“It was the President’s decision to make, and he made it” Legitimization in Articles about Trump’s Pullout from Syria Santtu Vehniäinen Master’s Thesis Language Specialist Degree Programme, Department of English School of Languages and Translation Studies Faculty of Humanities University of Turku April 2024 The originality of this thesis has been checked in accordance with the University of Turku quality assurance system using the Turnitin Originality Check service. Master’s Thesis Language Specialist Degree Programme, Department of English Santtu Vehniäinen “It was the President’s decision to make, and he made it” – Legitimization in Articles about Trump’s Pullout from Syria Number of Pages: 82 Abstract In this study, several newspaper articles about President Donald Trump’s choice to withdraw from Syria in 2018 are analyzed to research legitimization in journalism. This study used van Leeuwen’s framework to categorize and quantify the methods of legitimization used within the articles, and the results were then put together and analyzed. The study regarded legitimization as a form of persuasion and a manifestation of ideological and power relationships. The main outcomes of this analysis were a clear prevalence in the use of instrumental rationalizations and expert authority to delegitimize the withdrawal, and a correlation between explanations and predictions. All of the analyzed articles were also clearly delegitimizing Trump’s choice, although to a different degree. These results show a hidden type of political bias within news reporting that arises from the common use of quotations and regarding various actors as essentialized in their characteristics. Further research to this topic is needed particularly on the connections between expert authority and quotations in newspaper discourse, and well as on the correlation between characterizations of actors and predictions based on those explanations. Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, Speech Act Theory, Legitimization, Rationalization, Authorization, Morality, Mythopoesis, Discourse, Politics. Table of Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Theory 3 2.1 Speech Acts and Discourse 3 2.2 Legitimization 5 2.2.1 Overview of van Leeuwen’s Categories of Legitimization 8 2.2.2 Authorization 9 2.2.3 Moral Evaluation 11 2.2.4 Rationalization 12 2.2.5 Mythopoesis 13 2.3 News Discourse 14 2.4 Donald Trump and Political Discourse 15 3 Material 16 4 Methods 18 4.1 Van Leeuwen’s Categories of Legitimization 18 5 Analysis 20 5.1 USA Today Articles 20 5.1.1 Kim Hjelmgaard: “Syria Conflict Explained: How Did We End Up 20 Here?”, 19th Dec. 2018 5.1.2 Vanden Brook & Jackson: “Trump Orders US Troops Out of Syria, 23 Declares Victory Over ISIS; Senators Slam Action As Mistake”, 19th Dec. 2018 5.1.3 David Jackson: “President Trump Defends Pulling U.S. Troops Out 25 of Syria After Bipartisan Backlash”, 20th Dec. 2018 5.2 Wall Street Journal Articles 26 5.2.1 Nissenbaum, Youssef & Salama: “Trump Orders Troops Out of 26 Syria”, 20th Dec. 2018 5.2.2 Youssef & Ballhaus: “Mattis Quits in Split with Trump --- Defense 31 Secretary’s Move Comes After President Orders Drawdown of Troops”, 21st Dec. 2018 5.2.3 Lubold & Donati: “U.S. News: Next Troop Drawdown: 34 Afghanistan”, 21st Dec. 2018 5.3 Washington Post Articles 37 5.3.1 Warrick & Mekhennet: “Still Able to Fight, Islamic State 37 Begins A Bloody Resurgence”, 20th Dec. 2018 5.3.2 Gearan & Dawsey: “Mattis’s Sway With the President Continues to 39 Fade”, 20th Dec. 2018 5.3.3 Ryan & Dawsey: “U.S. Troops Will Leave Syria Immediately, 41 Officials Say U.S. to Quickly Pull Troops From Syria”, 20th Dec. 2018 5.4 The New York Times Articles 47 5.4.1 David Sanger: “A Strategy of Retreat in Syria, With Echoes of 47 Obama”, 20th Dec. 2018 5.4.2 Megan Specia: “Winners and Losers in Trump’s Planned Troop 49 Withdrawal From Syria”, 21st Dec. 2018 5.4.3 Neil MacFarquhar: “Glee in Russia Over Trump’s Foreign Policy 53 Largess”, 23rd Dec. 2018 5.5 Summary 56 6 Discussion and Conclusions 70 Bibliography 73 Primary Sources 73 Secondary Sources 73 7 Appendices 76 7.1 Appendix 1: Tiivistelmä 76 List of tables: Table 1 17 Table 2 57 Table 3 58 Table 4 59 1 1 Introduction On the 19th of December of 2018, Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of all troops from Syria. This decision was controversial within his own national security team as well as within both the Republican and the Democratic Parties, and led to the resignation of the Secretary of Defense James Mattis and later the US special envoy to the global coalition to defeat the Islamic State, Brett McGurk (Rabinovich and Valensi 2021, 213-214). In my thesis I intend to study the media discourse surrounding the decision, and especially how the decision was legitimized or de-legitimized in that discourse. This will be done through the framework made by van Leeuwen (2008, 105-123), which groups types of legitimization into four different categories: authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization, and mythopoesis, which refers to established narratives (van Leeuwen 2008, 105-123). The legitimacy of a decision is key to how well a decision-maker can make others follow his decisions, and this is particularly relevant to President Trump’s decision as it caused significant dissidence within his administration. This particular choice is an interesting example because Trump’s foreign policy team was mostly against the decision from the start, and had earlier made contrary statements regarding Trump’s administration’s goals in Syria (Rabinovich and Valensi 2021, 211-213). In fact Trump said that he had “wanted to pull out of Syria for six months publicly”, but his foreign policy team and other leaders had earlier managed to dissuade him from making such decisions (Rabinovich and Valensi 2021, 179-212). Trump had repeatedly stated interest in pulling out of Syria, but his administration had managed to keep the troops in Syria despite Trump’s intentions (Rabinovich and Valensi 2021, 183). However, a tweet and a surprise speech outside the White House were enough to decide this clear power struggle within the presidential administration. In fact, this decision “embarrassed his own team and several of his allies” (Rabinovich and Valensi 2021, 212). This thesis will attempt to categorize, analyze, and understand how the controversial decision by Trump was both legitimized and delegitimized in the American media. Such legitimization and delegitimization often happens in the media, as people bearing institutional positions must explain their decisions and why they make such decisions to the public. Trump’s decision was in dire need of legitimacy: his own administration had repeatedly denied him in his attempts to withdraw from Syria, and so he needed to make his decision seem authorized and correct. It is therefore interesting that he chose not to announce the decision through an official press briefing or some other institutionally established way. This seems to have been 2 an attempt by Trump to take part in another power struggle: the one that was happening within the media sphere, which added another layer of complexity to the legitimization efforts by Trump. The decision was also controversial within the parties of the American political sphere: there were many Republicans, even within his own administration, who were against the decision. In a dipole such as the American political field controversies in such vital decisions within the individual poles can be considered exceptions that can tell us much about the dividing lines and values used in the politics of Washington D.C. Then, the questions this study will try to answer are the following: 1. What kind of legitimization discourse was used to defend and attack President Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria? 2. What kind of distinct legitimization practices did different newspapers adopt, or were their attempts at (de)legitimization roughly based on similar use of methods? The hypothesis for this study is that most articles will be clearly against or for the decision to withdraw from Syria, as the decision was very divisive, and thus choosing a side based on the information the newspaper chose to present was easy even though most news outlets attempt to maintain at least a façade of neutrality. In addition, it is likely that an article supporting Trump’s decision would use his position and authority to support the decision’s legitimacy, while the articles with a viewpoint that opposes the decision will attempt to use other means to erode the legitimacy of the decision to withdraw. To continue, this paper first discusses the necessary theory to understand discourse and legitimization, as well as some theory relating to the context of the articles, in particular to news discourse and Donald Trump’s brand of political discourse. Most importantly, van Leeuwen’s categories of legitimization are considered in detail, as they are the main framework of this study. After that, the methods and materials used in this study are explained, with specific attention paid to the way van Leeuwen’s categories are used to sort the types of legitimization that are present in the studied articles. The studied articles and their context are then described in greater detail, followed by the full results of the analysis of said articles. Finally, the results of the study and their implications are discussed in the last part of the paper. 3 2 Theory This section will explain the theory used in this thesis, starting with speech acts and discourse, and continuing then further to explain discourse and discourse analysis. Then, van Leeuwen’s theory of legitimization will be discussed, as that is the main theoretical framework used for this thesis. After that, the next section will elaborate further on the categorization used by van Leeuwen’s theory: authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization, and mythopoesis. These categories are introduced and discussed in detail, as they form the main framework of this study. Finally, a small introduction to the discourse, history, and language surrounding Donald Trump as a president of the United States is useful to further understand the findings of this study. 2.1 Speech Acts and Discourse Language is an inherently social activity, which is almost always used with other people. It is no exaggeration that language is a fundamental building block of human social interaction, and that it is necessary for human society to function. But language is more than just words that convey information to others, as it is often used to perform actions that are more than just transference of information. Speaking a language is the act of performing speech acts, which are basic units of linguistic communication that are used to do things in the world (Searle 1969, 16). Speech acts can be divided to three types of actions: utterance acts, propositional acts, and illocutionary acts (ibid.), and of these, illocutionary acts are of particular interest for this study. Uttering act means making the sounds or writing the characters used in language, but the illocutionary act is the main means of conveying social information and performing actions with language (Searle 1969, 24). To make matters simpler, illocutionary acts are simply referred to as speech acts, while utterances are the words written or spoken, generally in the form of a sentence, and for speech acts to work, they must rely on some set of external rules or conventions that gives them meaning (Searle 1969, 42-43). Illocutionary acts can be performed indirectly, in which case one illocutionary act is performed with the intention of changing its meaning creatively to another (Searle 1979, 31). Doing a speech act in an unexpected way makes the speech act infelicitous, not incorrect, since performative utterances cannot be wrong, and because the default assumption in a conversation is that infelicitous utterances should not be made, the hearer will attempt to recontextualize the speech act, meaning that an indirect speech act has been performed (Austin 1962, 10-62). In an indirect 4 speech act, “a speaker communicates to the hearer more than he actually says by relying on mutually shared background information … together with general rationality and inference on the part of the hearer” (Searle 1979, 31-32). Since speech acts cannot be separated from the meanings of language itself, in effect the study of language itself is the study of speech acts, and speech acts are present in any meaningful use of language (Searle 1969, 18). This means that “saying something and meaning it is a matter of intending to perform an illocutionary act” (Searle 1969, 46). This means that using language is always the same as performing an action, a speech act, which has a meaning derived from an unseen system of rules and conventions that is socially constructed. This system is called discourse, and it is explained next. Discourse is a complex aspect of human interaction that encompasses the social acts done through language (van Dijk and Blum-Kulka, 2011). Discourse can also be understood as semiosis, or meaning-making, and discourses can construe social phenomena in diverse ways, though the influence on social phenomena this can have is a contingent matter (Fairclough 2012, 12). The analysis of discourse, according to Wodak and Meyer (2001, 35) is complicated by the fact that, “Discourse analysis encompasses the respective spectrum of what can be said in its qualitative range and its accumulation and/or all utterances which in a certain society at a certain time are said or can be said”. This already means that discourse is a very broad and intricate subject, but they continue further: “It also covers the strategies with which the spectrum of what can be said is extended on the one hand, but also restricted on the other, for instance, by denial strategies, relativizing strategies, strategies to remove taboos, and so on” (ibid). One fundamental aspect of social order that discourse construes and reproduces is power and its abuse, and this aspect is particularly important for this study (van Dijk and Blum-Kulka, 2011). Skog and Lundström (2022) also point to the notion of contextualizing moralizing discourse both historically and politically, and consider that contextualizing narratives allows discussions about their potential consequences. Power in this context can be defined as “preferential access to, and control over, public discourse by social groups or organizations” (van Dijk and Blum-Kulka, 2011). News media obviously has quite a bit of power according to this definition as they are capable of directing the agenda of public discourse and providing visibility to specific news items, and their ability to influence discourses is notable. Elite ideology in particular is influential in how the media constructs foreign political subjects and events, and discourses can serve to “construct deviance from what is perceived as legitimate” (Abalo 2014, 803). Discourse allows the exercise of power, 5 making it important to study and understand (Wodak and Meyer 2001, 34). Next, legitimization, one influential way of discursive persuasion used by news media to control the public discourse, is discussed in respect to how it shapes and is manifested in discourse. 