Impoliteness in President Donald Trump’s Posts on Truth Social

This paper aims at figuring out whether President Donald Trump’s posts on Truth Social can be characterized as involving impoliteness. The reason Trump’s language is chosen is that he calls a spade a spade. Unlike other politicians, Trump does not appreciate political correctness, which helps politicians to avoid offense or harsh language against marginalized social groups or political opponents. This paper has studied 127 posts that were collected from Trump’s page on Truth Social. Using Culpeper’s (1996, 2011) Impoliteness Model, I have obtained and categorized 249 instances of impoliteness strategies that the Trump posts contain. These impoliteness strategies fall into four categories: negative impoliteness, positive impoliteness, bald on-record and sarcasm or mockery. Of all these strategies, the positive impoliteness is the most dominant strategy at 51% (n=127). Negative impoliteness comes next at 40.2% (n=100), followed by bald on-record at 7.2% (n=18). Sarcasm or mockery is the Least frequent at 1.6% (n=4). Trump seems to be mainly dependent on two strategies of negative impoliteness and two of positive impoliteness As for the function of these strategies, it has been shown that the affective function is the most dominant at 73% (n=182), followed by the coercive function at 19% (n=47), and the entertaining function is the least frequent at 8.0% (n=20).