Politics is, per se, a concept related to power and, by extension, to influence and manipulation. The definitions given by the Cambridge Dictionary have to do with those related concepts:

1. the activities of the government, members of law-making organisations, or people who try to influence the way a country is governed;

2. the job of holding a position of power in the government;

3. the study of the ways in which a country is governed;

4. the relationships within a group or organisation that allow particular people to have power over others.

Language is an essential part of the practice of politics, as it is the main medium by which its actors, the politicians, share - and shape - concepts, and address their audience, generally in an attempt to convince (rationally) and persuade (emotionally).

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Manipulation can be interpersonal (between individuals) or societal (via institutions or organisations, against groups of people, who in politics are often the voting force especially in the context of a political speech). To Wilson (2005), both types can be considered harmful, because  the manipulated people are unable to see the negative within the context, and to van Dijk (2008), ‘it reproduces, or may reproduce, inequality: it is in the best interests of powerful groups and speakers, and hurts the interests of less powerful groups and speakers’.

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The concept of political discourse allows politicians to affect people’s knowledge and understanding of both social and political realities in a wider environment. The political community, such as parties, guide the politicians to maneuver themselves and demand them to accomplish particular goals through interaction with their allies and rivals and daily political activity (Kampf, 2015).

Manipulation can be interpersonal (between individuals) or societal (via institutions or organisations, against groups of people, who in politics are often the voting force especially in the context of a political speech). To Wilson (2005), both types can be considered harmful, because  the manipulated people are unable to see the negative within the context, and to van Dijk (2008), ‘it reproduces, or may reproduce, inequality: it is in the best interests of powerful groups and speakers, and hurts the interests of less powerful groups and speakers’.

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Cabrejas Peñuelas (2017) defines manipulation in political discourse as “an illegitimate control by the manipulator over other people” to make them believe that any policies taken are done in people’s best interests when, in fact, the policies only favour the manipulator.

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Teun A. van Dijk has studied the linguistic aspect of social/political power in depth, in particular in politicians' speeches (political address), which serve the purpose to influence the population’s beliefs and choices, often against their initial will and interest, which is regarded as manipulation. El Hussari (2010) details this idea of manipulation in speech (on a national scale) as a powerful tool to obtain advantages, maintain power, and avoid responsibility. Lihua (2012), Ali and Omar (2016) also shows that it serves the purpose to alter the audience’s knowledge, beliefs and attitude. Sustained by the media, the dissemination of manipulated information in speeches can be widely expanded to outreach more recipients.

Ideological polarisation

Ideological polarisation is portrayed in the Us/Them polarisation (McCoy et al., 2018). Through polarisation, the speakers are given the opportunity to divide people into an ingroup representing friends and allies (us) and an outgroup referring to enemies (them) (van Dijk, 2006), especially in the discourses of ‘group conflict or competition’. It plays on beliefs and attitudes, and inspires trust towards the ‘good side’ (the ingroup) or mistrust towards the ‘bad side’ (the outgroup).
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In 1998, Teun A. van Dijk ‘proposed the theoretical framework of an ideological square to uncover the discursive reproduction of the ideology of positive us and negative them’; this was completed by Win Zaho’s work in 2021:

1. Express/emphasize information that is positive about Us: Duties claimed by us as a result of self-motivation;

2. Express/emphasize information that is negative about Them: Other’s faults;

3. Suppress/de-emphasize information that is positive about Them: Other’s duties upon request;

4. Suppress/de-emphasize information that is negative about Us: Exemption of our faults.

Self-legitimisation

Marwa Adel Abuelwafa (2021) states that ‘legitimization is the process through which certain ideologies are made legitimate within the norms and values of a given society. It is a process by which certain events or actions are normalized by virtue of the authority one holds. Through legitimization practices, politicians are provided with the means of offering implicit reasons to complete their actions through using certain discursive tools.’

