Demonisation and hate speech in the media: contrast between Donald Trump's anti-immigration speech and Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitic rhetoric

Abstract

Despite the progress that mass media have brought to society, they may also be used as an instrument to spread prejudices and negative attitudes towards certain groups of people, as in the case of immigrants. This distorted perception of reality is achieved, for example, by means of narratives against them. On 16 December 2023, during the electoral campaign to the presidency of the United States, Donald Trump accused immigrants of being “poisoning the blood of the country”, which was associated with the Nazi rhetoric employed by Adolf Hitler (1925) in Mein Kampf (My Struggle), where he described Jews as someone who poisoned others’ blood. In this study, it is hypothesised that, along with the “contamination” of blood, more similarities will be observed in the anti-Semitic and anti-immigration discourses delivered by both political leaders, to increase otherness and hatred towards the groups involved, with topics such as those described by Marcus (2022), Wodak (2001), Reisigl & Wodak (2001), and Hart (2015). The objective of this research is to identify, within the frame of critical discourse analysis, those topics in Donald Trump's speech of December 2023, and Hitler's book, whose qualitative analysis will be complemented with data provided by Sketch Engine for the study of each corpus. The results show coincidences in the demonisation of the other, the emphasis on their undesirable characteristics, their representation as a threat and a “poison” for the in-group, and their association with criminals, terrorists and parasites.