Running the Country Like a Business: Donald Trump, Neoliberalism, and the Metaphor of the CEO Presidency.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election based not on traditional qualifications (such as having held elected office or being a military leader), but on his business background. He called on his status in popular culture as a real estate developer, writer of The Art of the Deal, and host of The Apprentice. Through the metaphors he used to describe presidential leadership, he defined politics in economic terms, promising to run the country as a business. Building on the emerging scholarship studying Trump's election, presidency, and institutional impact, this project provides a rhetorical critique of what I call the "CEO presidency," or Trump's promises to run the country as a business. I draw on primary texts ranging from 2015 to 2021, gathering together speeches, rallies, public appearances, contemporaneous media coverage, and social media posts to trace the rhetorical form and function of this CEO presidency.I argue that Trump used the CEO presidency to address the gap in qualifications between him and his opponents by re-defining political leadership to be the same as running a business through a hypermasculine vision of CEO leadership and a postracial, neoliberal view of leadership. I contextualize my analysis in a historical chapter that positions Trump as the culmination of changing norms around presidential qualifications that made private sector experience more applicable and the neoliberal political realignment of the late 1970s that imposed free market and economic language into governance. Then, I draw out the major themes of the CEO presidency across three chapters of analysis. First, I argue that Trump defended his business background as qualifying him for the presidency based on his experience building a business, his ability to make deals, and his "stamina," which he used to create a hypermasculine view of leadership. Even as Trump defended a nontraditional background, he also called on gendered, masculine norms of political communication and the presidency. Second, I trace the use of race and postracialism in the rhetorical form of the CEO presidency through case studies of racial justice, economic anxiety, and racial justice. I show how Trump used explicitly racial themes in blaming external threats like Mexico and China for economic downturn and in presenting a commodified view of immigration that called for immigrants who would add value to the economy. Alongside this rhetoric, Trump made postracial calls to move beyond race for a purely economic justice that precluded considerations of structural racism or its causes. Third, I show how these themes led to a view of neoliberal citizenship exemplified by his response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in which he called for an individual response to the pandemic that demanded citizens return to work and be "stronger" than the virus to revive the economy. My concluding chapter considers the ethical implications of the CEO presidency arguing that its economic emphasis, while possibly politically advantageous moving forward for conservative politicians, risks obscuring issues of structural racism and preventing discussions of equity and social justice that fall beyond the neoliberal leadership the CEO presidency reinforces.