On Metapragmatic Gaslighting: Truth and Trump’s Epistemic Tactics in a Plague Year

Abstract

This article focuses on the nexus between political discourse and contemporary concerns about the arbitration of truth to argue that Trump’s way of using speech about speech (i.e., his metapragmatic discourse) resembles the manipulation tactic commonly called gaslighting. Based on examples drawn from 2020 (i.e., White House press conferences and electoral presidential debates), I explore Trump’s metapragmatic gaslighting both as an epistemic tactic for the manipulation of information and as an effective style of political self-presentation. By analyzing specific instances of Trump’s metapragmatic commentaries that blatantly contradict shared pragmatic principles for the interpretation of utterances’ illocutionary force and denotational content, I show how Trump is able to present himself as a champion of semantic and moral candor and simultaneously promote a highly personalist view of the meaning-making process. In so doing, I also propose a metapragmatic approach to the epistemological and political predicaments posed by the “post-truth” epistemic regime.