How the British media framed Donald Trump as a Presidential candidate

Framing is traditionally defined as a process of selecting a particular aspect of a situation and making it more salient, so as to support a particular causal explanation, an evaluative judgment or a course of action (Entman 1993). Fairclough and Madroane (2015) argue that framing is a process that offers an audience a ‘salient and thus potentially overriding premise’ in an argumentative, decision-making process that can lead to action. With this in mind, this paper will analyze the framing of Donald Trump as a candidate for the position of the President of The United States of America, and the way in which various framing strategies, used in the premises of an argument for action, served to sway the readers’ views in favour of him or against him. Using corpus linguistics software (Antconc), I will investigate how a range of British newspapers of diverse political orientations presented Donald Trump in the two- month period before the election. Combining both traditional framing research with my own interpretation, I will look at the techniques used by the printed media when discussing the notion of Donald Trump as President and how this could have affected perceptions of Trump in the UK. I will look at how Donald Trump was presented as possibly the most unlikely candidate for the role by the British newspapers and how this could have led to one of the most surprising political decisions of our time.