(Im)politeness has been shown to be essential to the study of characterization, as demonstrated in a variety of works examining literature, plays, and telecinematic fiction (see Bousfield and McIntyre, 2011; Culpeper, 2001; McIntyre and Bousfield, 2017). This talk expands on the extant scholarly literature by investigating the characterizations of President Donald Trump and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as tough-guy politicians from New York City and North New Jersey, respectively. This approach to comparing the rhetoric of Christie and Trump is adopted due to the increasingly blurred distinction between public political events and entertainment in recent decades (see Tracy, 2017; Wodak et al., 2021).

Specifically, this talk explores the rise in prominence of tough-guy politicians from this region (see Hall et al., 2016: 92), whose personas are characterized by several schematic elements commonly associated with quintessential New Yorkers and North New Jerseyans. These elements include being brash, in-your-face, straight-talking, and unapologetically telling it how it is (see Bourgeois, 2025). Therefore, this talk examines what this cultural schema of the straight-talking, no-nonsense tough guy from the Metropolitan New York area entails, and it illuminates how it has been used by politicians such as Christie and Trump to characterize themselves as strong and capable leaders while simultaneously engaging with and entertaining their targeted audiences.

Furthermore, the talk addresses how, despite both figures attracting significant attention from the press, late-night comedies, and social media for their typically blunt New Yorker and North New Jerseyan personas, only Trump successfully translated this attention into political successes at the Republican primary elections (and the general elections) in 2016 and again in 2024. The talk concludes by briefly exploring how some elements of this tough-guy persona are now increasingly being mimicked by other US politicians beyond the borders of New York City and North New Jersey.

References

Bourgeois, S (2025) ‘Just saying it like it is’: A comparative study on the characterizations of Chris Christie and Donald Trump as tough-guy politicians, Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics [Online-First Articles].

Bousfield D and McIntyre D (2011) Emotion and empathy in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas: A case study of the “funny guy” scene. In: Piazza R, Bednarek M and Rossi F (eds) Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series. John Benjamins, pp. 105–123.

Culpeper J (2001) Language and Characterization: People in Plays and Other Texts. Routledge.

Hall K, Goldstein D and Ingram MB (2016) The hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, gesture, spectacle. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(2): 71–100.

McIntyre D and Bousfield D (2017) (Im)politeness in fictional texts. In: Culpeper J, Haugh M and Kádár DZ (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)Politeness. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 759–783.

Tracy K (2017) Facework and (im)politeness in political exchanges. In: Culpeper J, Haugh M and Kádár DZ (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)Politeness. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 739–758.

Wodak R, Culpeper J and Semino E (2021) Shameless normalisation of impoliteness: Berlusconi’s and Trump’s press conferences. Discourse & Society 32(3): 369–393.

Biography

Samuel Bourgeois is currently a lecturer at the University of Neuchâtel. Previously, he worked in the UK at Lancaster University (2023–2024) and Manchester Metropolitan University (2024–2025) as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on his Swiss National Science Foundation-funded project Impoliteness in the Politics of Trump: A New Normal for Political Rhetoric?

Recent publications from this project include a monograph co-authored with Dr Derek Bousfield, Pragmatics in Contested Interpretation: Varied Audiences, Varied Implicatures, Varied Inferences, an article in Language and Literature (‘‘Just saying it like it is’: A comparative study on the characterizations of Chris Christie and Donald Trump as tough-guy politicians’), and an article in the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict (‘On the conventionalization of impoliteness formulae: The case of Trump’s ‘fake news’ insult’).

Prior to his postdoctoral project in the UK, Samuel was a lecturer at the Universities of Neuchâtel and Lausanne from 2020 to 2023. He received his MA and PhD from the University of Neuchâtel and his BA from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.