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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 22:6 (2023) ► pp.918–937

“You are fake news”

The resistant response practices used by Donald Trump during the press briefings of 2020

| South China Business College Guangdong University of Foreign Studies
| Xi’an Shiyou University

Using the methodology of conversation analysis and a modified analytical framework, this article attempts to characterize and investigate Trump’s practices to resist the agendas of the interviewers’ questions during the press briefings held by the Trump Administration in 2020. Statistical data show that Trump mainly used four types of overt resistant response practices in order of decreasing frequency: (1) Justifying the resistance; (2) Providing a partial answer; (3) Flatly refusing to answer without any explanation; and (4) Resorting to a personal attack, which is a new type of overt resistant practices. However, only one type of covert resistant response practice is identified, i.e. Repeating words subversively. The potential reasons for Trump’s use of such practices are discussed. In essence, Trump’s deliberate use of resistant response practices is a typical reflection of the right-wing populist politicians’ claim of “authenticity” rather than “truth” in the Post-Truth era.

Keywords: resistant response practice, conversation analysis, Covid-19, press briefing, authenticity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Prior research on Trump’s political discourse
    • 2.2Prior research on resistant responses
  • 3.Data and methodology
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Data coding
  • 4.Data analysis
    • 4.1Overt category
      • 4.1.1Justifying the resistance
        • A substantial shift of the topic
        • A response containing additional turns that shifts away from that agenda
        • “I-don’t-know” followed by some explanation
        • Attacking the question directly as improper and unworthy of an answer
        • Refusing to answer on the ground that to do so would be somehow inappropriate
      • 4.1.2Providing a partial answer
      • 4.1.3Flatly refusing to answer without any explanation
      • 4.1.4Resorting to a personal attack
    • 4.2Covert category
      • Repeating words subversively
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 September 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.22107.qua
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