Donald Trump's Rhetoric Concerning Black Lives Matter: Constructing a Security Threat.

Abstract

In the Summer of 2020, mass protests occurred throughout the United States in response to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of law enforcement. This incident sparked a lot of contradicting discourse when speaking about the BLM movement and what was happening around the nation. At the height of it all, the President of the United States warned those who were participating in the protests that he would deploy the U.S. Military. This thesis aims to review the utterances made by President Donald Trump during the summer of 2020 when speaking about the Black Lives Matter movement in order to determine if both the language and framing of the movement could be categorized as a speech act. Throughout this process, it was critical to determine whether these utterances, particularly ones laid out in Trump’s tweets, were instrumental in influencing the public’s perception of and reactions to the movement. It was also critical to resolve whether Trump’s words fabricated a message that had the potential of securitizing the BLM movement. To draw a conclusion concerning this topic, the use of tweets, speeches, and a variety of news articles were analyzed from key events that happened between the months of May and August of 2020. One of the thesis’ key findings is that Trump’s statements about the BLM movement led to abnormal, if not excessive, response not only by local law enforcement, but also federal agents. The use of federal agents, specifically agents from the Department of Homeland Security, is especially abnormal, which suggests that the BLM movement was viewed as a security threat.