Abstract
By focusing on the receiving side of post-truth political communication rather than its production, this chapter contributes a less common approach to political discourse. The chapter analyzes the reactions of Trump supporters through the comments they left on his official Facebook page after the announcement of the Muslim ban. It uses the statements containing the lemma SAY as a dataset to study how the audience interpreted what Trump meant by his vaguely worded proposal. The analysis classifies the comments according to their distance from the exact wording of Trump’s proposal and the strategies of text modification employed by the commenters. The findings demonstrate the range of interpretations produced by Trump’s Facebook commenters and the distance some of them travel from the literal meaning of Trump’s statement.
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Knoblock, N. (2020). Trump’s Text Appeal: Vague Language in Post-Truth Politics. In: Kranert, M. (eds) Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55038-7_5
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