ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to increase civic understanding by proposing a method for identifying the worldview of a political actor. A worldview “is a set of assumptions about physical and social reality that may have powerful effects on cognition and behavior”. The approach is based on principles of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (henceforth, CMT) and demonstrates that the analysis of a political actor’s language choices provides access to cognitive structures that are the components of the speaker’s worldview. The political discourse of US president Donald J. Trump forms the basis of the analysis. The CMs that emerge from the analysis of Trump’s political discourse are the subdomains of an overarching conceptual space that corresponds to the social role of a Conqueror. Trump’s role and worldview are those of a Conqueror. The corpus, amounting to 282,926 words, was written and oral language produced by Donald Trump in speeches, social media, interviews and debates largely from 2015 into 2017.
