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In:Remedies against the Pandemic: How politicians communicate crisis management
Edited by Nadine Thielemann and Daniel Weiss
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 102] 2023
► pp. 256–275

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Trump’s framing of Covid-19
as a war and conspiracy theories

 | University of East Anglia
Published online: 24 July 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.102.09mus
Abstract
The use of war-related metaphors by Western political leaders to frame the COVID19 pandemic has drawn strong criticism, both in the media and among critical discourse analysts. A particular reference point in such criticisms has been the long-standing critique of the illness-as war metaphor because it frames patients’ bodies as battlegrounds and favours ‘radical cure’ solutions that prioritize elimination of the illness as an enemy. This paper investigates the links between the pandemic as war metaphor scenario and Covid-19-related conspiracy theories in the sense of flawed, i.e. empirically and/or logically unwarranted theories (UCTs), with special reference to the anti-Chinese Covid-19-UCT that was used by the former US President Trump and other conspiracists who pretended to be in a situation of self-defense that entitled them to commit acts of resistance against a perceived war enemy.
It is, however, important to distinguish routine uses of the war-metaphor from narratively elaborated, ideologically invested metaphor scenarios such as Trump’s appeal to fight the “China virus”. It is the latter that can best be exploited in conspiracy theories for their implications, e.g. the identification of supposed ‘culprits’ and ‘traitors’ and the legitimacy of ‘fighting back’ against them. For this reason, “reframing” efforts, which have been proposed for Covid-19 in terms of the pandemic as war metaphor, should not target whole source domains but concentrate specifically on critiquing those scenarios that lead to the stigmatization of social/national groups.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Conspiracy theories and metaphorical discourse
  • 3.Trump’s war against the China virus
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (87)
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