STAMPING OUT ISIS: METAPHORICAL EXPRESSIONS ABOUT TERRORISM IN DONALD TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN SPEECHES

The 2016 US Presidential Elections brought about one of the fiercest election campaigns so far, ending in a tight victory of Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, over Hillary Clinton, the candidate of the Democrats. The public appearances Trump made at rallies were one of the main tools he used in profiling himself as the new leader of America. In the light of the unstable situation in the world and the frequent terrorist attacks on Western states, Trump’s rhetoric regarding the issue of “Radical Islamic terrorism” was the key factor that propelled him towards victory (Azarian 2016). When he tackled the problem of terrorism, one of the discourse mechanisms that he used in abundance was a set of conceptual metaphors drawn from different spheres of human experience. The aim of this research will be to contribute to the role metaphor plays in discourse by highlighting some of the most salient and frequent metaphors in Trump’s terrorism rhetoric, including the conceptualizations involved and their conceptual implications in discourse