Cut Nadia Muji Rahmah, Nurlela, Nidiya Mawarni, Aisyah Inka Putri Lubis

Attitude System in Donald Trump’s Speech on Harvard’s Foreign Students: An Appraisal Analysis

Introduction

Attitude system in donald trump’s speech on harvard’s foreign students: an appraisal analysis. Appraisal analysis of Trump's speech on Harvard foreign students reveals his political persona, critique of elite institutions, and nationalist education policy framing through evaluative language.

Abstract

This study investigates the evaluative language used by Donald Trump in his speech concerning Harvard University’s treatment of foreign students, employing the Attitude system from Appraisal Theory. Focusing on three subsystems such as Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation. This study analyzes how Trump constructs his political persona, positions ideological others, and frames educational policy within nationalist discourse. The data were drawn from transcribed segments of a publicly available speech and analyzed qualitatively using Appraisal Theory as the primary analytical framework. The findings reveal that Judgement was the most dominant Attitude type (44.29%), followed by Appreciation (35.71%) and Affect (20%). Most evaluations (58.57%) were directed toward others (especially institutions and political actors), while the remaining 41.43% targeted the speaker himself. The overall evaluative polarity was predominantly negative (61.43%), with positive evaluations accounting for 38.57% of the data. Trump frequently praised his own leadership capacity while expressing dissatisfaction or moral condemnation toward elite institutions. Notably, this study highlights a rarely examined theme in Trump’s discourse: education policy. By framing foreign students as victims and elite universities as ideologically flawed, Trump repositions the education sector as a site of political contestation. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on political discourse by extending Appraisal analysis into the educational domain, revealing how evaluative meanings shape public narratives beyond traditional themes like war and immigration.

Review

This study offers a timely and insightful application of Appraisal Theory to analyze Donald Trump's evaluative language concerning Harvard's foreign students. By focusing on the Attitude system—Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation—the authors adeptly unpack how Trump constructs his political persona, positions ideological adversaries, and frames educational policy within a nationalist framework. The clear methodology, based on transcribed speech segments, provides a robust foundation for the analysis. The preliminary findings, indicating a prevalence of Judgement and a predominantly negative evaluative polarity directed largely towards external entities, immediately establish the distinct rhetorical patterns employed by Trump. A significant strength of this research lies in its detailed quantitative breakdown of Attitude types, revealing Judgement as the most dominant, followed by Appreciation and Affect. This distribution, coupled with the observation that most evaluations target institutions and political actors rather than the speaker, paints a clear picture of Trump's strategy to condemn elite establishments while simultaneously elevating his own leadership. Crucially, the study distinguishes itself by highlighting education policy as a rarely examined theme in Trump's discourse, framing foreign students as victims and elite universities as ideologically flawed. This repositioning of the education sector as a site of political contestation represents a valuable contribution, extending Appraisal analysis into a novel domain and demonstrating how evaluative meanings shape public narratives beyond traditionally analyzed themes like war and immigration. While the study provides a compelling snapshot of Trump's evaluative language within a specific speech, a natural next step might involve exploring how these findings resonate across a broader corpus of his speeches on education or related topics, to ascertain the generalizability of the identified patterns. Furthermore, investigating the potential impact of such framing on different audience segments could offer a deeper understanding of the persuasive power of Trump's discourse. Nonetheless, this study makes a significant scholarly contribution, providing a rigorous and nuanced analysis that enriches our understanding of political discourse and the intricate workings of the Appraisal system.

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