A Pragmatic Analysis of Donald Trump’s Remarks at Women’s Empowerment Panel

This article has criticallyanalysed Donald Trump's remarksat women's empowerment panel (Whitehouse) in a Critical Discourse Analysis framework. The aim is to explore the speech, by drawing on Speech Acts Theory proposed by Austin (1962), Searle's taxonomy (1969), Leech's (1983) Politeness Principle, Grice's (1989) Conversational Principle and Levinson's and Brown's (1987) Face Threatening Acts (FTAs) to unveil and get more insight into Trump's emotions and attitudes towards the American women and the kind of policy he wants to implement for their empowerment. The results have revealed that most of the Gricean principles are respected whereas the Politeness principle of Leech and Levinson and Brown' FTAs are partly observed. Further, the preponderance of representative (39.78%) and expressive acts (35.22%) shows that Donald Trump simply wants to circumvent the American women folk to earn much more fame amidst them. The low occurrence of commissive (17.59%), and directive (7.7%) acts which normally denote the implementation of concrete acts to achieve one's goals and objectives, discloses that the President does not verily intend to empower the women as being suggested in the monologue.