Persuasive Attacks on Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Primary investigates the nature of persuasive attacks on Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential primary campaign. It begins by extending the Theory of Persuasive Attack to include attacks on character as well as attacks on actions. William L. Benoit & Mark J. Glantz use topical analysis to understand humor (late night television jokes; video from SNL, Colbert, and Oliver; articles in The Onion, and political cartoons) and Republican "establishment" attacks from Mitt Romney and the National Review. Quantitative content analysis...

This edited volume fills a void in the literature concerning the purpose, practice, and pedagogy associated with performing rhetorical criticism. Literature regarding these issues--predominantly purpose--exists primarily as scattered journal articles and as sections within chapters of textbooks on rhetorical criticism. This book brings together 15 established rhetorical critics, each of whom offers well thought out and argued opinion pieces that stress the more personal nature of criticism. The purpose of this book is to serve as a disciplinary resource, and as a teaching and learning aid....

James Farmer Jr.: The Great Debater provides a rhetorical and biographical guide to how the American Civil Rights Movement came into being. It details James Farmer Jr.'s intellectual emergence as a young debater at an HBCU in Marshall, Texas and ultimately chronicles how this led to the emergence of the first non-violent sit against segregation in 1942 in Chicago. Farmer was a key founder of the Congress of Racial Equality CORE] that pioneered the non-violent strategies that would later be used by Martin Luther King. He debated important figures like Malcolm X to provide a powerful advocacy...

James T. Kitchens and Larry Powell examine why political messages appeal to voters in the United States by exploring the four pillars of the American psyche: fear, national narcissism, consumerism, and religiosity. These pillars, combined with the related matrix of attitudes, beliefs, and values, determine how political communication is understood.

Political Campaign Communication: Theory, Method, and Practice brings a diversity of issues, topics, and events on political campaign communication around the concepts of theory, method and practice. The volume contains studies of political campaign communication utilizing a wide range of empirical, rhetorical, content analyses and social science methodologies as well as a variety of foci on the practice of political campaign communication with studies on the communication dimensions and elements of political campaigns. It reflects the growing depth, breadth, and maturity of the discipline...

When Madam President moves into the Oval Office of the White House, she will share a path that several women have helped to pave. Often left off the history pages--and out of the minds of many Americans--are the presidential bids of several women: Margaret Chase Smith, 1964; Shirley Chisholm, 1972; Patricia Schroeder,1988; Elizabeth Dole, 2000; Carol Moseley Braun 2004; and Hillary Clinton, 2008/ 2016. Still Paving the Way for Madam President shows the progress women candidates have made as they have moved from symbolic candidates to viable candidates and in 2016, the Democratic nominee. This...

This book examines the presidency's relationship with television entertainment, particularly late night comic talk shows. It covers presidential campaigns and administrations from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.

The Culture of Blame and Payback in American Democracy looks at the forces that have developed over the past 50-plus years and created a dysfunctional political system in the United States. It argues that the current level of partisan polarization is actually the culmination of a number of forces at work during the past few decades. These include a perception by each party that the other is using unfair political tactics, the subsequent creation of a culture of blame with each party blaming the other for the dysfunction, a decline in political norms leading to childlike behavior by...

This book utilizes a theoretically informed framework for analyzing the effectiveness of the president's economic rhetoric and employs an empirical assessment that measures rhetoric's effect on economic actors. The analysis suggests that the rhetoric presidents use has little influence in shaping the behaviors of these economic actors.

This book argues that the use of the monster metaphor through media coverage and discourse surrounding Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign suggests characteristics of the monstrous in the public discourse, warranting concerns for the future of national discourse.