Semiotic space invasion: The case of Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign
-
Peter Wignell
and
Sabine Tan
Abstract
This paper uses a social semiotic perspective to analyze Donald Trump’s domination of media coverage of the US presidential campaign from 16 June 2015, when he announced his candidacy for nomination as the Republican candidate until 8 November 2016, when he was elected as President of the United States. The paper argues that one of the keys to Donald Trump’s domination of media coverage was that, in presenting himself and his agenda, he foregrounded interpersonal meaning by making himself the focus of attention of the campaign through strategies that invaded various semiotic spaces to form a “sub-semiosphere” of Trump dogma. The effects of this were that what he did and what he said captured the majority of media attention at the expense of his opponents, enabling him to win the election, despite his complete lack of background experience as a politician.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- L’énonciation et l’avènement de Gaston Lagaffe
- Stereotyping in representing the “Chinese Dream” in news reports by CNN and BBC
- Transcoding identity: Assemblages between man and machine beyond the cyborg archetype – a semiotic route
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- The semiotics of common sense: Patterns of meaning-sharing in the semiosphere
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- L’énonciation et l’avènement de Gaston Lagaffe
- Stereotyping in representing the “Chinese Dream” in news reports by CNN and BBC
- Transcoding identity: Assemblages between man and machine beyond the cyborg archetype – a semiotic route
- Semiotic interpretation of a city soundscape
- “Presentation” and “representation” of contents as principles of media convergence: A model of rhetorical narrativity of interactive multimedia design in mass communication with a case study of the digital edition of the New York Times
- “Authentically Disney, distinctly Chinese” and faintly American: The emotional branding of Disneyland in Shanghai
- Branding and communities: The normative dimension
- Form and non-linear continuity:The development of the idea of clusterin Peirce’s thought
- “Atmos-fear”: A psycho-semiotic analysis of messages in New York everyday life
- Semiotic space invasion: The case of Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign
- The ontology of Yentl: Umberto Eco, semiosis, mimesis, closets and existence, and how to read “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”
- The semiotics of common sense: Patterns of meaning-sharing in the semiosphere
- Sémiotique de la /lumière/ et de l’/obscurité/ de L’Ile de la fée d’Edgar Poe, et Pierre et Jean de Guy de Maupassant, à La Route d’Altamont de Gabrielle Roy, et L’Assassinat de la Via Belpoggio d’Italo Svevo
- A Lonerganian-Bakhtinian novelization of inculturation
