Meaning making in Trump’s anti-Biden political campaign commercials: multimodal perspective

Abstract

This chapter examines the expanding role of video commercials in modern political campaigns and the growing interest in meaning-making through the synergy of multimodal resources. It focuses on Donald Trump’s 2020 election campaign commercials with a twofold aim: theoretically, to explain the mechanism of multimodal meaning-making in political campaign advertising, and empirically, to define the combinability potential of each semiotic resource in the meaning-making process. This research draws on an integrated cognitive-pragmatic and cognitive-semiotic approach, incorporating conceptual integration, blended classical joint attention, and performativity theories. From a cognitive-pragmatic perspective, the chapter highlights the intersubjective interaction between politicians as filmmakers and the electorate as viewers in constructing ‘meaning-in-context,’ while a cognitive-semiotic framework emphasizes the dynamic, enactive, and embodied nature of meaning-making. The chapter argues that Trump’s anti-Biden political campaign commercials function as short films aimed at persuading viewers to vote against Biden by eliciting emotions, primarily fear. The emotive meaning in these commercials is constructed through a combination of audial and visual modes, incorporating elements of verbal, non-verbal, and cinematic resources. The chapter demonstrates how the integration of multimodal resources is pivotal in shaping voter attitudes in media environment.