The below sub-sections of legitimisation are based on Theodoor Jacob "Theo" van Leeuwen’s theory:

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Authorisation

This strategy is based on using a “higher authority”, or at least recognised authority, to make one’s arguments acceptable and irrefutable. There are 6 categories of authorities:  personal, expert, role model, impersonal, tradition and conformity authorities.

For example, Trump uses a lot of personal authorisation, using in particular wit the excessive use of the pronoun I. ‘The same goes on for the employment of legitimation through expert authorization where Trump calls upon the Congress Senators who stand by his side denouncing the elections, thus seeking further legitimation.’ (Abuelwafa 2021)

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Moral legitimation

It comprises three sub-divisions: evaluation, abstraction and analogies.

Evaluation is made on basic qualities of actions or objects, based on their opposition to accepted values.

Abstraction gives an abstract dimension to ideas, mainly through metaphors.

Analogies are comparisons, where ‘moral legitimation takes place via juxtaposing an action through another and associating it with either positive or negative values.’ (Abuelwafa 2021)

Rationalisation

Rationalisation is ‘an attempt to find reasons for behaviour, decisions, etc., especially your own’ (Cambridge dictionary).

Abuelwafa explains that legitimation is achieved ‘through reference to aims or goals, means and effects of established social actions’. It also includes reference to ‘the knowledges that society has constructed to endow them with cognitive validity’ (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 106)’.

In the case of Trump’s discourse, it was ‘instrumental to magnify the results of defrauding the elections or theoretical to gain legitimation through presenting the facts and numbers of the votes he was denied.’ (Abuelwafa 2021)

In this aim to rationalise, a method is particularly efficient for politics: adducing seemingly irrefutable proofs of their beliefs and reasons: a reasonable argument can work to construct another argument by offering information that seems impossible to deny. To Lippi and Torroni (0216), arguments with subjective and possibly controversial statements are automatically extracted to provide structured data for models of arguments and reasoning. 'As a discursive manipulative strategy, adducing an argument offers to support the speaker’s belief and reason.’ (Abuelwafa 2021)
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Mythopoesis

Mythopoesis consists of moral and cautionary narratives. The first promote legitimate institutionalised practices, and the latter warns against the consequences that happen if people do not follow or conform to the norms of social practices. ‘This framework offers a variety of options to show how power, legitimation and discourse analysis are intertwined.’ (Abuelwafa 2021)

Delegitimisation of the opposite stance

After showing themselves off to their advantage, manipulative speakers focus on delegitimizing their opponents, marking the biggest contrast possible between their positive self-presentation and their opponents negative (and inferior) depiction.

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‘Using the notion of responsibility as blame has been widely applied in politics-related discourses to construct and normalise the negative them’ (Zaho 2021). Hansson (2015) confirms this practice by observing that avoiding denial and accusations of misconduct along with shifting blame can point to another intricate way of discrediting others. Schroeder (2008) compares it to the discourse of hysteria, ‘where the negative and terrible effects of something are explicitly intensified, foregrounded and contrived in order to prove the otherwise as legitimate’.  To specifically discredit the others, President Trump and President Bolsonaro exploited this notion by displaying Us/Them polarisation, vilifying the other, using the communicative acts, and attacking the other’s characteristics (Kakisina et all. 2022).

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Alain Denealt explains in Le langage au service des puissants ? (ThinkerView podcast) that political discourse often presents two choices: being on the ‘good side’ or the ‘wrong side’, the good side being the politician / party and their ideology. Anyone who disagrees with their ideas is categorised as marginal, extremist, ignorant, with negative (even problematic) values and morality.