2.2 Legitimization This thesis focuses primarily on van Leeuwen’s categories of legitimization, which is also discussed further in part 3.1, but legitimization itself is a complex subject which requires further elaboration (van Leeuwen 2008, 105-106). Legitimization attempts to link social practices with discourses of value, thus linking positive values to practices which the speaker is in support of, and negative values to practices the speaker wishes to delegitimize (van Leeuwen 2008, 17-21). In other words, “Legitimation stands for creating a sense of positive, beneficial, ethical, understandable, necessary, or otherwise acceptable action in a specific setting” (Vaara and Tienari 2008, 986). Key parts of this definition of legitimization are “action” and “in a specific setting”. Legitimization usually involves explaining the speaker’s past, current, or future action through some argument about why the action is “reasonable or in general acceptable” (van Dijk 1998, 234-235). This can include legitimizing the action through the legitimacy of its performer, or some other attributive process. Invoking values requires social knowledge, and therefore recognizing those values similarly requires social knowledge, a process which Simonsen calls resonating (Simonsen 2019). She sees that the cultural contingency of persuasive appeal and alignment of prior knowledge is significant in legitimization, and the effect can be further divided into two types of “resonance”: epistemic, which results from cultural belief systems and prior knowledge; and normative, which is caused by the message being viewed as morally appropriate (ibid.). This means that rephrasing a message to align with the prior knowledge or the belief system of the target can cause resonance (epistemic or normative), which can even be used to overcome lesser resonance of the other kind through targeting and exploitation of culturally shared perceptions and values of an audience (Ibid.). This social knowledge, or social cognition, is also modified by discourse, and the relationship between social cognition and discourse can be said to be a dialectic one (Khosravinik 2015, 48). The understanding that social knowledge can be used to cause “resonance”, and is in a dialectic relationship with discourse, is vital, as it shows that language can be used to influence the audience’s beliefs and is either consciously or unconsciously influenced by the audience’s beliefs. Legitimization always contains allusions to what is “right”, evoking wider “regimes of justice” or universality (Lundgren and Nilsson 6 2018). In a way, this is a means of proliferating the speaker’s ideology, as such claims to universality inherently carry a social pressure for others to consider the ideology’s doctrine as generally valid and good, fulfilling the function of influencing the audience’s beliefs through claims to universality or truth creating universalities and truths (Ibid.). According to Wang (2020), legitimization attempts to “create ideological spaces in which actors can operate and enjoy sufficient social acceptance to pursue their activities freely”, and this process creates dominant ideologies by naturalizing the practices of the elite, which are then perceived as common sense. This process of naturalization is very important, as it makes political ideologies widely accepted, and thus no longer political (Wang 2020), as will later be discussed. Audience’s beliefs are important for attempts at legitimization, as it must be situationally located and contextual as stated earlier, and it is employed to use, overcome, or influence those beliefs to give more social acceptance for the actions of the speaker. This means that legitimization as an action “creates a state where the exertion of power by one person or group over another is made to be, and maintained as being, acceptable to those over whom power is wielded” (Mackay 2015). Legitimizations can be considered illocutionary speech acts that are felicitous under certain conditions, and to which “soft power”, or “the capacity to persuade others through attraction rather than coercion” is vital (Isiaka 2024). Chilton sees three strategic functions of creating validity for speech acts: coercion, legitimization (including delegitimization), and representation (including misrepresentation) (Chilton 2004, 45-46). This means that legitimization is used validate the actions that are performed through language. Legitimization itself can be called the speech act of “defending oneself” (van Dijk 1998). A centrality of legitimization in persuasive speech acts has been demonstrated, showing that the act of legitimization is connected to the need to defends actions and their intents by justifying them (Isiaka 2024). This observation is important because it shows that legitimization and delegitimization can be used for specific purposes of creating social effects. Indeed, it can be argued that all human social practices have an element of legitimization, and that language is therefore an innately legitimizing tool (ibid.). It is important to make a distinction between legitimacy and compliance, as the two terms are closely intertwined, and represent two distinct outcomes of persuasion. Compliance happens when the fear of punishment or coercion and cost-benefit calculations lead to a tacit acceptance of commands (Steffek 2003, 254). Meanwhile, the acceptance of a norm as binding is the only way of gaining legitimacy (Ibid.). In other words, legitimization attempts 7 to create binding norms which do not necessarily take into account cost-benefit calculations or weakens the impact of such calculations on the behavior of those who follow the norms. An action which would have a positive impact does not necessarily need to be legitimized, as such action would be accepted as beneficial on its own, and can thus be viewed as inherently legitimate (Steffek 2003, 255). However, a norm or an action with negative impacts necessarily requires legitimization, as people may not follow them if they are not coerced or if they do not gain profit (Steffek 2003, 254-255). In this way, legitimacy is connected to Austin’s (1962) felicity conditions, which show that when a performative utterance, a speech act, does not conform to social norms, it acquires additional negative meanings. In a similar way, when a declaration or request lacks legitimacy, it can often be ignored or even considered offensive. This is connected to the second felicity condition, which states that there is an unspoken requirement that utterances must be appropriate for their context (Austin 1962, 14-15). In the case of an illegitimate statement, the context of the utterance is inappropriate, as the speaker does not have the prerequisite legitimacy to make such a speech act. For a political actor, it is not particularly efficient to bribe or force people to follow, and therefore gaining legitimacy for a norm or action is vital. Legitimacy means that people will follow a norm or an action without further incentives due to social pressures, making it effective as a tool of making sure policies are followed. In summary, legitimization is always a defensive strategy (van Dijk 1998, 234), and is used to create either binding norms or to justify decisions without clear benefits or with negative impacts. It is a strategy used in situations where listeners need to be convinced of the validity of the viewpoint which justifies the action that the speaker believes needs to be taken. This is particularly notable for cases such as conflicts, including the Syrian War, because “the serious nature of armed conflicts warrants constant legitimizing ideological exchange between the actors and the public” (Isiaka 2024). Arguments about legitimacy are always normative in nature, as they need to create a reason why a norm needs to be regarded as binding (Steffek 2003, 254). Van Dijk (1998, 235) additionally sees legitimization as the institutional counterpart of justifications, which can, in addition to actions, be used to justify positions, roles, or institutions themselves. This means that the user of legitimization has to be in a role where they need to justify their actions that would impose upon the freedom of action of those who the holder of the role has power over. In order to further understand legitimization, it is necessary to find how it is used 8 in real language. To do this, van Leeuwen’s categories of legitimization will be introduced in the next subsection. 2.2.1 Overview of Van Leeuwen’s Categories of Legitimization Van Leeuwen’s categories of legitimization are a means of sorting the “whys” of legitimization (van Leeuwen 2008, 105-106). These categories are used to sort the means of creating legitimacy for an action, and thus they help simplify the complex realities of discourse and human interaction. According to van Leeuwen, all references to real life in texts are done through social practices or their elements (van Leeuwen 2008, 5-6). Texts also draw on and transform these social practices, creating representation and recontextualization (van Leeuwen 2008, 13-16). In recontextualization, four different kinds of transformations of meaning may occur: substitutions, deletions, rearrangements, and additions (van Leeuwen 2008, 17-19). Legitimization, according to van Leeuwen (2008, 105-119), is an addition of meaning, and is closely connected to evaluation, and particularly the category of moral evaluations is closely connected to other kinds of evaluations. To clarify the nature of legitimization, Oddo (2011, 289-302) considers some key techniques of legitimization to be references to values, references to temporality (past actions), and references to group membership demarcation. When contrasting with the types of legitimization by van Leeuwen, which will be explained in more detail later, references to values as a category are similar to the category of moral evaluation, while the other two kinds of legitimization are not present. This can be explained through the nature of legitimization itself: it references social practices and is closely related to identities. Chilton, meanwhile, identifies two types of legitimization: epistemic, or claims to have better knowledge, which are often backed with authoritative sources, and deontic, or claims of “rightness” in a moral sense, which are often overlapping with feelings and “factual” representations, and are “unchallengeable” (Chilton 2004, 111- 117). In these different categorizations of legitimization can be seen the complexity of the process of legitimization, which seems to draw from the whole of social practices. Legitimization is connected to such difficult concepts as values, social memory, identities, knowledge, and factuality, which makes it a difficult thing to directly observe. In fact, legitimization is generally based on an assumption by the writer or speaker that the recipient of the legitimization attempt is able to understand the message they are trying to convey in a similar 9 way as it is intended. This assumption rises from an intuitive understanding developed through social knowledge of various constitutive rules that govern the use of language separately from the rules of language itself (Searle 1979, 18). This process is at its simplest when a speakers produces an utterance and means exactly what he/she says, but there are also cases where there are additional meanings or the intended effects of the utterance are different from what the form might suggest (Searle 1979, 30). Van Leeuwen’s categories help with identifying a particular form of these additional meanings of utterances, values, which affect the legitimacy of actors and actions through the social effects of language. Next, the different categories are discussed in four larger groups: authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization, and mythopoesis. 2.2.2 Authorization Authorization, in van Leeuwen’s categorization, is characterized by references to authority, tradition, law, persons, or other outside sources of legitimacy. According to Isiaka (2024), “authorization is legitimacy derived from an existing legitimacy of entities, institutions, or cultural conventions rather than logic or reasoned justification.” Authority is divided into six subcategories (van Leeuwen 2008, 105-119): 1. Personal authority: This form of authority relies on the personal position in an institution of someone who is relevant to the object of legitimization. Relevant examples of this form of legitimization would be a politician endorsing a law or a parent telling their children to do chores. In a case such as this, the politician or parent would mostly have authority as a representative of an institution, and their word gives justification to an action due to this position. Steffek (2003, 255) identifies similarly that certain persons are “entitled to act on behalf of others, or to impose rules on them, because of a common history, ethnic origin, or destiny, often in the context of a national community.” 2. Expert authority: Experts are vital in any important decision-making, as no single person can hold all relevant knowledge for making any complex decision. This expertise gives experts a certain type of power over the decisions they provide consultation for. This can even be seen in people’s private lives, as experts have at least superficial influence over many people’s nutritional decisions, lifestyle decisions, financial decisions, and so on. Expert power, however, is the most visible in political decision-making, as it can convince politicians or the public to support or reject policies, particularly in fields of expertise that the politician 10 is not well-educated in. Typically, this type of legitimization relies on clauses where the expert is the subject and states his or her opinion on a particular course of action. However, an expert opinion is not necessarily believed, and thus can be stripped of the expert power through context. An important note is also that expert authority is always based on the assumption that the expert knows or has experience that is greater than the recipient’s, and that the expert is knowledgeable on the particular subject discussed. 3. Role model authority: Role model authority is a very particular type of authority most easily identified in celebrities. In its purest form it essentially means that when the person holding that authority adopts a certain belief or lifestyle, people will follow by adopting similar beliefs and lifestyles. This type of legitimization relies on a peer or celebrity endorsing an action passively, by doing it in public. Steffek (2003, 255) identifies informality as one type of legitimacy, and it is clear that a person being considered a peer or socially close can affect the legitimacy of an action they are endorsing. Donald Trump has famously used this strategy in his messaging, and recently social media has brought this kind of legitimization to the political sphere (Ross and Rivers 2020). Oddo (2011, 296-297) also identifies “past heroism” as a kind of legitimization where the actions of past glory through violence legitimizes current and future violence. This kind of legitimization can be considered role model authority, but also comes close to moral tales, which are described later in the Mythopoesis-section. 4. Impersonal authority: This kind of authority is not used by a single person, but stems from laws and regulations. As stated earlier, legitimacy is needed to create binding norms, so it can be inferred that the authority of laws and regulations can be considered to be a result of earlier legitimization. This means that legitimization of an earlier action can be transferred to a later action. It is also possible that the authority of laws and regulations derives from the way they are created; Steffek (2003, 255) identifies, for example, a legitimacy of democracy. This means that common purpose is more important than common identity and may transfer some of its legitimacy to the products of democratic decision-making (Steffek 2003, 255). 5. The authority of tradition: The authority of tradition essentially comes down to “we have always done it so. and so it will be done that way now”. Tradition is not necessarily actively visible, such as cultural traditions, but can also be things such as routines or institutional traditions like regular meetings or contingency procedures. For example, the past actions of 11 people who have previously been in a (at least superficially) similar situation are a common way of legitimizing the actions that the speaker believes should be done (Oddo 2011, 289). 6. The authority of conformity: In short, the authority of conformity means that legitimacy of the action or norm comes from the fact that others are willing to follow it. As people always seek to fit into their social environment at least to some extent, fear of social condemnation can be a powerful motivator for following the same rules as everyone else does. This type of authority relies on social pressure and people’s willingness to conform to the expectations of society. 2.2.3 Moral Evaluation Moral evaluation legitimization as a category is the most difficult to recognize, as recognizing it entirely relies on cultural knowledge. This kind of legitimization seems to be fairly straight forward in its goals and methods, if difficult to discern in real language (van Leeuwen 2008, 110-112). Key to this type of legitimization are emotions, which are inherently contextual and relational across spaces, while simultaneously being political and connected to specific identities (Lundgren and Nilsson 2018). This type of legitimization relies on assigning moral values on the objects legitimized or delegitimized by referencing a value system, or by simply assigning the values of good or bad to an object, and is divided into three subcategories (van Leeuwen 2008, 110-112): 1. Evaluation: Evaluation is generally conveyed through evaluative adjectives, though adjectives can both convey concrete qualities and evaluations in terms of a domain of values. In its simplest form, evaluation can consist simply of using words such as good, bad, or inefficient to describe something. However, using descriptive phrases such as blue car, large building, or tall man is not inherently evaluative, so this category cannot be reduced merely to any instance of using adjectives, as there needs to be a legitimating value conveyed through the utterance. This type of legitimization also encompasses the phenomenon of “naturalization”, which attempts to treat an action as normal or expected. This works through similar means to the authority of conformity, as it relies on describing an action or norm as so mundane that everyone considers it unremarkable, and thus legitimate by default. An example of this is describing a decision as routine or a norm as common sense. 2. Abstraction: This kind of legitimization relies on referring to actions or their “component actions or reactions” in abstract and vague ways to moralize, or attach certain values, to them. 12 This happens by taking a quality from these actions and amplifying it to link them to discourses of moral values. For example, referring to a declaration of war as a response to aggression serves the purpose of obscuring the other qualities of the action itself while emphasizing the specific moral quality of the action as self-defense. 3. Analogies: Comparisons in discourse often have a legitimizing or delegitimizing function. This kind of legitimization compares the legitimized action with another thing that is associated with positive values. Comparing sugar to drugs, for example, would bring the delegitimizing bad moral qualities partially to sugar, emphasizing certain specific qualities of it, like addictiveness. These parallels help transition attributes from one entity or action to another, thus creating new imaginary qualities, both positive and negative, to the receiver of the new attribute. By doing this, a speaker can creatively intertwine the moral values of two separate concepts quite effectively. 