A Critical Discourse Analysis of Donald Trump’s 2025 Inaugural Address as the 45TH President of United States of America

Abstract

The study investigates the “Inaugural Address” of Donald Trump in his second inauguration ceremony on 20, January, 2025 to explore the ideological stance of the president. It applied Norman Fairclough’s (2015) three dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), highlighting the impression markers such as pronouns, model verbs, repetition and parallelism to explore Trump’s ideological stance of crisis and renewal of America. His speech opposes the progressive values such as immigration reform and gender diversity and gives emphasis to the reformation of national security, economic strength and sovereignty of the country through the lens of populist and conservative ideologies. To him, these will overcome the crisis of the country and he is the sole leader who can bring such reforms.  The speech portrays persuasive rhetoric strategies which frames Trump as the national savoir amidst the crisis. It reveals the strategic use of language in political speeches reinforcing nationalistic discourse and contradictory ideologies are disregarded.