Wording choices that make the difference

Linguistic manipulation strategies are numerous; a quick overview thanks to Hancock et al. (2007) and van Dijk (2017) gives us some pertinent examples:

• Speech acts

• Rhetorical speech, in particular with numbers game rhetoric

• Formal speech

• Specific intonation, volume, speed and tone

• Producing more words

• Using more third-person pronouns

• Lexical derogation, lexicalisation

• Metaphors

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Manipulative uses of pragmatic markers in political discourse

Péter Furkó (2014) studied the use of pragmatic markers (PrM) in corpora of political discourse according to their type, to identify their specific use in the politician’s intent to influence and manipulate (via suppression, polarization, recontextualising and conversationalisation). ‘It is important to point out that a single PrM can serve several manipulative functions, while a manipulative strategy might be realised by a variety of pragmatic items. Consequently an onomasiological approach to the functional spectrum of a set of PrMs is vindicated.’
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Evidential markers

They’re PrM that ‘signal the degree of confidence, positive or negative, weakly or strongly, held by the speaker about the truth of the basic message’ (Fraser, 1996), and that ‘indicate a speaker’s attitude regarding the validity of certain information, for example, whether it is certain, probable, or untrustworthy’ (Nuckolls, 1993). In addition to marking the source and the reliability of information and knowledge (Ifantidou, 2001), they may also indicate how knowledge or information was acquired, for example, through personal experience, inference, or report (Nuckolls, 1993).

Example: “of course”: Furkó explains that, unlike in celebrity interviews or spontaneous conversations where of course can ‘express strong agreement with the interlocutor’s previous utterance (‘emphatic yes’ function, cf. Lewis, 2006), while in other contexts it marks topic shifts, evaluations in narratives as well as the end of a lis’, ‘in political news interviews the range of functions of course fulfils is markedly different from its use in the other two discourse types’:

1. To anticipate an opposing viewpoint, and/or the audience’s objections

2. To background propositions that were previously foregrounded by the previous speaker

‎‎‎‘As for the heteroglossic function of of course, Simon-Vandenbergen et al. conclude that of course confirms solidarity with the like-minded, construes solidarity with those who need to be persuaded, and, at the same time contributes to the image of the speaker being “in the know”, thus giving the speaker “a temporary advantage in the battle for scoring with the audience” (Simon-Vandenbergen et al., 2007: 66). In other words, IEs exploit the multifunctionality of of course by influencing the assumptions of different segments of the audience simultaneously, addressing a range of alternative viewpoints about particular political themes.’

General extenders

1. They might imply that there is more to be said on a certain issue than the speaker has time to say in the interview, while the speaker actually only enunciates one argument or example.

2. They can be used to downplay alternative viewpoints and policies and thus, similarly to evidential markers, provide ways of manipulating the mutual cognitive environment shared by the first-frame and second-frame participants in the interview.

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Quotation markers

They are used to decontextualise and recontextualise texts, legitimise opinions and polarise the audience. They have a function of voicing where manipulation is implicit.

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Other manifestations of manipulation: conversationalisation and the exploitation of ambiguity

The conversationalisation of mediatised political discourse is a manipulative intent ‘ reflected by the frequency and distribution of PrMs in political interviews’.

‘Fetzer and Weizman (2006), for example, state that “politics has undergone dramatic changes [in that] the primarily monologue-oriented mode of discourse, which prevailed in the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties, is no longer considered to be appropriate in the western and Anglo-American contexts” (Fetzer and Weizman, 2006). Sandova (2010) observes that politicians use conversational style in an effort to impress their audience, and to be able to influence them more easily. Fairclough (1995) argues that conversationalisation is a type of marketization of ideologies and has a specific (hidden) consensus-building effect (Fairclough, 1995).’

Originally, those two verbs distinguished the way someone (or an organisation/institution) influences people: convincing corresponds to making someone believe something via rational arguments (facts) while persuading corresponds to making someone believe something via irrational arguments (emotions).

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The polarisation and in particular legitimation strategies mostly work via convincing, but political discourse also includes a lot of persuasion, where emotions are usually mixed.

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Kakisina et al. develop this idea: ‘Showing emotional appeals is considered vulnerable in political discourse. However, the notion gives access to the speaker to manipulate the recipient into thinking that the speaker understands, shares, and relates to their attitude, desire, and emotions. By that means, recipients often believe and behave upon the manipulated information without fact-checking them (Blass, 2005). To appeal to the recipients’ attitudes and emotions, the speaker makes use of authoritative sources. Through rhetoric, explicit and implicit information, figures, and photographs, people’s emotions can be provoked (Higgins & Walker, 2012). Inappropriately displaying strong emotional appeals elicits the manipulation of the recipients' emotions and feelings, which are labelled as pathos (Brown et al., 2012).’ Along with positive self-presentation and rhetorical figures, it emotionalises the politicans’ argument over logical evidence to win the emotional reaction from the recipients.

