Out-grouping and ambient affiliation in Donald Trump’s tweets about Iran

Abstract

This paper explores communing affiliation and out-grouping in a corpus of Trump’s tweets about Iran. Communing is a form of ‘ambient affiliation’ (Zappavigna 2011) which offers a way of understanding how Trump attempts to build alignments with his audience without necessarily directly engaging with them, since he tends to ignore replies to his tweets. The paper focuses on three affiliation strategies: convoking (mustering community), promoting (garnering attention), and finessing (dialogistic positioning). It draws on Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal framework to consider how these affiliation strategies are used to foster communing around ideation-attitude couplings, typically couplings associating Iran with negative judgement or appreciation. Promoting affiliation was found to be the most prominent affiliation strategy used by Trump to garner attention through his rhetorical tendency toward hyperbole.