An investigative history of Russian speech manipulation strategies in Republican discourse

Donald Trump’s sophisticated use of speech manipulation strategies has inspired numerous research studies. O.I. Nazarenko and O.Ye. Nesterenko (2023) looked beyond Donald Trump at the Republican Party at large and found a pattern of manipulative effect in Republican discourse supporting Russia in the Russian-Ukrainian war. This raises many important questions for researchers. What is the political motivation for Republicans to side with Russia against Ukraine? How did this come to be? To answer these questions, this article presents the first recorded history of Russian speech manipulation strategies in Republican discourse. Continuous sampling of Republican discourse employed pattern analysis and purposive and random selection to establish a corpus of 10 quotes presented as a series of historical episodes forming a narrative with a plot. Pragmatic analysis and critical discourse analysis identified manipulative strategies consistent with Russian thinking of reflexive control connected across speakers and generations. The findings reject the “ideological asymmetry hypothesis” and support the novel “freedom grift hypothesis” which proposes conservatives’ unique susceptibility to political misrepresentations is the result of covert Russian information warfare. This exploratory study supports the need for further speech manipulation research of Republican discourse from a historical perspective as a matter of urgent global security.