2.2.4 Rationalization The process of legitimization through rationalization means finding rational reasons behind the object to be legitimized. This is often done through references to goals or uses of the legitimized action, and the action’s cognitive validity. In addition, this kind of legitimization often relies on specific categorization of actors or actions, which allows for the moralization of the Self and Other by assigning positive or negative attributes indirectly (Isiaka 2024). This type of legitimization can be divided into two subcategories (van Leeuwen 2008, 105-106, 113-118): 1. Instrumental rationalization: Rational legitimization by instrumentality happens through references to the goals, uses, and effects of an action, or, in short, the purpose of that action. Purpose constructions must are always used with moralizing intent, because any instrumental value is subjective. This kind of rationality is mostly concerned with the means and ends of the legitimized action. Reference to results such as greater security or wealth are some of the most obvious sources of political legitimacy, as they are used quite liberally for justification of all kinds of actions or laws. 2. Theoretical rationalization: This kind of legitimization relies on truths, referring to what the speaker considers self-evident reality. It is closely related to naturalization, but explicitly states how the reality is, instead of assuming a shared perception of what is normal. This category can also be divided into three forms: definition, explanation, and predictions. When 13 using definition, the speaker attempts define one activity in terms of another, already moralized activity with certain attached values. In definitions, both activities are made more generalized and the link between them is changed to an attributive or significative one. An attributive link means that one action is defined through the other, while a significative uses the meanings of the actions in a similar way. An example of this is the phrase in school the children are growing up, and in this case school is defined through children growing up, a positive activity. Explanation, meanwhile, instead of defining an action, defines one or more of the actors who take part, and attempts to give a reasoning for the action by considering it a result of the nature of one of the participants. Generality is essential here too, as what is described are the characteristics or habits of an actor. For example, one can say that small children thrive on routine, which attempts to make thriving on routine habitual to small children. Legitimization in the form of predictions instead is based on expertise, and so there is a possibility of a different experience which can act as a counterpoint. This can be further divided into experiential and scientific rationalizations, the former of which are explanatory schemes relating objective meanings, often functioning as commonsense knowledge like moral evaluations, but being more explicitly formulated, while the latter are systemic bodies of knowledge legitimizing institutions. This division is not particularly relevant to this study, since it is too specific, but may be useful in other contexts. 2.2.5 Mythopoesis Mythopoesis is a category of legitimization based on a narrative style. It relies on creating tales which have outcomes that “reward legitimate actions or punish illegitimate actions”, and can be further divided into two different subcategories (van Leeuwen 2008, 118-119): 1. Moral tales: In these kinds of tales, “the protagonists are rewarded for engaging in legitimate social practices or restoring the legitimate order” (van Leeuwen 2008, 118-119). 2. Cautionary tales: These stories, as the name says, “give cautionary examples of what happens to those who do not conform to the norms of social practices” (van Leeuwen 2008, 118-119). Steffek (2003, 255) finds one mythopoetical, or more specifically identity-related, kind of legitimization being the view that “certain persons are allowed to act on behalf of others, or to impose rules on them, because of a common history, ethnic origin or destiny, usually referring to a national community”. This kind of legitimization can possibly be considered to be a part 14 of the moral tales-subcategory, as the reward of being legitimate is leadership, and legitimacy comes from a link to the audience. This can be considered the basis for the power of politicians. An important note about legitimization through narrative structures is also that these structures can become self-justifying, where any decision made within the structure can be justified through the structure itself (Vaara and Tienari 2008, 990). An example given by Vaara and Tienari are “restructuring programs”, which function as narratives that justify factory shutdowns, as these shutdowns become strategic decisions in the context of the narrative redescribing them (Ibid.). These kinds of self-justifying narratives are interesting, as they do not seem to directly fit into moral or cautionary tale-categories, but more alike to theoretical rationalizations, which describe “how things are”. To analyze the importance of identity in creating legitimacy and the self-justifying narratives, we can examine how Hansen (Hansen 2006, 19) describes the discursive enactment of foreign policy as creating identity, even as that same identity acts as a legitimization for the proposed policy. This interesting self-justifying circular effect is important in understanding why mythopoesis works: the creation of identities allows for the creation of stories using those very same identities in legitimizing the identity, and the social practices relating to that identity. 2.3 News Discourse In order to understand how the news media legitimizes political actions, it is first important to understand how news discourse itself works. According to Khosravinik (2015, 48), “mass communicated discourse is the main field of action for competing ideologies”. Mass media always represents the interests of some of the dominant groups in society, either politically and commercially, or in a combination of both (Khosravinik 2015, 72). All news in general is partial and ideologically framed, and makes reports of events, not direct summaries, however, “language used in the media and news may be some of the most pervasive and widespread discourse that people from all backgrounds are exposed to” (Khosravinik 2015, 72-73). Modern news media also gains a large part of its authority from the “market” (Vaara and Tienari 2008, 989). Therefore, an important note is that the interface between the readers and the news is not unidirectional, and both influence the other (Khosravinik 2015, 73). The access to mass media itself constitutes soft power, and indicates status and rank (Oddo 2011, 289). Soft power itself is the ability to “get others to want what you want”, and its aim is to establish legitimacy of the desired thing symbolically (Chouliaraki 2007, 1-3). 15 2.4 Donald Trump and Political Discourse Political discourse is related to politics, a vital part of the functioning of any human society. There are two broad definitions of politics (Chilton 2004, 3): 1. Politics is a struggle for power between those who want to use power and those who want to challenge it. 2. Politics is cooperation in resolving clashes of interest through the practices and institutions of society. These two definitions show the two very different sides of politics, confrontation and cooperation, which actors in politics use to advance their interests. Another interesting view on politics is the definition that it consists of those actions which involve power, or its inverse, resistance (van Dijk and Blum-Kulka, 2011). The use of language is key to politics, as political associations are defined by shared perceptions of values, and language is used to indicate what is advantageous or not, according to such perceptions, to the group (Chilton 2004, 5). In the political sphere, it is also common to employ people specialized in communication management (Chilton 2004, 8). President Donald Trump was both famous and infamous for his highly confrontational style of rhetoric, which discarded much of the common consensus-seeking rhetoric that is often used in politics (Ross and Rivers 2020). Trump is noted to commonly use tactics such as nicknaming, insulting, and self-promoting, which are generally informal, and he creates a frame in which Trump himself is a winner and his opponents are losers (Ross and Rivers 2020). Decisions in politics are often reached through communication, generally persuasion and bargaining, and through this process these decisions become authoritative by the threat of force operationalized through communicative acts (Chilton 2004, 4). This leads to language being a vital part in political decision-making, and it is important to note that language itself may have evolved to perform the social functions we would today call “political” (Chilton 2004, 6). 16 3 Material This part of this paper introduces the analyzed materials, and gives some necessary background knowledge about them. The newspapers from which the articles used in the study were taken from will be introduced, followed by a further examination of the general features of the articles analyzed in this study. The articles chosen for this study were from four different newspapers: New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. These newspapers were chosen as they were the most widely circulated newspapers in America at the time of writing. The articles chosen for this study were taken from these newspapers with the following parameters: the articles were explicitly about the announcement of withdrawal from Syria, or at least extensively discussed the event; the articles were of sufficient length (determined to be over 500 words for this study) to have enough material for analysis; and the articles were the first ones to be published after the announcement. The number of words and characters for each individual article are further shown in Table 1. Next, it is important to give some overview of the articles studied. The longest article had 1555 words, while the shortest was 576 words, and in total, all the articles had 13595 words. There were 12 articles studied, meaning that the scope of this study was very limited, and further research would probably give a more complete understanding of the subject matter. One important note about the articles are that, us usual for newspapers, quotation was common. Quotations are, of course, fully within the power of the newspaper to redact or include, so they were included as possible sources of legitimization within the articles. Common for the articles was also a divide between articles that presented the subject matter more as “news” adopting a neutral tone, and those which considered the withdrawal from a more opinion-based perspective. Both kinds of articles were included due to the fact that neutrality is, in reality, only a way of hiding a certain kind of perspective that is often considered mainstream enough to be seen as “neutral”. This means that even seemingly “neutral” articles use discourse and legitimization, but in a manner that is more disguised as matter-of-fact and self-evident. 17 Table 1. Words and characters per article. Article Number of Words Number of Characters NYT: Sanger 1363 6735 NYT: Specia 1252 6560 NYT: MacFarquhar 1183 6113 UST: Hjelmgaard 888 4757 UST: Vanden Brook & Jackson 884 4398 UST: Jackson 606 2933 WSJ: Nissenbaum, Youssef & Salama 1158 5924 WSJ: Youssef & Ballahaus 1555 8047 WSJ: Lubold & Donati 576 3035 WP: Warrick & Mekhennet 1252 6572 WP: Gearan & Dawsey 1483 7398 WP: Ryan & Dawsey 1395 7171 18 4 Methods The basis of this study is van Leeuwen’s categorization of types of legitimization, and it is the main analytical tool used to study the texts chosen for this study (van Leeuwen 2008, 105- 106). The application of this method of categorization requires the identification and classification of instances where legitimization is used to advance the ideology and discourse of a group or delegitimization is used to hinder another group’s competing ideology or discourse (van Leeuwen 2008, 105-123). To do this, the action that is legitimized and delegitimized has to first be identified. In the case of this study, the action that is being legitimized and delegitimized is defined to be president Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria. Next, places in the text where “resonation”, as Simonsen (2019) calls it, or culturally salient attempts at legitimization, occurs need to be recognized. This is done by searching for parts of the text where social practices are used to either defend or attack the target action of legitimization. Legitimizing or delegitimizing happens when meaning that performs a legitimizing function is added to social practices (van Leeuwen 2008). Also, legitimizing is an attempt at making an action be viewed positively (Vaara and Tienari 2008, 986). This means that identifying parts of the text with a legitimizing function requires finding places where specific social practices are used to make the legitimized action be viewed in a more positive fashion by a specific target audience. Parts of the text that attempt to show Trump’s decision to withdraw in a positive (or negative for delegitimization) light, and add a positive meaning to Trump’s decision in a way that would resonate with the target audience, are parts that have attempted legitimization. The target audience in this case can be considered the readers of the newspaper, who are assumedly from the United States or interested in American foreign politics otherwise. In the next part, the methods of sorting the parts of the texts that were detected to have legitimization are explained in more detail. 4.1 Van Leeuwen’s Categories of Legitimization Explaining the efforts to sort legitimization into the categories proposed by van Leeuwen requires recognition that communication and interaction is complex and the categories of legitimization are not, and cannot be, perfect representations of this complexity. They are, rather, tools for analysis that can help make sense of discourse and power relations in said discourse. Of van Leeuwen’s categories, authorization is fairly simple to distinguish as it 19 generally relies on an outside authority to legitimize an action, which is fairly simple to detect in text. Moral evaluation, however, is difficult to analyze, as van Leeuwen (2008, 111) warns. However, van Leeuwen (2008, 110-112) states that this is due to the underlying pool of moral norms and values, which are only analyzable through a specific kind of method that will not be touched in this study. However, this kind of analysis is unnecessary for the scope of this study, as in this study cases of moral evaluation will be identified and explained as well as possible for the limited scope of this study to create a more surface level analysis of the articles’ attempts at legitimization, meaning that the category of moral evaluation will be the most uncertain in terms of its content. Rationalization is similar to authorization in that it is fairly easily distinguished and analyzed. It is, though, important to state that cases of legitimization can overlap and be mixed within text, so it can be difficult to fully extract clear categorization from real texts (van Leeuwen 2008, 105-119). Mythopoesis is a specific example of this, as it can be easily intermixed with other kinds of legitimization due to potential length of text a tale can take to convey. In addition to this, some of the categories of legitimization resemble each other, such as predictions and mythopoesis, and expert and personal authority. This can make distinguishing these categories from each other difficult, and due to the culture-relatedness of legitimization, different analyzers may even categorize the same legitimization attempts differently (van Leeuwen 2008, 105-119). However, it should be noted that through consistent categorization the results are still interesting and usable for scientific study. Practically, this study uses the following methods to identify, distinguish, and categorize different types of value-based legitimization. Firstly, each article is analyzed by going manually through it and picking out points of the article where legitimization seems to occur. This manifests as phrases, sentences, utterances, and specific words that can be related to a discourse which supports or opposes the choice of withdrawal by Trump. Then, these instances of legitimization are sorted into the categories of van Leeuwen by individually going through them and examining what kinds of values these utterances convey, and how they specifically affect the readers’ perceptions of Trump’s decision’s legitimacy. There are clear subjective elements to this method due to the unavoidable biases of the researcher, but through acknowledgement of these biases, the bias can be compensated for, and the findings of the study can be used to further current knowledge. 20 5 Analysis In the following section, specific examples of legitimization from the articles chosen for this study are analyzed in detail, after which a summary is given to gather together the overall findings from each article. Examples of cases of (de-)legitimization are explained and discussed, and the articles are analyzed from the perspective of how they try to construct legitimacy or illegitimacy for Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria. Specific examples from each article are introduced in particular detail to illustrate the specific means of legitimization and to explain the process of identifying these means of legitimization with van Leeuwen’s method. Then, the articles are introduced more generally, talking more broadly about the methods of legitimization used and how they relate to the article as a whole. Finally, a summary will summarize the general findings from the analysis, and what direct conclusions can be drawn from this study. 