing, 17/03/2020.” ([URL]) (Accessed 20/12/2020)
2020d “Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing, 01/04/2020.” [URL] (Accessed 20/12/2020)
2020e “Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing, 10/04/2020.” ([URL]) (Accessed 20/12/2020)
2020f “Remarks by President Trump in Press Conference, 14/07/2020.” ([URL]) (Accessed 20/12/2020)
2020g “United Nations address by US President Trump, 21/09/2020.” [URL]. (Accessed 20/12/2020)
United Nations
2020 “Covid-19: ‘We are at war with a virus’ – UN Secretary-General, 19/03/2020.” [URL] (Accessed 20/12/2020)
Wang, Peiwen and Theresa Catalano
2022 “Social media, right-wing populism, and Covid-19: A multimodal critical discourse analysis of reactions to the ‘Chinese virus’ discourse.” In Pandemic and Crisis Discourse. Communicating Covid-19 and Public Health Strategy, ed. by Andreas Musolff, Ruth Breeze, Kayo Kondo and Sara Vilar-Lluch, 321–337. London: Bloomsbury. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
WHO (World Health Organization)
2020a “WHO Director-General’s statement on IHR Emergency Committee on Novel Coronavirus, 22/01/2020.” [URL] (Accessed 26/07/2020)
2020b “Statement on the Second Meeting of the International Health Regulations (2005) Emergency Committee Regarding the Outbreak of Novel Coronavirus (2019-NCoV). 30 January 2020.” [URL]. (Accessed 26/07/2020)
Wodak, Ruth
2015 The Politics of Fear. What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar