ABSTRACT
Lakoff accounts for Donald Trump’s communicative strategies through a continuum that extends from ‘lie’, through ‘post-truth, ‘truthiness’, and ‘alternative facts’, to ‘truth’. Trump’s supporters take him seriously but not literally’. Since Trump came into public notice, an astonishing level of interpretive effort has been lavished on his tweets and other utterances. For some commentators Trump functions as an unreliable Delphic Oracle: there must be some kernel of meaning whose truth value can be discerned by the cryptanalyst. The very fact that there is no universal agreement that there are illegitimate ways to construct an argument gives legitimacy to Trump and his supporters; it becomes harder to pin them down and justifies all kinds of slippage, verbal and otherwise. The 2016 election was persistently viewed as having as its theme Change vs. the Status Quo, with Trump representing the former.