5.1 USA Today Articles 5.1.1 Kim Hjelmgaard: “Syria Conflict Explained: How Did We End Up Here?”, 19th Dec. 2018 Hjelmgaard’s article approaches Trump’s decision from a historical perspective, explaining the history of the Syrian conflict’s past events. This approach creates a specific context for the decision, which provides an interesting view into how the article’s writer sees Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria. As Skog and Lundström (2022) point out, contextualization is a key part of moralizing discourse. The article is formatted in a question-answer style, and starts with the statement “President Trump reversed previous U.S. policy on Wednesday and plans to withdraw all American troops from Syria”. This statement views Trump’s change of policy as a “reversal”, which highlights the abruptness of the decision, and can be considered an attempt at legitimization through abstraction, a type of moral evaluation. Abstraction means referring to actions or components of them in “abstract” ways, and this seems to be a way to make the decision seem a complete, sudden change in policy, something that can be considered an infelicitous way to act from a president, particularly in foreign policy decisions that can require significant continuity through administrations. This is particularly interesting in an article viewing the Syrian conflict as a more long-term event that has had devastating effects on the country, thus emphasizing the duration and constancy of the conflict and how 21 Trump’s decision to retreat was surprising in the context of a long war. It is especially so since it is emphasized that the conflict has been particularly bloody and destructive, and later the article makes clear through quotations that the conflict is geopolitically relevant and not close to closure. Similarly, Trump’s decision is cast in a negative light by making it seem rash in the light of what the troops were actually doing in Syria. For example, their mission is called “straightforward” in reference to the fact that they were supporting local militias in the fight against the Islamic State. The term “straightforward” implies that what the American troops were doing in Syria was simple, easy, or even safe, all of which seem odd implications for troops in an active warzone. This, in turn, implies that withdrawal is unnecessary, which seems to affect the instrumental rationalizations of the decision by Trump. After all, running from what is described by the article as serving as advisers and providing support such as air power is not easily explained when the troops are helping in the fight against the Islamic State. The article also states that the United States is “attempting to fight the Islamic State without taking sides in the civil war”, and is “not in conflict” with Assad or his supporters. This is a notable way of describing how the United States is involved in the conflict, as it seems to paint the U.S. forces as not being in conflict with anyone else besides the Islamic State despite acting in an active warzone. As Isiaka (2024) points out, conflict requires constant legitimization, so it can be assumed that a larger conflict with major nations would require significantly stronger legitimization, and thus this caveat is important in lowering the required legitimacy of staying in Syria. This is another way of delegitimizing the withdrawal by attacking the instrumental rationalizations, as the article paints a picture of the United States forces stationed in a warzone but uninvolved with the main conflict itself. Interestingly, the article seems to later contradict itself by stating that the conflict has turned into a “proxy war”, where the interests of Russia and the United States are clearly contradictory. The article then claims that Trump’s assessment that the Islamic State is defeated is untrue, and bases this claim on a report from the “Center for Strategic and International Studies”. This is clearly an example of the use of expert authority that contrasts Trump’s personal authority with the expert authority of the “Center for Strategic and International Studies”. Of course, this comparison requires either understanding or an assumption of how “expert” Trump and the center are, which means that the article clearly assumes that the average reader would consider Trump less authoritative on this subject than the “Center for Strategic and International Studies”, which is simply explained to be a “Washington-based think tank”. Of 22 course, it is very unlikely that a layperson would know or understand the specific expertise of a specific think-tank, especially one so ambiguously introduced, and this reveals a very interesting aspect of legitimization, that is that expert authority does not seem to require actual knowledge of the qualifications of the expert when it is an institution rather than a person. This can be contrasted with the way that Mara Karlin, “an intelligence and security expert at the Brookings Institution think tank”, is introduced. Finally, the article quotes Karlin, who said her congressional testimony was still relevant. Karlin said in her testimony that Bashar Assad would not voluntarily step aside, and that violence and oppression in Syria would continue. This quote is interesting, because it does not seem to directly be criticizing the withdrawal from Syria, but it does allude to an ending to the conflict that is not felicitous to the United States: continuation of oppression and violence in Syria. In this way, the quote uses a method of delegitimization that is quite interesting: a prediction, a type of theoretical rationalization. The article seems to predict that, due to the United States not stopping the conflict in Syria through troop deployment, the conflict will continue to an undefined future. This prediction is further strengthened by the success of Karlin’s previous prediction, which lends further legitimacy to the article, and directly contradicts Trump’s thought that the war has been won and the troops are no longer needed. The quote by Karlin is contextualized with a statement that the United Nations, Iran, Russia, and Turkey have pursued or are pursuing peaceful resolutions to the conflict, but Assad’s fate is a sticking point stopping such a resolution from happening. The interesting part about this contextualization is that the article earlier stated that the United States troops were not fighting against Assad’s forces. This means that logically, the presence of the troops should not reflect on what happens to Assad. However, it is possible that the article is considering a different prediction: one that considers what would happen had the United States troops not been pulled out. In this sense, the quote almost serves rather as a legitimization of the alternative decision of staying in Syria and possibly even increasing the presence and changing the goals of the deployment. All in all, the article seems to consider Trump’s decision an abrupt overreaction. In the greater picture, the United States troops were not in danger, and did not enter into conflict with other great powers, merely the Islamic State. Trump’s quick change of mind was also not based on a true evaluation of the state of the area, as can be seen from how the “Center for Strategic and International Studies” disagrees with his thoughts on the Islamic State. Even a security expert considers that the conflict will not resolve itself, an opinion that is reinforced by the 23 state of the peace talks, and thus Trump’s victory can be assumed as false. In summary, the article depicts President Trump’s choice to leave Syria as rash, uneducated, and harmful in the long run. 5.1.2 Vanden Brook & Jackson: “Trump Orders US Troops Out of Syria, Declares Victory Over ISIS; Senators Slam Action As Mistake”, 19th Dec. 2018 To start with the next article, an example of a very common way of legitimating or delegitimating Trump’s withdrawal within the collected articles should be discussed. This method of (de)legitimization is through personal authority, or the ability of the representative of an institution to authoritatively present opinions or ideas as the institution’s own, thus adding the legitimacy of the institution itself to the utterance. To simplify this, a clear example from the article titled “Trump orders US troops out of Syria, declares victory over ISIS; senators slam action as mistake” by Vanden Brook and Jackson can be found in the title itself. “Senators slam action as mistake” is a simple way of stating the opposition of a powerful group of people to the action of a single, equally or more, powerful person. This title effectively frames Trump’s actions through the evaluation of a group of holders of personal authority as a mistake. Similarly, personal authority is used when the article states that: “In Russia, a foreign ministry spokesperson applauded Trump’s decision.” Due to their position as a rival, the praise from a Russian institution can be interpreted as a condemning factor due to the framing of the article. Of particular interest with this article is also its abundant use of abstractions as a means of legitimization. Most of the instances of abstraction are from official statements quoted in the article, which is interesting, as most of the article consists of quotes. This fact may make it seem as if the article is simply relaying the things other people have said, but there are clear signs that this is not the case. Most of the cases of abstraction are either directly contradicted or refuted, or put into the article as examples of official statements that were made before Trump’s decision to withdraw that refute Trump’s claims and consider his course of action inadvisable. The way this article is written is quite fascinating, as it shows directly how abstractions can be countered in real text – either through pointing out the abstraction’s problematic nature, or by finding an earlier abstraction that contradicts the later one. An example of the first way is how the article uses Trump’s declaration of victory against him, as this declaration is contrasted with statements from military leaders, senators, and even 24 Russia’s statements on the issue. The “victory” is disputed by giving reasons against withdrawing, then by predicting bad consequences, then through an evaluation of the decision as a “major blunder” and as a “dangerous decision”, and finally by considering the reaction of Russia, which is seen as the major beneficiary of the decision. This thorough dismantling of a video statement by Trump is interesting, as it shows that the delegitimization of an action can happen in many ways through the rebuttal to a statement that legitimates the action. An example of contradicting abstractions can also be found in this article, as contradicting statements from the White House and the Pentagon are compared in the article. The White House spokeswoman is quoted saying that the decision signaled a “transition to the next stage of this campaign”, while the Pentagon spokeswoman says that “the fight against ISIS continues”. As the article starts by explaining Trump’s announcement of the withdrawal, then progresses to the White Houses idea of a transition, and finally comes to the Pentagon’s words about the fight continuing, a certain implied comparison can be found. These contradictory statements are then brough together through a tweet by Trump, which celebrates the defeat of ISIS in Syria, a claim which the rest of the article refutes. Another interesting case of abstraction comes from Trump’s tweet: (1) It's time to come back . . . they're getting ready; you're going to see them soon. This quote, in fact, has two abstractions: “coming back” and “you’re going to see them soon”. The former avoids the question of the logistics behind the withdrawal and the timescale, while the latter creates a feeling of immediacy and relief, while similarly remaining vague about the specifics of when and how. This article relies on the reactions of other major political actors and various experts to delegitimate the choice to pull out from Syria. Important to note about this is that this article has the second most examples of impersonal authority, showing a preference for the use of opinions from think tanks and institutional sources. This article also uses quite a bit of abstraction with 14 instances of it found, which is consistent with the generally vague wording that many institutions may prefer to use due to their nature as collectives of experts. Significantly, abstraction is used several times by Trump and others defending Trump’s decision, which reveals that legitimating Trump’s decision is clearly reliant on vagueness and detaching the decision from its real-life context and attaching it to new ones. 25 5.1.3 David Jackson: “President Trump Defends Pulling U.S. Troops Out of Syria After Bipartisan Backlash”, 20th Dec. 2018 The third article from USA Today is quite clear in its intentions, as the title already states that Trump is on the defensive against a “bipartisan backlash”. This title has two types of legitimization, as abstraction is used to make clear Trump’s actions are a defense against the consequences of his own actions, while the authority of conformity shows that this defense is against not only one party, but both. Taken in this context, Trump’s defenses seem very underwhelming, as the article makes clear by dismantling these defenses. To give the “opposition” a clear position to delegitimize, Trump is quoted as saying: (2) “Getting out of Syria was no surprise”, Trump said in one post, “I’ve been campaigning on it for years, and six months ago, when I very publicly wanted to do it, I agreed to stay longer.” This quote, out of context, seems simple in its intentions, as Trump explains his long-term commitment to the withdrawal, and questions the surprise of people opposing the move. He even seems to be saying that he has accommodated the opposition by delaying the decision before. Three distinct instances of legitimization are working here to make Trump’s decision legitimate in the original quote: the definition of the decision as a predictable move, a factor that should negate any surprise; the long-term commitment, creating a sort of authority of tradition, as betraying such a commitment would be problematic in itself; and another definition, which shows Trump’s accommodation of opposition through his delaying of the decision. These legitimizations are then contended with through four different perspectives. First, members of Congress, who hold personal authority, use that authority to evaluate Trump’s rationale for the decision as false, and predict that the decision would have disastrous consequences. Next, unnamed “critics” use instrumental rationalization and prediction to show further bad consequences, appealing to the unfinished business in Syria, which would leave local Kurdish allies in trouble. After that, Senator Lindsey Graham, who is clarified to be “an ally of Trump”, an explanation to create further legitimacy to his statements, then gives even further instrumental rationalizations against the decisions, and finally evaluates Trump’s rationales as fake, even comparing Trump to Barack Obama, the predecessor Trump detests. Finally, the article explains that the Russian President Vladimir Putin evaluated the decision as positive, which is a delegitimizing instance due to the rivalry between the United States and Russia, particularly in the Middle East. 26 A notable characteristic of this article is that it has three instances of authority of conformity, all of which appeal to the fact that resistance to Syrian withdrawal is bipartisan. This article clearly focuses on the criticism of Trump’s decision, and therefore it is significant that it does not do this from only the perspective of one party. Another aspect of the article is a perspective on the views of other actors in the conflict, which is ultimately used to frame the critical viewpoints of the bipartisan opposition to the decision as beneficial to the national interests. 5.2 Wall Street Journal Articles 5.2.1 Nissenbaum, Youssef & Salama: “Trump Orders Troops Out of Syria”, 20th Dec. 2018 Similarly to the first article discussed in the last section, Nissenbaum, Youssef, and Salama’s article starts by criticizing the abruptness of the shift in policy by Trump. The withdrawal Trump has ordered will be “rapid”, and the resulting shift in posture is “abrupt”. This can be considered direct evaluation, a type of moral evaluation that simply uses adjectives to give legitimizing or delegitimizing values to actions. However, unlike the previous article, this one considers the Islamic State to be “on the brink of its defeat”. In this case, the type of legitimization employed is potentially a mix of expert authority and impersonal authority: the expertise of the officials and their position in the government of the United State are the reasons that this evaluation needs to be believed. Impersonal authority can also be found in how the Trump administration has been “…working to defeat Islamic State, contain Iran’s expansionist ambitions and counter Russia’s influence in Syria…”, all actions that have been “recast” by the decision to pull out from Syria. Another problem is that the “U.S.’s Kurdish partners” are worried as they are losing “vital support” as “Turkey is threatening to attack them”. This is an attempt at delegitimizing withdrawing, as the Kurdish are considered “partners” who are put in trouble by President Trump’s decision, which seems to put this instance in the category of theoretical rationalization, and more specifically explanation. As the Kurdish are US’s partners, it is assumed that it is in their nature to be worried when the United States seems to be abandoning them. Later in the article, the Kurdish forces are described “the most effective fighting force in Syria against Islamic State”, and the Turkish President Erdogan is stated to have threatened them, a clear instrumental rationalization 27 against leaving Syria. Similarly, the article later states that Israel had worries about the United States leaving its current role of being a deterrent, furthering a theme of the pullout leaving local allies in trouble. This theme of abandonment can be found in the article again, as the writers state: (3) The U.S. has long said it would remain in Syria until Islamic State was defeated and local forces could prevent a new rise of extremist forces, and to press Iran to withdraw its forces from the country. While those objectives haven’t been met, Mr. Trump declared an end to the fight against Islamic State, or ISIS, in a tweet on Wednesday. Interestingly, this quote has two different kinds of delegitimization: instrumental rationalization and authority of tradition. Instrumental rationalization is very simple to detect: the goal was the defeat of the Islamic State or the prevention of the rise of new extremists, and withdrawal would go against this goal of the U.S. in Syria. Meanwhile, the authority of tradition is harder to detect, but equally important, as it shows that the goal to defeat the Islamic State is not a new one – it is a long-term goal, and thus to some extent naturalized. The U.S., having “long said” that it would remain until the Islamic State was defeated, must naturally stay until the goal is accomplished. Trump is breaking away from the long-term goals and actions of “the U.S.”, the country he supposedly represents, and therefore he is changing the “natural” actions of a nation that has made a promise to control the conflict in Syria. Another aspect of the previous quote is that it refers to President Trump as “Mr. Trump” and specifies that the declaration to end the fight against ISIS was made in a tweet. While minor without context, when the article states later that: “Sarah Sanders, Mr. Trump’s press secretary, said the U.S. would now ‘transition to the next phase of the campaign’. Neither the White House nor the Pentagon offered details of the withdrawal.”, the attempt at delegitimizing the decision to retreat from Syria is easier detected. The decision is shown as rushed and poorly planned, as neither the White nor the Pentagon can offer an explanation of “what happens now”. This is further emphasized by adding that the decision was made in a tweet, and by referring to the president as “Mr. Trump”, instead of as “President Trump”, as the writers did at the start of the article. This can be viewed as an attempt at delegitimizing through both attacking Trump’s personal authority and the methods of decision-making through referring to the impersonal authority of the White House and the Pentagon. The attacks on Trump’s personal authority seem fairly mild, and mostly remind the reader that the 28 decision was not made in an established way, and so it was, in a way, not made by “President Trump” but by “Mr. Trump”, reducing the institutional legitimacy backing the decision. This improper ‘unofficial’ way of declaring the action is also the reason for using the impersonal authority of the White House and the Pentagon to make the action seem rushed: if neither of these prestigious institutions can offer further explanations, then were they even involved in the decision that seems to be within their fields of institutional expertise? It would follow that the decision was made in a way that was contrary to the proper, or natural, institutional procedure, and so was announced in an equally improper, or unnatural, manner, through a tweet. This means that the decision was illegitimate because it was not done in a way fit for the institutional position of the president. The article also creates a sense of the decision being heavily opposed by other politicians and important decision-makers, who together have greater legitimacy than the President. The article states that: (4) The withdrawal plan drew criticism from within the White House, among both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, the State Department and in the U.S. military. Some lawmakers urged Mr. Trump to reconsider, comparing it to former President Obama's decisions to scale back U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. This description of the decision being widely criticized and compared to Obama’s controversial and historically poorly viewed decision (at least according to the lawmakers) is possibly an example of legitimization through the authority of conformity. To explain, a decision viewed as unsatisfying by any single one of the institutions or decision-makers that were critical would be controversial, and thus a point of debate. However, when so many different political actors with differing viewpoints, backgrounds, authorities, and rationales come together to criticize a decision, it is difficult to say that any single authority, value system, identity, or logic is used as the reasoning for the controversy. In such a case, there can be very few ways to make legitimizations to counter this opposition: it is very difficult to find a perspective that would not be contentious to any of the doubters of the decision. This peer pressure can be powerful, but in this case it is clear that President Trump had simply not taken this into account in his decisions, invoking a critical response from his lack of conformity to general consensus on how the situation should be handled. Despite all of the criticism of the decision, the article states that “A few lawmakers praised Mr. Trump for his decision”, followed by an encouraging comment from Senator Rand Paul. 29 However, immediately after that, the article cites a U.S. official as saying that there had been “conflicting interests within the administration” between “Mr. Trump” and his advisers. Trump had “grown impatient and told his advisers enough is enough”. This part of the article reveals another means of creating illegitimacy for the withdrawal: referring to the expert or personal authority of Trump’s advisers, who were against Trump’s decision, as they were assumedly people who either had institutional roles within the administration or experts hired to work with the administration. Meanwhile, Trump had been “impatient”, which can be seen as a clear moral evaluation. This means that the legitimacy of the criticism from the decision comes from authority and expertise, while Trump’s decision’s illegitimacy is based on the moral shortcomings of making an “impatient” decision. To end the article, Trump’s rationalizations for withdrawing from Syria are considered by the authors. In particular, Trump’s call with Erdogan is discussed, where he stated that: (5) …he no longer wanted to spend money and time in Syria and preferred instead to focus his energy on domestic issues… This seems to be an important clue to the writers about why Trump chose a retreat. Money also comes up when the article ties in a major missile defense system purchase by Turkey, which had also been “straining relations between U.S. and Turkey”, who are also mentioned to be allies. In addition, the article mentions that the Islamic State had been cornered, and the troops in Syria at the time were enough to maintain them in the corner. The first of these legitimizations in favor of Trump’s decision, money, is a classic instrumental rationalization with little subtlety, and the missile defense system purchase can be considered a way of gaining instrumental resources. Similarly, time and energy, which Trump wants to “spend”, which clearly shows the nature of these “resources” as positive for him, are instrumental rationalizations. However, the relations between the U.S. and Turkey are an interesting instrumental rationalization, because this attempt at legitimization directly clashes with the relations with the Kurds. The article, however, also mentions that Turkey is specifically a “North Atlantic Treaty Organization”, or NATO, ally. This means that unlike the Kurds, Turkey is an institutional ally, which means that the comparison is between an institutional, long-term ally, and a more impromptu, unofficial ally. The fact that the Islamic State is constrained by the current troops by the U.S. within a “corner” is, similarly to the comparison between Turkey and the Kurds, seemingly in favor of Trump’s decision to leave, 30 and an instrumental rationalization. This means that all of the factors legitimizing withdrawal are instrumental rationalizations. The relevant part of the article ends with comments from Marine General and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joe Dunford, who stated that the U.S. mission in Syria was “incomplete”, Islamic State “hadn’t been defeated”, and “much of the local forces were untrained”, and finally that “stabilization was far off”. This final comment relies on legitimization through the expert authority (General) and through the personal authority (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) of Dunford, and directly negates the pro-Trump legitimization that the Islamic State was on the brink of defeat, and counters Trump’s instrumental rationalizations with references to the U.S mission in Syria, the mostly untrained State of the local forces and the lack of stability in the area. The reference to the “U.S. mission in Syria” can be considered legitimization by abstraction, as “the mission” is a very vague way to refer to what the United States is doing in Syria, and seems to imply a deeper purpose for staying in the area, or the existence of some kind of end goal. The untrained local forces are interesting, as the untrained local forces can be considered an explanation, as the description defines the local forces as naturally incapable of defending against threats. The reference to a long way to stability, meanwhile, is difficult to directly put into any of van Leeuwen’s categories, as it does not seem to directly imply that Trump’s decision was either right or wrong. However, it can be considered a prediction, as it implies that Trump’s declaration that the Islamic State was defeated was a poor evaluation of the situation. The fact that the prediction comes from a military officer in a high position supports this analysis, as predictions can be denied by contrary experience from a person with higher expertise in the subject. Overall, there is a clear sense of focus on the internal disputes within Trump’s administration and party within this article, and this is reflected in the use of personal authority, expert authority, and abstraction. Generally, the article also has a secondary theme of abruptness, though this is not particularly strong and does not seem to be reflected very clearly in the methods of legitimization utilized. 31 5.2.2 Youssef & Ballhaus: “Mattis Quits in Split with Trump --- Defense Secretary’s Move Comes After President Orders Drawdown of Troops”, 21st Dec. 2018 The next article mostly focuses on Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s reaction to Trump’s decision to withdraw the troops from Syria. This means that much of the legitimization done in the article is done through this perspective as well. One example of this is how Mattis and his choice to resign are treated in the article: “an abrupt departure of a military figure considered a stalwart of national security”. This quote contains both an evaluation and an explanation – Mattis’s departure is “abrupt” and he was a “stalwart of national security”. The evaluation is clearly meant to emphasize the exceptional nature of how Mattis chose to leave his position, but the characterization of Mattis that follows gives this exceptionality an interesting explanation. Introducing Mattis as a “stalwart of national security” gives him the trait of constancy, meaning that an “abrupt” decision from him is not rash, but is instead exceptional, perhaps even an emergency measure. This is later reinforced by saying that both Mattis and other military officials are worried about Trump’s decision, and then it is stated that “the unexpected series of events appeared to catch many in the military off guard”. This statement contains several legitimating types, and gives an interesting insight into how Mattis and other military officials’ worries are used to delegitimate Trump’s decision. One of the types of legitimization that can be found is impersonal authority. It is obviously very troublesome for a major political leader to engage in hurried decisions without consulting the best advisors available, and in military decisions these advisors would assumedly be, at least partly, military officials. The military is also a very powerful and influential institution, with highly regulated and complex operations. That Trump did not consult the military in a matter which heavily involves it, and made a decision that the military disagreed with at that, is a severe encroachment on the military’s traditional authority. This means that Trump effectively weighed his own authority against the military’s. Of course, the military is under the command of Trump, and has to follow his orders, but the fact that the military disagreed with this decision severely lessens the decision’s legitimacy in the minds of those who consider the military an important organization for national security. Other aspects of the quote about the military being caught off guard are abstraction and expert authority, which are used to improve the impact of the sentence. That the military appeared “caught off guard” is an interesting way of stating the writer’s impressions of the reaction of military officials. It is of course not known how surprised military officials actually were by Trump’s announcement of withdrawal, but it is possible that they did not know about it 32 beforehand. However, that they were “caught off guard” implies a certain resistance to the decision that the military would have had had they known about the decision beforehand. Trump’s announcement and possibly the following Mattis’s resignment are also considered “the unexpected series of events”, which is a clear use of abstraction to change the way the actions are seen. The announcement, though surprising, was not necessarily “unexpected”; Trump had, after all, clearly stated earlier that he wanted to leave Syria. It is also interesting that the events are considered to be a “series”. This implies a clear connection between the events, and leaves open what events exactly belong to this series. The article itself only discusses the resignment of Mattis and the withdrawal from Syria before this point, so calling these events a “series” is very curious. It seems almost as if the writer of the article considers some other events to be part of the series, or expects that something else will happen later. Overall, this quote creates an image of a decision that surprised all, even those who are knowledgeable about the situation within the Trump administration, and so bypassed all opposition because of Trump’s move to directly announce the decision. Next, it is useful to discuss the way the differences between Trump and Mattis are considered in the article. One interesting quote relating to this is a quotation of the article of Mattis’s resignation letter, which reads: “The president had a right to a secretary of defense ‘whose views are better aligned with yours,’ Mr. Mattis wrote”. This quote contains three different kinds of legitimization: personal authority, evaluation, and explanation. Personal authority comes from Mattis representing himself as a secretary of defense whose views did not align with the president, and who considers that the president has a right to a person in this position with aligning views. This is interesting, because it shows a clear conflict of views between the president, and one of his key advisors, effectively clashing their personal authorities. This also means that the quote contains an implicit element of evaluation – the president and the secretary of defense have differing views, which means that Mattis disagrees with the president’s decisions. Finally, an element of explanation is evident in the quote. It is clear that Mattis considers the president’s views to be unchangeable, similarly to his own, and thus their views are conflicting in a way that cannot be ignored. On its own, this quote simply reinforces that a person of high importance has a clear and irreparable disagreement with the president. However, when put into the context of the rest of the article, this quote’s purpose for legitimization comes into perspective. Much of the rest of the article is used to give a tale that combines elements of both moral and cautionary tales from van Leeuwen’s framework. The tale begins with explanations about 33 how Trump praised Mattis in the past, and continues on to explain how Trump was disappointed in how Mattis disagreed with him in various ways, which has lead to Mattis being ignored and pushed out. This tale ends with mentions about Mattis being praised by Republican lawmakers, and warnings about Trump’s administration being in chaos. Here, Mattis is clearly seen as the party with the most legitimacy, and he is “rewarded” with praise, while Trump is “punished” for his illegitimate actions by his administration being in chaos. After this tale, Trump is also indirectly scolded by the Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said in a statement that: (6) "We must also maintain a clear-eyed understanding of our friends and foes, and recognize that nations like Russia are among the latter." Two distinct instances of legitimization can be found here, as explanation is used to naturalize Russia as a “foe” to be fought against, while an evaluation is used to further create a sense that this “natural” knowledge should be “common” knowledge by saying that a “clear-eyed understanding” about this state of matters should be had, implying that Trump lacks such. After this, a second tale, this time a purely cautionary one, is told. This tale gives a narrative where Mattis, despite his significant contributions and willingness to look away from President Trump’s mistakes, was pushed out because of his disagreements with the President and because of him trying to stop some of these mistakes. This is further explained in the last part of the article: (7) “There was a perception that Mattis was unwilling to project sufficient American military power against Iran, which, until the Syria withdrawal, appeared to be an essential element of the president's strategy to roll back Iran's influence in the region,” said Mark Dubowitz, chief executive officer of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a supporter of the administration strategy. “For the president, the credible threat of the military force means it is therefore less likely that he has to use that power and get himself in a protracted Middle East war, like his predecessors. With his Syria withdrawal, which Mattis rightly opposed, he has severely undermined that credible threat.” This is an interesting part of the article because of how it attempts to delegitimize Trump by implying that his decision is counteracting his true intentions, and Mattis opposed the withdrawal because of this contradiction. This creates an analogy between Mattis and Trump, where Trump is seen as too incompetent to act correctly to further his own interests, while 34 Mattis is clearly evaluated to be right to oppose Trump’s decisions. The abstraction of “credible threat” is also important, as it allows Mr. Dubowitz to create an evaluation of Trump’s actions, where Trump is himself undermining his own intentions. In fact, Trump’s intentions are assumed through a definition, where “the president’s strategy” is equated with “projecting military power”. Meanwhile, Mattis is evaluated to project an image of being against this strategy, while later it is revealed that Mattis is actually working to further the strategy despite Trump’s actions working against it. The most notable thing about this article is the use of role model authority and both types of tales. This reflects the almost moralistic and heroic way Defense Secretary Mattis is framed, and shows a clear strategy of delegitimization through creating a figure of resistance from Mattis, who fought against what the article describes as an “unexpected series of events”. The decision is seen as so disastrous that the article even states that “Mattis rightly opposed” it, which is a very direct and moralistic turn of phrase from a newspaper article. 5.2.3 Lubold & Donati: “U.S. News: Next Troop Drawdown: Afghanistan”, 21st Dec. 2018 In this article, evaluation as a type of legitimization is particularly well represented, which can be seen from the very beginning sentence. In this first sentence, Trump’s decision to withdraw is evaluated to be “contested”, which seems to make clear the article’s attitude toward the decision. Interestingly, two different instances of evaluation later show two other nuances the article has toward Trump’s decision. These can both be found in a single sentence: (8) Taken together, the Syria withdrawal and the likely Afghan drawdown represent a dramatic shift in the U.S. approach to military engagement in hot spots around the world, reflecting Mr. Trump's aversion to long-running military entanglements with their high costs and American casualties. The first part of this quote uses both evaluation and authority of tradition to emphasize the exceptional suddenness of Trump’s decision, while the latter part seems to the contrary to legitimate Trump’s decision by mentioning his likely motivations, thus using explanation which is also evaluated to be ‘correct’ by mentioning the “high costs” and “American casualties”. However. the rushed nature of the decision is later emphasized more, for example through the following evaluation: 35 (9) The shifts may have proven too drastic for some in the administration. This is then followed by the next sentence, which further elaborates who has found the shift rushed: (10) Mr. Mattis's unexpected departure raises questions about whether Mr. Trump's plans will proceed as he directed. Here, both evaluation and definition are used to delegitimize Trump’s decision, as Mattis’s departure is considered “unexpected”, and because it is almost certainly a reaction to the decision to leave Syria, a clear sign of opposition, “Trump’s plans” are defined through this reaction. However, then the unexpectedness of the decision is seemingly undermined by the next sentence, where it is explained as a result of Trump’s campaign promises and his general approach to involvement overseas. After this, the article once again shifts perspective, as it explains that the move to withdraw was “widely opposed within the U.S. national security establishment”. Here, both expert authority and impersonal authority are used, as the “national security establishment” is likely to have quite a bit of experience, while also being deeply involved in decisions regarding involvement in conflicts. This shifting view of the decision by the article is very interesting, as it simultaneously legitimizes the decision, while also legitimizing opposition to it. This bipolarity ends in the next part of the article, where the article stops sympathizing with Trump, and instead makes it clear that the decision was rushed and comes from Trump’s impatience. This is clearly stated in the form of both an evaluation and explanation, as impatience both carries negative connotations and explains that it is innate to Trump to make such rushed decisions. More interesting is how Trump’s attempts to further his goals are treated: (11) The Pentagon over the last weekend fended off a push by Mr. Trump to start bringing troops home from Afghanistan starting in January, officials said. Here, the Pentagon’s impersonal and expert authority are threatened by an abstract “push”, which was equally abstractly “fended off”. This creates an image of a battle between Trump and the Pentagon, which is important when taken in the context of the rest of the article. Another important part of the article where “legitimate” impersonal authority is threatened is when the article states that: 36 (12) Mr. Trump's decision on Syria, like earlier foreign-policy decisions including his decision to leave the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, was made without a formal consultative process within his cabinet, officials and lawmakers said, cementing his inclination to make key national security decisions on his own or in small groups that include national security adviser John Bolton and a few others. He also apprised few international leaders of his intentions. This part of the article clearly criticizes Trump’s tendency to work outside of the formal processes, and an analogy between the earlier decision regarding the Iran nuclear agreement and the decision to leave Syria are compared as examples of Trump making illegitimate decisions because of this problematic tendency. From Trump’s small group of advisers, only Bolton is mentioned, which is clearly a sign that the article does not consider the group’s personal or expert authority large enough to warrant such a breach of impersonal authority as ignoring legitimate institutions. Finally, the seemingly smallest of Trump’s infractions is that he did not apprise most international leaders of the decisions beforehand. It is interesting that this seems to be almost an afterthought to the article, as such major decisions would have immense effects on the rest of the world, yet the article seems to treat this part of Trump’s behavior as relatively inconsequential. At the end of the article, some interesting examples of analogy and definition can be found. The first of these is when the choice to withdraw from Syria is defined through the Trump administration’s new national security strategy, making the decision seem more deliberate and “strategic” than it was before. At the same time, this new strategy is defined through an analogy, where competing superpowers, Russia and China, are compared to “terrorists or failed states”. This creates an interesting idea where the withdrawal is simply a symptom of a deliberate shift in strategy that was executed in a rush due to Trump’s impatience. However, then the article reminds the readers that the decision was unpopular both among Congress members and national security experts, and so uses personal and expert authority with authority of conformity to make sure that the reader is not too supporting of the decision. After this, the withdrawal from Syria is compared to a possible “drawdown” from Afghanistan, which is predicted to be “more deliberative because of the presence of treaty allies”. This is also a definition, as a “deliberative” drawdown is considered a better option compared to the rushed withdrawal Trump opted for in Syria. 37 Interesting about this article is a lack of instrumental rationalization which is otherwise abundant in other analyzed articles. This may be due to a lack of quoting of critics of the decision, which is a common means of legitimization for other articles. Another conspicuous feature is an abundance of uses of impersonal authority, which can be attributed to the several references to institutions opposing Trump or declining to comment on the decision. Last note about this article is its several uses of analogy to compare the rushed troop pullout from Syria to a potential withdrawal from Afghanistan, which is seen as practically inevitable. This predicted Afghanistan exit is imagined as a more ideal withdrawal, which means that it would not be as rushed or improperly prepared. 5.3 Washington Post Articles 5.3.1 Warrick & Mekhennet: “Still Able to Fight, Islamic State Begins A Bloody Resurgence”, 20th Dec. 2018 Warrick and Mekhennet’s article’s title begins by using an explanation, a type of legitimization that means defining an actor involved in an action, and using that to legitimate the action. In this case, the article states that the Islamic State is “still able to fight”. This is of course a direct challenge to Trump’s claim that the Islamic State is defeated, as the article later also points out. In this way, it is seen as natural to fight the Islamic State if they are not “defeated”, and the “defeat” of the Islamic State is seen as the conditionality of when withdrawal from Syria is natural. This type of legitimization naturalizes the notion that the Islamic State needs to be defeated, and only when it is defeated it is legitimate to leave the area. However, another instance of definition, this time combined with evaluation, is the following: “It’s premature to use words like defeat, because we know how hard it is to truly achieve that condition”. This quote’s attempts at legitimization are further enhanced by the explanation of its source, a former director of the U.S. government’s National Counterterrorism Center. This means that four different types of legitimization are being used at once: definition, to define the “enemy” as undefeated; evaluation, by considering Trump’s use of defeat as premature; personal authority, as the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center is assumedly capable of giving authoritative evaluations of the situation of the Islamic State due to his former position; and expert authority, as the person 38 quoted is giving his personal thoughts of the situation based on his personal knowledge and expertise. The start of this article’s main body uses a cautionary tale and a moral tale, an interesting way of illustrating the viewpoint of the article. In short, the article gives the first tale about Islamic State fighters making a surprisingly fierce attack that was then stopped by US warplanes, and a second tale about children killed by roadside bombs in Iraq. These tales are interesting because of how clearly they moralize the decision about withdrawing from Syria: a moral tale about how the United States can make a difference against the Islamic State contrasted against a cautionary tale about dead children is a completely blatant attempt at manipulating the readers’ emotions. In fact, the second tale about the children even clearly implies a comparison between Iraq, where the Islamic State was “declared defeated”, to Syria, where Trump had just made a similar declaration. An important instance of expert authority that gives further insight into how the category works can also be found from this article. The article quotes: “the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence assessments”, and this way of referring to the source is interesting from the perspective of legitimization. The officer in question is earlier stated to be a “senior Kurdish security official”, and the officer explains the actions and methods of Islamic State insurgents. In contrast to the thoughts from the Kurdish official, the article also quotes an Islamic State official to give the opposing side’s voice. This choice seems to be in service to the duty of journalism to remain neutral, but is also a method of delegitimization against Trump’s decision to withdraw. This is because the Islamic State official’s personal and expert authority are used to frame several of his statements as important and alarming. In particular, the official states that the Islamic State is preparing for “a new phase of battle”, and that they would “ultimately prevail”. However, the official is also portrayed as confused by Trump’s decision – he “doubts the U.S. forces would completely withdraw from the region” and says that the announcement “left even the terrorists perplexed”. Explanation is commonly used in this article too, as it is used to naturalize the predicted actions of the Islamic State. Explanations are paired with predictions, which shows an interesting way that the two categories are connected. In the text, this materialized as predictions based on the assumed characteristics of the Islamic State. There were also several 39 cautionary tales in the text, which were used to illustrate the ‘reality’ on the ground and how dangerous the situation in the conflict is. 5.3.2 Gearan & Dawsey: “Mattis’s Sway With the President Continues to Fade”, 20th Dec. 2018 The next article has two main ways of delegitimating Trump’s decision to pull out from Syria. Specifically, this article dismisses Trump’s decision from the point of view of expertise and institutional authority. For example, the quote “On Wednesday, it became clear Trump was brushing aside his defense secretary's advice” gives an excellent view of how expert authority and personal authority work together to delegitimate Trump’s actions. This utterance compares Trump with his defense secretary in a very overt manner, by comparing both their personal authority and expert authority. In terms of expert authority, the comparison is clear: Trump’s expertise in foreign policy is unknown, while he is brushing aside advise from his defense secretary, who is supposed to be the President’s main advisor in terms of foreign policy. Similarly, the article simply calls the President of the United States with his last name, while calling his defense secretary by the title. This simultaneously emphasizes the expertise of the defense secretary, while seemingly considering the defense secretary the institutionally more authorized person to make decisions like pulling out from a warzone. It is clear that the article considers the president, while being a democratically elected representative, not as institutionally authoritative in this subject as the defense secretary to that president. This comparison between Defense Secretary Mattis and President Trump continues with the way they are presented in the next part of the article: (13) Once considered among the most influential advisers to a president with no prior government or military experience, Mattis has been repeatedly overruled by Trump in recent months and left out of key discussions as the president pursues his own national security path. One specific part of great interest here is the way Trump is considered a “president with no prior government or military experience”. This is a clear type of delegitimating through the lack of expert authority, as Trump’s knowledge and skill in governing are questioned in deliberately. It is interesting that the delegitimating is both particular, with mention of Trump’s lack of military experience, but also general, with the mention of his lack of government experience. Here, not only is Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria 40 delegitimized, his position as a president is also considered illegitimate – a president lacking military experience is not very notable, but a president without government experience is extremely rare. This can be contrasted with a later part of the article, where the writer references “David Lapan, a former top military spokesman and aide to Kelly when Kelly was Trump’s first Homeland Security Chief”. Mr. Lapan said, according to the article, that “Trump has taken Mattis and the Pentagon by surprise several times”. The fact that a former official is clearly stating that Trump surprised his own Defense Secretary and the Pentagon, the highest military command of the United States, as has been seen, is significant. In addition, later the article states that officials from “both Cabinet departments” were also surprised, and Republican lawmakers were even “stunned and angry”. The implication here is that Trump’s actions are illegitimate because he has not only ignored the advise of his advisors, party, and the military, but also chosen to not notify them of his decision. In addition, Lapan cites several of Trump’s earlier, though more minor, decisions regarding the military, and then comments that the decision to withdraw from Syria was “a whole different level than some of those things”. This is a type of analogy, as Lapan is comparing Trump’s earlier bad decisions with the withdrawal, and moralizes the withdrawal as a bad decision in a completely different class. It is an interesting way of impressing upon the readers the scale of the mistake, as the article considers the decision. Here an analogy is not made between something positive and negative, but between a smaller negative and a larger negative action. The assumption here is that Trump’s actions are generally negative, at least when concerning military and defense, but the scale of this specific decision is surprising or exceptional and so the decision is more illegitimate. Another important aspect of how Trump is delegitimized is a cautionary tale about Mattis that occupies a large portion of the article’s middle portion. The cautionary tale creates a picture of a close relationship between the two men, who had lately become more distant. In particular, the story seems to imply that Trump has changed his mind, while Mattis has stayed loyal to the president. Later in the article, Lapan makes interesting statements relating to this. For example, he states that White House officials have to obey lawful orders or leave, but Mattis would ask whether there would be room to change the decision. This is a type of explanation, making it seem as if Mattis is an expert of changing Trump’s orders to a more felicitous state. While this seems to be taken as a positive, it is interesting to contrast it with how the article next references a White House official who says that Trump “often complains that if it were up to his military advisers, he would never bring troops home from anywhere”. 