Ideology and Power: a Discourse Analysis of Donald j. Trump’s Speech at the “Save America” Rally

This research entitled Ideology and Power: Discourse Analysis of Donald J. Trump’s Speech at the “Save America” Rally. This research aims to analyze the representation of ideology and power through the structure of Donald J. Trump’s protest speech. This research employs text analysis under a descriptive qualitative approach in order to answer the research questions. Donald J. Trump’s utterances in the speech are selected by using purposive sampling technique. The research uses theory of Teun van Dijk’s discourse structure (1980) and ideological square (2000), and Reisigl’s political scheme (2008). The results of the analysis are divided into three components of the structure of speech: microstructure, superstructure, and macrostructure. The microstructure analysis presents four discussions of syntactic, semantic, stylistic, and rhetoric. The superstructure analysis indicates the content arrangement of the protest speech: the introduction (exordium), the statement (statement), the argument (proof), and the conclusion (peroration). The macrostructure analysis reveals the theme of the speech, namely Donald J. Trump’s objection to the 2020 election result. According to the identification of speech structure, a strong polarization of ideological square is represented by means of passive structure, details, lexical choice, hyperbole, simile, and repetition. Moreover, Donald J. Trump’s power has easily contributed to his act of persuasion that makes his speech influential. Finally, the language and strategy by him are managed in consonance with the speech’s purpose as an action of objection to the 2020 election result