Overstatement in Donald Trump’s Selected Speeches on COVID-19

Abstract

This study intends to investigate the ways in which news agencies and writers overstate the risk posed by COVID-19 through the use of a linguistic strategy: overstatement. The President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, will be the primary focus of this research project. The scope of this data is limited to a random selection of two speeches downloaded from YouTube by President Donald Trump. In light of this, the primary objective of this research is to provide a response to the following question: (1) Which linguistic strategies does Trump employ in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic? (3)Which linguistic and rhetorical tools does he utilise more frequently in the course of putting this linguistic tactic into effect? (3) What functions are performed in addition to using exaggeration in his speech?