41 This statement includes both an explanation and an abstraction, as it implies that Trump’s military advisors are always against withdrawing, and refers to “bringing troops home from anywhere”, a rather vague wording that can be interpreted in many ways. Of course, the comparison between the two sides is clear: Trump sees Mattis and others like him as brakes for his wish to withdraw from conflicts, while Mattis sees his attempts at negotiating with Trump as trying to change poor decisions into better ones, even if only partly. The article even quotes Brett McGurk, a special envoy for the defeat of the Islamic Caliphate, who stated: (14) “It would be reckless if we were just to say, 'Well, the physical caliphate is defeated, so we can just leave now,'” McGurk said Dec. 11. “I think anyone who's looked at a conflict like this would agree with that." This is a clear analogy for Trump’s actions, as the quote uses authority of conformity to make its conclusions the only legitimate ones, and makes a clear statement on the legitimate action. This shows how from the article’s perspective, Trump’s decisions are illegitimate, meaning that Mattis’s attempts to change them are inferred to be legitimate. In general, this article used the most instances of personal authority, particularly to give more credibility to Defense Secretary Mattis against President Trump. The article clearly picks the side of Mattis to delegitimize Trump’s decisions, but also uses other experts to criticize the choice, leading to prodigious use of expert authority. Interestingly, authority of conformity was also used quite a bit to show a widespread dissatisfaction among experts and politicians with the withdrawal. 5.3.3 Ryan & Dawsey: “U.S. Troops Will Leave Syria Immediately, Officials Say U.S. to Quickly Pull Troops From Syria”, 20th Dec. 2018 In the third article from the Washington Post, a similar theme of Trump being delegitimized on the basis of him overruling experts and his appointed advisors continues. He is stated to have “defied warnings from his top advisers”, which is both a delegitimization through expert authority and abstraction, as the nature of these “warnings” is unknown, and a warning is quite clearly a moralizing word. Further abstraction follows in the next sentence, as the article states that “the move plunged U.S. allies into uncertainty”. Both of the aforementioned abstractions use very alarmist language, and delegitimize Trump’s decision based respectively on the uncertainty it is based on and on the uncertainty it creates. This uncertainty comes from 42 what the article states is: “The step is the latest twist in a years-long effort by two administrations to defeat the militants in Syria and end the country's long civil war”. This statement uses both abstraction and definition to delegitimize Trump’s decision. Of these, the abstraction comes from the way Trump’s decision is referred to: the “step” and the “latest twist” are two very vague ways the move can be described. Both of these imply that the action is only a continuation of the previous actions in Syria, and maybe only a prelude to further actions. Meanwhile, the actions of the administrations that have intervened in Syria are defined through clearly moralized actions that the article states are the intentions of the Trump and Obama administrations: defeating the militants and ending the civil war. This is, of course, where Trump’s instrumental rationalization is relevant – Trump’s administration sees the Islamic State as defeated. The article states this too, and uses a definition to emphasize that the Islamic State once “ruled a vast swath across Iraq and Syria”, comparing the organization’s current state to its previous state by saying that it was “all but defeated”. An interesting note about how this defeat is imagined is that the article states that “U.S. forces have been working in small numbers with local forces since 2015.” The previous sentence of the article talks about confusion the rapid departure of U.S. forces has generated, putting this sentence into an interesting context, as the confusion seems to be due to the fact that the forces are departing after such a long time, instead of the situation during which they are departing. In Ryan and Dawsey’s article, some interesting tendencies can further be observed. The most visible of these is the article’s perspective – much of the article looks at Trump’s decision to pull out of Syria through the lens of the past. This is consistent with the claim by Skog and Lundström (2022) that the historical and social context of moralizing action is significant. In particular, the article considers some past statements from various officials and experts, and through this gives context to Trump’s decision. An example of the use of the authority of tradition being used to this effect is how the article frames the US forces’ existence in Syria. As previously discussed, the article states that “U.S. forces have been working in small numbers with local forces since 2015”, and this statement creates an interesting argument for the illegitimacy of Trump’s withdrawal based on the authority of tradition when taken together with the sentence that precedes it: “Behind the scenes, the move generated confusion as military officials raced to outline plans for a rapid departure of the entire U.S. force of more than 2,000 troops”. 43 These two sentences are seemingly unrelated, as the first sentence talks about the confusion caused by the decision to pull out, while the next one suddenly shifts to discussing the long stay and relatively small size of the forces, but they are in reality connected. To explain this, the second sentence should be divided into two parts: “the U.S. forces have been working in small numbers with local forces” and “the U.S. forces have been in Syria since 2015”. The first statement emphasizes the relatively small size of the forces in Syria, and this can be considered in the light of an earlier statement in the article about how these forces have struggled with the Kurdish forces in eradicating the last Islamic State militants. This makes it possible that the statement is deflecting the danger inherent in staying in a warzone to the local forces, for example the Kurds. The second statement, meanwhile, when taken in the context of the earlier sentences, seems to indicate that the suddenness of the pullout, after the long time America has spent in Syria, has created considerable confusion. Using confusion is an interesting method of delegitimizing the decision, as it can be considered an abstraction because the word has a negative connotation related to chaos and lack of knowledge or understanding. Here, the implication is that the American military was given a command, after several years of maintaining a presence in Syria, that was seemingly so sudden and unexpected that it threw the organization into an infelicitous state where it had to rush into an unneeded action. This contentment by the American military to stay in Syria can also be seen in other places throughout the article. An example of this is the following part of the article: (15) The officials said Trump had startled his own aides earlier this year by saying U.S. forces would depart "very soon." Since then, Mattis, Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and others had repeatedly talked Trump out of ordering a swift exit, they said. This quote uses both expert and personal authority to emphasize the importance of the people who the article puts in opposition to Trump: he “startled” his own aides, and Mattis and Kelly had persuaded him out of his decision “repeatedly” before. The first type of legitimization that can be found in this article is abstraction, as “startling” his own aides is a vague and moralized way of referring to Trump choosing to withdraw from Syria. This, as before, implies that the sudden nature of Trump’s declaration to withdraw from Syria was the source of distress for his aides. In addition, as Mattis and Kelly had repeatedly talked Trump out of “a swift exit”, a type of definition can be found in this quote, as the decision to withdraw is contrasted with two important advisors constantly attempting to stop Trump from making the 44 decision. However, the article later points out that these attempts to change Trump’s mind were fruitless, and potentially even counterproductive: (16) “People have bought time, bought time for months,” the official said. But the president complained that his wishes were being slow-rolled and expressed skepticism about Pentagon arguments that the United States had a responsibility to keep the region safe. Here three important points can be made: the first quote uses the authorities of conformity and tradition to show that not only was Trump opposed by a multitude of people, these people were also actively acting to stop the decision to withdraw from being made – but the reason for “buying time” is absent. After all, if Trump wanted to pull out from Syria during his time as President, fulfilling his campaign promise, why would delaying this for some months make a difference? Instead, the article seems to naturalize the United States staying in Syria, and considers it a matter of fact that buying time, as people have for a long time done according to the quote, is the right thing to do. The second important part of this text is that the article acknowledges Trump’s perspective: buying time made Trump think that “his wishes were being slow-rolled”, which is an evaluation that legitimizes Trump’s decision. In particular, the way Trump’s decision was announced, through a Twitter post, makes much more sense if Trump thought that he was being stalled. This, of course, relates closely to the third, and most important, point, or how Trump thought about the conflict itself. It is quite interesting that the article gives this kind of insight into the motivations behind Trump’s decision, as it combines several different types of legitimization in a peculiar manner. To start with, Trump “expressed skepticism” about the Pentagon’s arguments, which is an evaluation from Trump’s point of view that attempts to negate the following delegitimization attempts. These delegitimization attempts are made through impersonal authority or expert authority, as the Pentagon is a high military authority, and through abstraction, as “keeping the region safe” is an abstract and vague mission statement. This vagueness can be found later in the article when Brett McGurk, the presidential envoy for the global anti-Islamic State coalition, was quoted from the week before Trump’s announcement to have said: (17) It's fair to say Americans will remain on the ground after the physical defeat of the caliphate, until we have the pieces in place to ensure that that defeat is enduring. 45 This quote shows two different kinds of attempts at creating illegitimacy for Trump’s decision, prediction and instrumental rationalization. The prediction aspect of the quote comes from how McGurk frames Americans remaining in Syria as a highly possible, almost certain eventuality. Of course, the quote also sets an instrumental rationalization for remaining in Syria – the enduring physical defeat of the caliphate. This quote is interesting because it uses an instrumental rationalization as a sort of goal for a prediction, as the prediction can be considered true as long as the instrumental rationalization is not fulfilled. This means that the legitimization for remaining in Syria resulting from this quote can last from the point when the statement was made until the instrumental rationalization is fulfilled. This indefiniteness of timescale can also be found in another interesting part of the article, where the article states that: (18) The opposition from Trump's senior advisers suggested that the withdrawal could possibly be slowed or abandoned. This statement gives an interesting insight into how definition can be used to contrast two separate actions in a way that gives them both a moralistic undertone and further assumed implications. In this case, the opposition from Trump’s senior advisors is contrasted with the withdrawal, and a conclusion that the latter would be slowed or abandoned is made from these past actions of these advisors. This statement both positions the opposition to Trump’s decision to be morally opposite of Trump, and creates an implication of the future actions of those opposed to Trump. This means that the quote can also be considered a prediction, which uses the idea that the Trump’s opposition is willing to delay withdrawal from Syria to an indefinite future as a way of legitimating Trump’s decision to withdraw quickly. The sentiment that Trump made the right choice, but on a wrong timescale, is a clear implication in this article. At its clearest, this can be seen in how the article discusses the reactions of lawmakers to the announcement. Senator Lindsey O. Graham is quoted as having been “completely blindsided”, and he criticizes the move as premature due to the threat of ISIS returning. He uses an abstraction, in the form of being “blindsided”, and a prediction, in the form of ISIS returning, to create a sense of the decision being rushed and premature. In addition, he explains the ISIS to have been “dealt a severe blow but not defeated” and mentions that it has certainly not been defeated in Afghanistan, which is an instrumental rationalization. This means that Senator Graham’s comments alone use four different types of legitimization to delegitimate Trump’s decision to withdraw. Meanwhile, Senator Rand Paul, 46 who is prefaced as “sharing the president’s distaste for foreign wars”, stated that he was: "happy to see a president who can declare victory and bring our troops out of a war. It's been a long time since that has happened." These two parts of the text illustrate clearly the article’s approach to legitimating Trump’s decision. The first quote uses explanation to demonstrate that both Senator Paul and President Trump share a “distaste for foreign wars”, which seems to be an insert from the writer of the article to demonstrate that it is in their nature to want to stop “foreign wars”, meaning that Trump’s decision is naturalized as simply something that he would do because of his convictions. While this first quote is simple in its intentions, the second quote is much more complex and exhibits several different types of legitimization. In particular, three types can be found: analogy, abstraction, and definition. Of these, definition is the most straightforward: declaring victory and bringing troops out of a war are clearly connected, even though these two things are not inherently the same. Bringing troops out of a war does not necessarily mean victory, and declaring victory does not always result in withdrawing from a conflict. These actions are also stated in an abstract way, as “declaring victory” and “bringing out troops out of a war” are not very descriptive statements, and they are used very deceptively to imply that the war in Syria is over and America has won. Finally, the last sentence of the article, “It’s been a long time since that has happened”, shows a clear component of analogy. It is comparing Trump’s choice to declare victory and bring troops home with other, earlier, Presidents’ choices regarding similar situations, and considers Trump’s actions better. In this article, expert authority was widely used to show internal opposition from within President Trump’s administration to the decision to withdraw from Syria. Importantly, this is paired with some use of authority of tradition, which is used to criticize the sudden change of policies from those of the previous administration. This conservative perspective emphasizes that the institutional resistance comes from a place of continuity, where the policies of an administration require significant preparation before they overturn the whole foreign policy of the country. The article overall positions President Trump against his advisors, taking the side of the advisors and heavily criticizing Trump’s neglect of their advice. 