The cooperative speech strategy of sacred legitimization and the means of its implementation in D. Trump’s speeches
DOI: 10.23951/1609-624X-2026-4-28-35
In modern political communication, an arsenal of speech strategies and tactics of their implementation is actively used to exert manipulative influence on the mass addressee. Cooperative speech strategies are often used to increase the number of potential supporters of politics. The strategy of sacred legitimation is one of them. The purpose of the study is to study the cooperative speech strategy of sacred legitimization used by Donald Trump in public speeches after the attempt on his life on July 13, 2024. The strategy under study is aimed at constructing a narrative of sacrifice and divine election, which serves as the highest form of legitimization, transforming a political candidate into a figure of a Messianic-redemptive kind. The article analyzes three tactics that implement the speech strategy of sacred legitimation: 1) sacralization of the event through the narrative of miraculous salvation and direct appeals to Providence; 2) construction of the collective heroic identity of the “community of destiny” through an inclusive “we” and the glorification of supporters; 3) demonstrations of moral leadership by shifting the focus to victims among “their own” and acts of material solidarity. These tactics perform not only a communicative and integrative, but also a myth-making function, allowing us to translate the political crisis into the plane of sacred history and create an emotional and symbolic alliance with the audience. The main means of implementing these tactics are: vocabulary with religious and providential semantics (God, miracle, blessing, fate, divine intervention), metaphors of physical unity and struggle (stand together, fight as one, bullet for democracy), epithets with heroic connotation (brave, unbreakable, fearless), repetitive syntactic constructions (the inclusive we in conjunction with the verbs of volition), rhetorical questions, antitheses (life / death, weakness / strength), as well as performative statements that formalize acts of solidarity. The source of the material was a 44-page corpus of texts of D. Trump’s key speeches, including a speech at the Republican Party convention on July 18, 2024, as well as his first public comments after the incident. The empirical basis of the research is 145 contexts in which the cooperative speech strategy of sacred legitimization is objectified. In extraordinary circumstances, the cooperative strategy achieves its highest goal – absolute legitimization – through an appeal to archetypal, mythological and religious layers of consciousness, which requires a revision of approaches to the analysis of political speeches in situations of extreme instability.
Keywords: cooperative speech strategy, speech tactics, narrative, means of speech influence, political communication, Donald Trump
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Issue: 4, 2026
Series of issue: Issue 4
Rubric: GERMANIC LANGUAGES
Pages: 28 — 35
Downloads: 35