Most governments in the world had a discourse that went against the scientific research already established for years, and used this polarisation strategy to legitimate measures that would have been absurd and unacceptable in other contexts and with the correct scientific information, as well as emotional manipulation (causing general fear); on the other side, they delegitimised the opposite stance, often represented by scientists. The whole process was, again, helped by the media and their decisions in public speakers' exposure, wording, selected information and sensational news presentation using the emotional dimension of manipulation.

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Kalkisina et al. studied the political political speeches about COVID-19 pandemic delivered by Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. ‘The findings show that the manipulation in both speeches is delivered through ideological polarization, discrediting the others, emotionalizing the argument, emphasizing the power, moral superiority and credibility of the speaker, and adducing seemingly irrefutable proofs of the speaker’s beliefs and reasons. Polarization can indoctrinate a community with shared beliefs and values because of its close relation with particular ideology and belief. These findings add to a growing body of work on discursive manipulation, suggesting that political discourse can be a potential source of societal manipulation. Most importantly, these results draw a point whereby ideological polarization is the most effective and prevailing category while adducing seemingly indisputable proofs of the speaker’s beliefs appears to be less compelling.’

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Jean-Dominique Michel explains how the French government accused a part of the population of threatening the rest, using a typical polarisation strategy where the good side is the population that obeyed the government’s directives while the bad side is the part that refused to do so. It also confirms the various studies findings about shifting the blame to others in order to manipulate the audience’s beliefs for a positive view and attitude towards the manipulator (government) and their stance.

In the USA, Rochelle Walensky, CDC director (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), received reports in January 2021 stating that being vaccinated against Covid-2019 doesn’t prevent against transmitting it to others, however in the next 8 months she publicly said (on TV) that only vaccination protects from contaminating others. The same lies were told in France by the Scientific Council and in Switzerland by the Federal Office of Public Health. This corresponds to the authorisation legitimation strategy described earlier in this article using a higher Scientific institution to prove a fact, even if in this case the fact was incorrect).

Franck Lepage shares an interesting example of terminology shift that serves a political purpose in his conference. The use of different terms to refer to the poor/exploited classes changes the perspective and even definition of the status of that person: from victim of a structure and social group to unlucky or even lazy person who cannot or even doesn’t want to participate in the society’s structure.

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Similarly, George Lakoff shows how perspective influences the discourse’ reception by the population once a term is changed into another, with the example of “regulation” used instead of “protection” in this interview.

Clément Viktorovitch qualifies as “perversion” the extreme use of this strategy, where one uses a term to express its total opposite.

The concept of New English in Orwell’s 1984 is based on the same idea: removing words to remove concepts (democracy etc.),  and more generally reducing the language to reduce the actual thoughts, and the capacity to question concepts and reality.

Almost a century before Orwell’s work, Karl Marx laid the foundations of this reflection about thought control, not to the literal idea of a police control like in 1984 of course but the often implicit and subconscious influence of the ruling class and their ideas.

According to Herbert Marcuse (1964), in the absence of a specific context of high discontentment in the population, there is a lack of opposition to the ruling ideas in the advanced industrial society, leading to a one-dimensional universe of thought and behaviour, in which aptitude and ability for critical thought and oppositional behaviour disappear.

Note: The use of language to influence concepts and thoughts can be extended to the general phenomenon of ideology manipulation, aided by the media. ‘Political figures who have power in society can control group knowledge by dominating the access of public and non-public discourse and determining which kind of information will be given to the public through the mass media (van Dijk 2012). All of these unjustified dominations may subsequently lead to the manipulation of public knowledge and indirect control of the minds and actions of the public.’ (Kakisina et al. 2022)

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