Silence and Denial: Trump's Discourse on the Environment

Ever since Trump took office as the 45th president of the US, he has turned a blind eye on the global threat of climate change and on environmental issues in general. His announcement of the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on June 1st 2017 caused an international outcry and has been interpreted as a sign of his irresponsible and short-sighted policy-making, which is geared towards non-sustainable, short term economic success. Not only has Trump’s controversial politics stirred attention and often criticism on a global scale, his use of language on the political scene has also given rise to an emerging body of linguistic research. While Trump’s populist discourse has been in the limelight so far (cf. e.g., Demata 2017; Johnson 2017; Lakoff 2017; Montgomery 2017; Oliver & Rahn 2017), further studies investigate his anti-intellectual language use (Degani 2016), his political incorrectness (Shafer 2017), his use of conceptual metaphors (Pilyarchuk & Onysko in print) and his language use on social media, such as Twitter (e.g., Schneider in prep.). The environment and climate change in particular, which has been repeatedly denied by Trump, are important topics that call for research of how he discursively frames his stance on these issues. Taking the White House publications in this area as a point of departure, the study will take a discourse-analytic approach of how Trump talks about issues related to the environment and climate change. Our approach will consider in detail how Trump discursively constructs his messages that promote the exploitation of fossil fuels and deny the reality of climate change.