A Pragma-Semiotic Analysis of Donald Trump’s 2025 UN General Assembly Speech

Abstract

This paper focuses on the pragmatics of presupposition in Donald Trump’s 2025 United Nations (UN) General Assembly address. It adopts George Yule’s (1996) framework of presupposition triggers as the primary pragmatic model and integrates it with Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) social semiotic model of representational, interactive and compositional meaning as the overall model of analysis. This paper addresses that gap through a pragma–semiotic analysis of Trump’s address. Presuppositions, understood as implicit assumptions presented as given by the speaker, are shown to operate as key strategies for influencing meaning formation and pre-structuring the audience’s response. The findings indicate that presuppositions are not only persuasive mechanisms that portray controversial stances as backgrounded and unquestionable, but also semiotic resources that shape the overall design of the speech. In this way, the address emerges as heavily reliant on presuppositional and semiotic framing to reinforce ideological accounts through implicit rather than explicit reasoning.