Evaluation and chronotopes in newsbites from Trump White House email newsletters from 2017 to 2020

Abstract

This article focuses on curated lists of newsbites (hyperlinked headlines accompanied by ledes or images) sent in emails by the official account of The White House during the first administration of U.S. President Donald Trump (2017–2020). Building on previous research on how evaluative language constructs power and organizes sociality in mediated texts, I use the Appraisal framework to identify how news events are interpreted from both partisan and non-partisan media newsbites. Identifying patterns in comparisons highlighted by newsletter newsbites, I show that intensifying and specifying lexis in headlines and ledes bolsters positive, non-normative imaginings of the president or administration's activities. Findings suggest that newsbites' graduated evaluations increasingly constructed partisan notions of ‘real news’ from 2017 to 2020 by indexing chronotopes (timespaces) of an idealized American present that frame events like tax cuts, impeachments, and a global pandemic in upscaled evaluations similar to Trump's own linguistic style. By arguing that such graduated meanings emphasize temporal shifts that divide society similar to other populist and authoritarian discursive strategies, this study contributes to scholarship on how newsbites in particular can facilitate the strategic deployment of chronotopic references by those in power to deepen political polarization.