3491 Journal of Critical Reviews ISSN- 2394-5125 Vol 7, Issue 17, 2020 Review Article CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF PRESIDENT TRUMP’S SPEECHES ABOUT IMMIGRANTS SIROUS ABEDINI Ph.D. in Linguistics, Gelisim University, Istanbul, Turkey Received: 10 Aug 2019 Revised and Accepted: 26 Oct 2019 ABSTRACT Racism is defined (Van Dijk, 1993a) as a specific social system of domination in which ethnic groups and their members (i.e.majority) abuse their power in various ways in interaction with other ethnic groups and their members (i.e. minority). Modern racism is hidden, so finding racism needs special strategies in new texts and discourses. Elites have power, control, and access to media and they influence people. Van Dijk represents Structures and strategies (reproduction of racism theory, 1993a) finding racism which consists of surface Structures and meaning (deep) Structures. In this research, Donald Trump’s speeches about immigrants in the election (2016, SEP) taken from New York Times were analyzed based on Van Dijk ’ s structures and strategies to find these structures in Trump ’ s speeches. The findings of this research show that Trump considers religion, nationality, and culture of immigrants as well. Moreover, many surfaces and meaning structures are found in Trump ’ s lectures with different frequencies. The results of this research are concordant with Van Dijk ’ s researches on racism. Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Elites, Donald Trump, Teun.A.Van Dijk, Racism, Surface and Meaning (Deep) Structures. © 2020 The Authors. Published by Advance Scientific Research . This is an open-access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22159/jcr.07.01.01 INTRODUCTION There are immigrants, refugees, and generally the minority existing in all of the countries. It highly depends on the elites and their role in the reproduction of racism when treating the minority. Therefore, if elites believe in racism ideology, the people will behave disgracefully and inappropriately toward the minority due to the power, control, access to media, and influence of elites over people. In some cases, this behavior may be such violent that leads to the death of the minority members. Politicians, scientists, teachers, journalists, and managers of companies can be called as elites. Nowadays, speeches of such political elites such as Donald Trump, the president of the United States, contain subtle(hidden) racism concepts and people cannot simply understand them. These people may be affected by unknowingly and negatively by such words. Therefore, specialized persons such as linguists, especially scholars of interdisciplinary major of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) who can clarify the meaning and ideologies behind the texts and speeches uttered by politicians. In this case, people will less be affected negatively. Trumps’ speeches about immigrants can be evaluated based on the racism field because he not only is against the entrance and acceptance of immigrants but also considers religion, nationality, culture, values, and beliefs of immigrants as significant metrics for the reception of them. This study was conducted based on the theoretical framework of Teun A. van Dijk (Theory of Reproduction of Racism, 1993a). Van Dijk has spent more than three decades on the study of racism. He believes that there are structure and solutions including surface and meaning (deep) structures used to find racism particularly hidden racism (Van Dijk, 1993a). As a linguist, the author of this study analyzed Trump's speeches about immigrants in the election (September 2016) taken from the New York Times. This analysis was performed based on the structures and strategies proposed by van Dijk (1993a) to find the ideology behind the speeches of Trump. Some of Trump's speeches were chosen to show his attention to religion, nationality, and culture of immigrants. This study aimed to find the answer to the following questions:  How can analyze the speeches of Trump in the light of Van Dijk’s approach to racism?  How many surfaces and meaning structures of Van Dijk can be found in Trump's discourse? METHOD Research data were collected from Trump's speeches about immigrants during the election taken from New York Times website (Donald Trump, September 2016). Purposive or judgmental sampling method was used to select speeches about immigrants or the minority. The research method of this paper was theoretical (based on the argument), longitudinal (over a period), trend research (the study of various samples with similar characteristics over time), documentary, retrospective, and descriptive methodologies. The selected speeches were analyzed critically based on the "structures and strategies" taken from van Dijk's (1993a) approach to racism and methodology of racism discovery. Theoretical Framework (Van Dijk’ theory of reproduction of racism, 1993a) Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a scientific and interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, sociology, history, and social psychology that examines the use of language in society. CDA approach studies the language as a social practice concerning ideology, power, history, and society at the discursive and textural levels of text (Aghagolzadeh, 2012, 11). Aghagolzadeh states about CDA, "It is a post-modernism approach that is rooted in opinions of French philosopher, Michel Foucault. This branch of linguistics assumes that some factors such as historical structure, power-dominance relations, social, cultural, and ideological institutes form new text or linguistic form, and meanings” (Aghagolzadeh, 2012, 11). CDA in linguistics tends to discover the reality of discourses using linguistic strategies to help people grasp the right meanings hidden in the text and discourse beyond the linguistic form. CDA introduces the implicit power of discourses employing linguistics strategies. According to this approach, the text and its meaning depending on the ideologies hidden in dominant social institutes. Power, ideology, and hegemony are the most significant concepts in this field. Van Dijk was a professor of discourse studies at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands and now is an honorary professor of Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain. He has been studying the cognitive psychology of discourse, literary theories, textual grammar, and reproduction of racism in discourse. Dijk has published numerous