Metaphors Trump Lives by: A Critical Metaphor Analysis of Trump’s Statements in 2020 Presidential Election Debates

Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) helps to define the relationship between metaphor, power, ideology and cognition by recognizing conceptual metaphors in text or discourse. This thesis built a metaphor-centered analytical framework which connects discourse, cognition and ideology to investigate metaphors in Trump’s discourses in the 2020 Presidential Election Debates, which shed light upon cognitive structure and ideology behind his discourse. To win more votes, Trump managed to magnify Republican Party’s contribution while masking its defects, exaggerate the disadvantages of the Democratic Party while concealing its merits. Meanwhile, he declared himself one who represents the interests of ordinary people and to fight for their interests. Besides, his “patriotism” and “exclusiveness” also reflected populism characteristics.


Introduction
Donald Trump, the previous US President, is a loyal user of metaphor. Metaphors ubiquitously appear in his discourse, no matter public speeches or TV debates, to express views on domestic and international affairs and preach his political advocacy.
More than a rhetorical technique and a linguistic device for modifying discourse, metaphor is believed to a manifestation of cognitive processes of human beings. By constructing the theory of conceptual metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson (2003) explained the cross-domain mapping mechanism and revealed the role of metaphor in the process of cognition. Charteris-Black attempted to combine cognitive methods with metaphors. He introduced critical metaphor analysis (CMA), and believed that by identifying conceptual metaphors in texts or discourses, combining language, cognition, and pragmatic dimensions, one can clarify metaphors' relationship to power (discourse power), ideology (value beliefs, etc.) and cognition (Charteris-Black, 2004).
Existing studies mainly focused on pragmatic analysis and highlighted the persuasive function of metaphor and Trump's ideology in his public speeches and TV debates (Harb & Serhan, 2020;Bonilla, 2020). Quite a few researches have noticed the metaphor in Trump's discourse to explore his ideology (Mohammadi & Javadi, 2016;Garcia, 2017;Pilyarchuk & Onysko, 2018). All these analyses remain in the shallow level, and hardly explore the deep level of ideology and cognitive structure reflected by metaphors. Moreover, the distance between discourse producers and recipients can also be used as a tool to reveal ideology. This study attempts to investigate Trump's cognitive structure reflected by metaphors in Trump's discourse and explore his ideology with help of the ideology square theory. To achieve this research goal, the following issues will be addressed: Critical Metaphor Analysis supplements the cognitive view by taking particular metaphor choices into consideration (Charteris-Black, 2004). Metaphor is inseparable from the process of cognition (Hart, 2008;Lakoff & Johnson, 2003). Metaphor exists in the conceptual system of human beings, which controls daily thinking and action. To a considerable degree, people construe the world through conceptual metaphors. Concept of social cognition could be expanded through the idea that conceptual metaphor is a unique cognitive tool that shapes social thought and attitudes (Landau, Mark, & Meier, 2010). Lakoff and Johnson (2003) defined that phenomenon that inference patterns from one conceptual domain to another as conceptual metaphor, and named the systematic correspondences across such domains metaphorical mappings. Source domain, target domain and mapping constitute the most basic elements of conceptual metaphor. Metaphors map the structure, relationships, characteristics, and knowledge of the source domain onto the target domain (Lakoff & Turner, 1989). On this basis, conceptual metaphor could be generally divided into three categories: orientational metaphor, ontological metaphor and structural metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003): Orientational metaphors organize the whole conceptual system according to another concept related to spatial orientation: up and down, inside and outside, front and back, on and off; Ontological metaphor provides a basis for people to describe parts of experience as discrete entities or as unified classes of matter; Structural metaphor refers to the use of familiar concrete and simple descriptive structures to construct another abstract concept (Li & Li, 2011).
Metaphor is central to Critical Discourse Analysis. Since it could convey the evaluation persuasively, it is considered to constitute part of the ideology of texts. Thus, critical metaphor analysis can expose the intention of the language user and the power and ideology behind it. Critical analysis of the contexts of metaphors may reveal the underlying intentions of the text producer and therefore serve to identify the nature of particular ideologies (Charteris-Black, 2004).
Donald Trump is a world-famous politician whose political words have attracted the attention of many researchers. Through the method of CDA, the relationship between Trump's discourse and ideology is comprehensively evaluated. Researchers also evaluated his discourses at different times in order to not only  where a more ng of a lexical asic one, this l or identificatio cal or purely l nd step is the in s process trigg and pragmatic he basis for es nation of meta orrelation betw of specific co metaphors, and s reflect ideolo s are selected t nterest groups the ideologic sentation and n ideology squa spects of "us", ng the negativ In sis can expose vided into thr this theory, Ch e 2. Dimension or analysis is s metaphorical discourse to get domain and for final confir utes a lot to ac rming a genera aning of each (i.e., contextu d after the lex e basic contem l unit in given lexical unit cou on discusses th literal, which p nterpretation o gered to be qu c factors that stablishing a c aphor involves ween metapho oncepts can be deepest agent ogy in the socia to attract the a , "Our" group cal image of negative other are, whose ma minimizing th ve aspects of "t The identification and classification of metaphor types allows us to figure out which types of metaphors Donald Trump tends to employ in political genres such as the 2020 presidential election debates. With the help of the ideological square, it is possible to reveal the relationship between language, power and ideology in Trump's discourse as well as to explore how he construct cognitive structures to achieve specific political goals.

Results and Discussion
With the help of MIP, all the involved metaphors in Trump's discourses in the 2020 Presidential Election Debate are identified, and then divided into seven categories according to the source domain. As it is demonstrated in the first column of Table 2, they are military metaphor, construction metaphor, heroic metaphor, machine/technology metaphor, crime metaphor, animal metaphor and climate metaphor. Metaphor keywords in each source domain, token which is the sum of frequency of each keyword and proportion are illustrated in the following columns. Hero metaphor accounts for the major part, followed by construction metaphor. They occupy 36.21 percent and 25.86 percent respectively. Military metaphor also occupies a certain proportion, nearly 10 percent. Machine/technology metaphor, crime metaphor and some other metaphors make up minor categories. In reference to these frequent metaphors identified in Trump's discourses, detailed qualitative analysis will be performed as follows.
After processing data, we found that Trump preferred to use these seven types of conceptual metaphors. According to the ideological square, this study divides these seven types into three catalogues according to his different ideology tendencies towards "us" and "them".
(1) Metaphors in catalogue one demonstrated the struggle between "us" and "them", which clearly shows the central idea of ideology square. They constantly magnify "our" strengths, disguise "our" shortcomings, and at the same time amplify "their" shortcomings to cover "their" strengths. Military metaphor, construction metaphor and machine/technology metaphor belong to this category. In such a strong contrast, "our" advantages become more and more prominent, while "their" ijel.ccsenet.
shortcomin manipulate "we". Und "our" shor emphasize (3) Catalo derogatory and some audience, m in "us". Th contributions of the Republican Party, masked the defects of the Republican Party, exaggerated the disadvantages of the Democratic Party, and concealed the merits of the Democratic Party. In this way, Trump weakened the people's trust in the Democratic Party and persuaded people to support the Republican Party. Moreover, in metaphors, Trump declared himself as one of the grassroots. He claimed to be a member of the ordinary people, representing their interests and willing to fight for their interests. At the same time, some populism characteristics were also reflected. Seeming, he regarded people as his priority and promoted his "patriotism", showing "exclusiveness" in his discourse. In essence, he controlled the public and engaged them in the political process for his own benefit.