Rationalization and Rhetorical Modes as Strategies of Legitimization in Trump's Public Speeches
This study is concerned with utilizing CDA to analyze and identify the main strategies of legitimization in D. Trump's public speech. As such, this study aims to (1) find out legitimization strategies processed in Trump's public speech, (2) pinpoint the rationalization and rhetorical modes as legitimization strategies in Trump's public speech. To achieve the aims of the study and test its hypotheses, the following procedure is followed: (1) surveying the CDA literature of the political discourse, (2) reviewing literature on legitimization, its definition, types, functions, strategies and models, (3) developing a model of analysis, (4) selecting representative extracts taken from Trump's public speeches to be the data of analysis, and (5) conducting qualitative data analysis in the light of the model developed, supported with some statistical correlations. The results of analysis revealed that the value of the significance has been reliable and this validates the first hypothesis that Trump manipulates different legitimization strategies that enhance his own ideologies towards political cases, where such discursive and rhetorical strategies have been employed to legitimize different political and economic decisions and threats concerning various ideological contexts such as the Middle East issues, terrorism, immigration and the global economic crisis.