The Representation of Covid-19 in Trumpian Political Discourse and Media Reports: The Ideology of Racism and Xenophobia

Abstract This research explores the political media discourse surrounding the reception of the Covid-19 pandemic within the United States, concentrating specifically on the discursive strategies employed in the US president, Donald Trump’s Tweets, their subsequent reconstruction and reiteration within news editorials of two major US news portals, CNN and Fox News, and the corresponding audience commentaries on their social media platforms. The study underscores the importance of digital platform mediation in structuring political discourse and influencing citizen participation in meaning-making processes, particularly during a period marked by significant public health concerns. The context for this investigation is the first period of Donald Trump’s presidency (2017-2021), the period coinciding with the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic. The President’s Tweets collected and analyzed fall between March 16, 2020 to January 20, 2021. Trump’s presidency is characterized by his intensive use of social media, particularly Twitter, as a primary channel of political communication channel, and his rhetoric frequently drew criticism for employing hate speech. The objective of this study is to explore the intensification and propagation of this hate speech around the construction of the meaning of Covid-19 as “China/Chinese virus”, targeting Asian American and, indirectly, Chinese citizens. The project goes beyond that and investigates further how the meaning associated with the term “China/Chinese virus” through the mediation of CNN and Fox News reports becomes a shaping force and gets perpetuated in the platform users’ comments. While some research has examined the impact of Trump’s rhetoric in the pandemic, this study addresses a gap by empirically investigating the ways his disposition could permeate the US media field. The analysis explores the role of digital news media in the articulation and perpetuation of the Trumpian rhetoric, and its normalization through its reconstruction and reiteration on news platforms and in citizen comments on social media. The study seeks answers to three main research questions: (1) How did Donald Trump’s Tweets about the virus function persuasively to produce racist and/or xenophobic meanings around the term ‘China / Chinese virus’? (2) How were those ideologies sustained or challenged by CNN and Fox News in their reporting of Trump’s pandemic-related communications? (3) How are discourses of racism and xenophobia reiterated or contested in citizen comments on the two news outlets’ Facebook pages, contributing to the circulation and normalization of the president’s hate propaganda? These questions collectively aim to show that the Trumpian discourse was not merely an individual peculiarity but became a dominant communicative mode in citizens’ language use through the mediation of social media circulation. Methodologically, this interpretative research employs Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (Martin, 2011) and Corpus Linguistics, namely keyword analysis, concordance lines and cluster analysis as developed by Baker (2004, 2006). It utilizes Fairclough’s three-dimensional CDA framework (textual analysis, discursive practice, social practice) (Fairclough, 1995b) and the Appraisal Framework of SFL (analyzing attitude, graduation, and engagement) (Martin & White, 2005). For the third research question, it employs a Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (CACDA) approach, combining the methods of corpus linguistics with critical discourse analysis to systematically investigate lexical choices and recurring phrase patterns (Subtirelu & Baker, 2018). The data comprises three distinct sets for the three research questions respectively, all collected between March 16, 2020 and January 20, 2021: (1) a corpus of 708 tweets by Trump containing the keywords ‘Covid’, ‘Coronavirus’, ‘pandemic’, ‘Asian/Asia’, and ‘China/Chinese virus’; (2) news reports on these tweets from CNN and Fox News; and (3) audience comments on the corresponding Facebook pages of these two news outlets. The analysis focuses on intertextuality, examining both explicit references and implicit assumptions to understand how ideological meaning is constructed and spread across the textual chains on these platforms. The key findings indicate that the Trumpian rhetoric is a strategically constructed discourse with significant socio-political consequences. His tweets systematically employed geography- and ethnicity-based naming conventions (“China/Chinese virus”) as a strategy to racialize the pandemic, legitimize xenophobia, align audiences against the given ethnic group and divert criticism from his administration’s inadequate handling of the health crisis. Additionally, the study demonstrates that media outlets reports are not neutral accounts but active participants in constructing what counts as the reality of the pandemic.