A comparative analysis of environmental discursive strategies: Joe Biden and Donald Trump

Abstract

This article presents a comparative discourse analysis of environmental rhetoric in the speeches of Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr., focusing on their contrasting approaches to climate change. Drawing on a small, focused corpus of eleven texts—including presidential speeches and electoral debates delivered between 2017 and 2022 – the study combines tools from discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to investigate how language constructs political stances, social identities, and ideological positions. Particular attention is paid to vocabulary (including “hooray” and “boo” words), grammatical structures (such as nominalizations and ergative constructions), and rhetorical strategies (metaphors, euphemisms, dysphemisms, and logical fallacies). Trump’s emphasis focuses on nationalistic, adversarial, and economically framed discourse, in which climate regulations are depicted as threats to prosperity and freedom, while environmental issues are minimized or reframed through euphemism. By contrast, Biden seems to employ a cooperative and institutional rhetoric, aligning environmental action with justice, responsibility, and global leadership, often invoking collective pronouns and legal-rational authority. The analysis demonstrates how similar keywords (e.g., “clean,” “jobs,” “freedom”) are strategically deployed to produce divergent ideological narratives. Ultimately, this study illustrates how environmental discourse functions as a site of political struggle in U.S. presidential rhetoric, where language not only reflects but actively shapes competing visions of economic development, environmental responsibility, and global governance