Hegemonic Masculinity and Leadership Response to Covid-19: Critical Discourse Analysis of President Trump’s Political Rhetoric in the Global Pandemic

Abstract

Based on the understanding that leadership is performed through language and discourse, this article endeavors to dissect the political rhetoric of former U.S. President Donald Trump during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic from March-May 2020. An overview of Trump‟s political rhetoric vis-à-vis Covid-19 depicts an overt subscription to masculinized metaphors and militaristic wartime imagery. The post-positivist feminist traditions argue that masculinity and „combative language‟ are engaged in a mutually constitutive cycle of production, regeneration, and construction of the male identity as an agent of politics and violence, meaning that combative militarist wartime rhetoric is itself gendered. This article applies the theoretical and methodological lens of Critical Discourse Analysis in conjunction with post-positivist feminist traditions to explore if the social and discursive construction of Trump‟s hegemonic masculine identity as a „strong man‟ and „fearless warrior‟ is reflected in his political rhetoric generally and in his Covid-19 responses particularly. The themes that emerge from Trump‟s political rhetoric highlight his gendered identity that is further perpetuated in his speech acts and manifested in his leadership response. Our goal is to understand the manifestation, acceptance, and naturalization of hegemonic masculinity within the social and discursive identities of „male agents of politics‟ through the themes that emerge in Trump‟s speeches.