Intertextual Strategies in American and Vietnamese Politicians’ Discourse: A Comparative Analysis of Donald Trump and Tô Lâm’s Speeches

Abstract

This qualitative paper aims to comparatively analyze the intertextual practices of US President Donald Trump and that of Vietnam’s Party General Secretary Tô Lâm in order to discover different models of political legitimation that the two leaders represent. In the study, a discursive dataset comprising 3 important speeches and public utterances of each leader has been analyzed in terms of manifest and constitutive intertextuality within the framework of CDA. The findings reveal the existence of two antithetical models: the populist disruptor (Trump), defined by a widely-open and eclectic discursive practice, and the institutional guardian (Lâm), characterized by a closed and coherent discursive practice. The results suggest that the function of intertextuality in these two distinct political systems is to establish disruption (Trump) and continuity (Lâm), respectively. This study proposes a new comparative model, demonstrating that the political function of language is deeply rooted in specific cultural contexts, thereby contesting the universal applicability of Western models of discourse analysis.