The artifact I will be examining will actually be more of a collection of artifacts. I’m interested in digging deeper into how Donald Trump presents and defends ideas, specifically how his ideologies can be seen through an example. Similar to my previous blog post, I’m interested in looking into his initial message pertaining to Sweden as an example of immigration gone bad (Video Clip), and although this segment is short, the language he uses could still be significant. I’m also going to look at a pair of tweets (Tweet 1 Tweet 2), the first one clarifying his previous statements during the speech that first mentioned Sweden, and the latter reaffirming his point. As I previously mentioned, I’m interested into looking at Trump’s ideologies within these messages, not the accuracy of the message itself. The style in which someone presents and defends ideas is something of great interest to me personally, and I think it would be extremely interesting at what sort of deeper ideologies could be found in these sort of scenarios. That’s why I think ideological criticism is the best choice to analyze this sort of artifact with. Ideologies are just mental frameworks for the ideas we have, which must be defended continuously. This example gives us just that, the presentation and defense of an ideology, of a sense. The ideology within this message however, could be more than just anti-immigration. I think by looking deeper at this message, I could find out a lot more about his ideologies related to the artifact. Although Trump’s ideologies could be found in innumerable ways, I think looking at it from this sort of angle, especially since this artifact includes a response to criticism of his message, could give us insight not attainable from other such artifacts.

In accordance with Ideological criticism, my first plan is to analyze the language he uses in these message, looking at where he put the stress in his sentences and hoping to pick out his dominant terms and ideas. These dominant terms/ideas will be the provided elements described by Foss in her description of Ideological criticism. After identifying these terms, I will consider the suggested elements associated with the terms he uses, perhaps what kind of ideas we get from those terms and how some of them fit together. After performing this analysis, I intend on formulating the ideology derived from the analysis, which will then become the topic of my research paper. The process seems fairly straightforward, and I think this would be a fine approach for my term paper.