47 5.4 The New York Times Articles 5.4.1 David Sanger: “A Strategy of Retreat in Syria, With Echoes of Obama”, 20th Dec. 2018 Sanger’s article’s first example of legitimization comes from its title, where “retreat” from Syria is stated to have “echoes from Obama”. This instance of role model authority is particularly interesting, as it is clearly a delegitimating attempt trying to say: “Trump should not retreat from Syria because Obama would have done so”. This is an aspect of role model authority that can be considered negative role model authority – something should be done solely because someone else would have done that thing. This negative role model authority is later leveraged by the article, when the article seems to directly address Trump: (19) Mr. Trump’s view that American forces cannot alter the strategic balance in the Middle East, and should not be there, was fundamentally shared by his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama. It was Mr. Obama who, at almost the exact same moment in his presidency, announced the removal of America’s last troops in Iraq — fulfilling a campaign promise. Here, negative role model authority is used to show that despite his insistence on being different from Obama, is following the same patterns, something that Trump would quite likely find appalling. An aspect of the authority of tradition can also be found here, as the article creates a continuity between the preceding Obama administration and Trump’s administration. This part of the article also addresses the claim that Trump was simply fulfilling a campaign promise by comparing this to Obama’s decisions which were made on the same basis. This comparison between the Trump and Obama administrations is made clear later, when the article directly creates an analogy between Obama’s strategy and discussions within Trump’s White House. In fact, the article later quotes a former official, who explicitly states that the similarities on this issue between Obama and Trump would make both administrations uncomfortable. The article also explains that this is against the wishes of some Congress Republicans, who are described as “hawkish”. This is an instance of explanation, which makes the quality of “warmongering” essential to the character of those against the strategy used by both Obama and Trump, and particularly those who are against bringing American troops away from these warzones. In contrast, the article also quotes Senator Ben Sasse, who said that “top military leaders ‘have no idea where this weak decision 48 came from’.” This, combined with how the article later criticizes Trump: “American military power was never used effectively to back up a diplomatic strategy…” shows that the article considers a full withdrawal to be too weak a decision, while also being against the hawkish policies of some Republicans who were against Obama’s strategy. An example of definition combined with instrumental rationalization that is useful to discuss is how this article frames deployed forces as “key to stopping terrorists before they reach American shores and vital to maintaining the alliances that keep the world safe”. In fact, this phrase is also a part of a moral tale – these ideas are, according to the article, supposed to be “the lessons that many in the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies learned in the post-9/11 era”. The article seems to imply that Trump has taken the wrong teachings from this era, and continues to complain that Trump is more concerned with the Mexican border than “Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China”. Here, instrumental rationalization is used to delegitimize the decision to withdraw from Syria, as the article considers the decision to serve the wrong purposes. The article even directly states that the performing the withdrawal “is to ignore the lessons of the past two decades”, an abstraction that raises an interesting question: what exactly are these lessons? Earlier, the article states that “deployed forces are key to stopping terrorists before they reach American shores and vital to maintaining the alliances that keep the world safe”. Stopping terrorists is an instrumental rationalization and an abstraction, as it is a clearly desirable goal, but in practice a very abstract one. The second part of the article is also an instrumental rationalization, but also a definition, as the “alliances” that are maintained through deployment of troops “keep the world safe”. This creates the implication that withdrawing the troops would endanger the world through the destabilization of these alliances. This fear of destabilization of relationships can be found later in the article, too, as the article states that: (20) If there were any conditions, any effort by Mr. Trump to shape the outcome in one of the great humanitarian disasters of the modern age, White House officials said nothing about them on Wednesday — even to some of America’s closest allies, who were phoning around Washington trying to understand what was happening. First, an abstraction is used to state the severity of the situation, as what is happening is “one of the great humanitarian disasters of the modern age”, a statement that can be considered at least somewhat hyperbolic. Then, the baffling lack of effort from Trump “to shape the 49 outcome” is defined through the confusion of “some of America’s closest allies”. This creates the effect of making the decision to not continue the intervention in the “great humanitarian disaster” seem a destabilizing factor among those America considers its allies, which would assumedly be far more alarming for the average reader than a vague “humanitarian disaster”. Later, the article also connects the conflict in Syria to a wider context by quoting the United States special representative for Syria, who said that it had “become a great-power conflict”. That Trump does not want to contend the United States’ rivals in Syria is explained to be because he is “uninterested in the geopolitics”. Interestingly, earlier the article stated that Trump had always had a “contrarian’s view of American military power”. This article uses several interesting ways of legitimization, including role model authority and authority of tradition, to change perceptions of the decision to withdraw. These different categories can partially be connected to the more relaxed, almost conversational tone of the article, which therefore shows much more of the author’s voice. The use of two moral tales can also be attributed to this unique tone, but the heavy use of instrumental rationalization in the article is less clearly correlated. Perhaps this comes from the more openly political stance of the article, but it is beyond this study’s scope to ponder on the specific genre features of newspaper article types. 5.4.2 Megan Specia: “Winners and Losers in Trump’s Planned Troop Withdrawal From Syria”, 21st Dec. 2018 The next article has a unique style of presenting information, as the article is formatted into a list of “winners” and “losers” of Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria. This shows a clear intention to (de-)legitimate the decision, as framing the decision to benefit certain sides while being detrimental to the goals of another is an easy way of stating which groups should support the decision. This benefit-focus can be seen clearly in how instrumental rationalization is used by the article. For example, the article states that: (21) American troops entered Syria in 2015 as part of a coalition fighting the Islamic State, which had seized large swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq. In the three years since, the extremist group’s self-declared caliphate has crumbled. But the continuing lack of stability in both Syria and Iraq could provide fertile ground for the jihadists to retrench. 50 This quote has two instances of instrumental rationalization: it connects the American troops entering Syria with the extremist caliphate crumbling, and makes a prediction about the possibility of the jihadists returning, implying that the continued presence of American troops is necessary to keep ISIS from reappearing. This sentiment is repeated later in the article, as the article states that: (22) Though the militants retain just 1 percent of the territory they held at the height of power, this would remove a major military adversary in the region. Here, an interesting phenomenon can be observed, as an instrumental rationalization for Trump’s decision is seemingly negated by a counteracting instrumental rationalization. This is interesting, because it shows a sort of tiering of instrumental rationalizations, where the benefits of one decision are considered greater than those of another, and thus the greater benefits create greater legitimization. This, of course, does not necessarily mean delegitimization, as both decisions would have a certain amount of legitimacy, which makes this quote a special example where both decisions seem to have legitimacy, but one is seen as superior over the other. Another aspect of the instrumental focus of this article is how the article treats the “defeat” of the Islamic State as incomplete. The article views the destruction of the Islamic State as an indefinitely long struggle with the goal of the complete destruction of the extremists. This can be seen in, for example, how the words of Brett McGurk are discussed in the article: (23) During a State Department briefing on Dec. 11, Brett McGurk, Mr. Trump’s special envoy in the fight against the Islamic State, said the battle was not over. “The end of ISIS will be a much more long-term initiative,” Mr. McGurk said. “Nobody is declaring a mission accomplished.” These words are contrasted with Trump’s declaration that “we have won against ISIS”, a clear declaration of a mission accomplished. The way these two statements are contrasted is so clearly meant to create a moral comparison between the actions they suggest, that this can be considered an analogy, which is a type of legitimization. Analogies inherently carry moralizations, as comparisons always create the question of which is better. This can be seen in the article, as Trump’s declaration of mission accomplished is followed by a mention of the disagreement by experts, Trump’s own staff, and coalition partners. Meanwhile, McGurk’s statement is prefaced with the previously discussed insert that despite the poor state of the Islamic State, the removal of the United States military forces from the area would remove 51 one of their major adversaries. It is evident that McGurk’s statement is heavily supported compared to Trump’s declaration of victory, as proven by the context the statements are put in. This also increases the power of the legitimization of the analogy between these two actions – Trump’s actions are considered illegitimate, because they are based on a false perspective of the situation according to the article, while McGurk’s earlier statements are based on the correct perspective and explicitly deny the legitimacy of Trump’s actions in this specific situation. The situation, of course, seems to be very important for the delegitimization of Trump’s actions here, but this is simply an illusion of immediacy. In another part of the article, an interesting idea about the duration for the need for U.S. troops in Syria comes from Kurds, who have been the allies of the United States in the fight against the Islamic State. The Kurds are quoted to have stated that: (24) “The White House’s decision to withdraw from northern and eastern Syria will negatively affect the campaign against terrorism,” the group said. “The fight against terrorism is not over yet, and the final defeat of terrorism has not come yet.” Here, three instances of delegitimization of Trump’s decision can be found: an abstraction, an evaluation, and a definition. “The fight against terrorism” is a powerful image of an action, and clearly an abstraction meant to connect the fight against a specific “terrorist” group, ISIS, to a more general fight against the omnipresent danger of terrorism. However, as ISIS is not the only terrorist group, nor in a particularly powerful state at the time, as evidenced by the way it is mentioned in the article itself, it is interesting that the fight against it is considered by the Kurds a fight against terrorism in general. In addition, this statement contains an evaluation, as the fight against terrorism is not over yet, meaning that there is some definite end state where terrorism can be evaluated as “over”, and this naturalizes the fight against terrorism as an action with a definite goal. Finally, the quote itself is a definition – “the campaign against terrorism”, which is “negatively affected by the decision to withdraw”, is defined through the “final defeat of terrorism”. This creates the illusion that the completion of the campaign against ISIS would somehow lead to the “final defeat of terrorism”. This is of course a naturalization of the continuation of the fight against ISIS, as the “final defeat of terrorism” is obviously a lofty goal which seems incredibly attractive. Of course, logically, no such thing would come from the defeat of ISIS, as many other terrorist organizations exist in the Middle East alone. 52 Finally, the article’s list format’s unique qualities’ impact on the way the article uses legitimization should be acknowledged. The “winners” and “losers” are compared indirectly, and the implications on the legitimacy of Trump’s decision should be clear based on who are considered to be in each category. The Syrian Kurds, Israel, and civilians as a group are considered to be losers, while Iran, Russia, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Turkey, and the Islamic State are considered winners, and thus instrumental rationalizations about their victory from Trump’s decision are used to delegitimate the decision, and these are not particularly interesting to discuss. Instead, interesting is that the inclusion of civilians in the “losers” is a blatant attempt at playing the sympathies of the readers, while the Syrian Kurds and Israel are both further framed as “victims” of the situation. For example, the Syrian Kurds are considered in the article: (25) “Kurds and their allies have paid a very heavy price,” said Mutlu Civiroglu, a Washington-based Kurdish affairs analyst. “They have fought on the front line, and thousands of Kurdish men and women lost their lives fighting on behalf of the entire world.” The “paying a heavy price” and “fighting on behalf of the entire world” are abstractions which show a clear affinity for the Kurds, while these clearly moralized statements are quoted from an analyst. It is clear that the article quotes the analyst to add weight to the sacrifice of the Kurds. It is also notable that the article uses explanation to create a sense of valorous sacrifice of the Kurdish. Both men and women of the Kurds are seen as having sacrificed much to “fight on behalf of the entire world”. This kind of picture of valiant defenders of the world is reminiscent of war propaganda, and is a heavy attempt to delegitimate Trump’s decision to withdraw, which would leave the Kurds to fight on their own. Similarly, the article seems very concerned that Israel would be in danger if the United States left the area. The rise of Iranian influence in the area is even seen as “posing an existential threat to Israel”. This can be seen both as an instrumental rationalization – as Israel’s continued existence would be in America’s interest – and as an explanation, which simply assumes that Iran gaining power would threaten the entire existence of Israel, and so it is natural for America to maintain military power in Syria. 53 5.4.3 Neil MacFarquhar: “Glee in Russia Over Trump’s Foreign Policy Largess”, 23rd Dec. 2018 One of the most interesting things about this article is its use of Russia as a “winner” from Trump’s decision. In the title, the article states that Russia is gleeful over Trump’s decision, and this idea is visible in the rest of the article. The first sentence of the article explains the article’s perspective clearly: (26) A note of glee crept into Russian commentary and news coverage on Friday about the current turmoil in Washington around national security, with President Vladimir V. Putin seemingly checking off one item after another that he might have written on his wish list for Santa. There are two instances of legitimization that can be found in this quote, both instances of abstraction. The first is about the “turmoil around national security”, which is attempting to create a sense of uncertainty in the United States, while the second instance is about President Putin checking off items from his wish list for Santa. This is a very vivid way of describing the benefits Russia gains from Trump’s decisions, and thus clearly attempts to delegitimate the decision to leave Syria. This descriptive language can be found elsewhere in the article too, as Trump and his decisions are commented on by various experts. For example, a Russian expert is quoted saying “Trump is God’s gift that keeps on giving”, and a professor of international relations states in the article that: (27) Here, Trump has been eerily consistent in his willingness to adopt policies that enable Russia’s strategy while undermining ours. These quotes use abstraction to create different ways of delegitimizing Trump’s decisions through the same reason: Trump is being more beneficial to Russia than his own country. In the second quote, many other types of legitimization can also be found, as the quote is both extremely vague and very clearly against Trump; and definition, instrumental rationalization, evaluation, explanation, and the earlier mentioned abstraction can be found in this quote. Of these, instrumental rationalization and evaluation are quite visible, while definition compares the possibility of Trump adopting policies which benefit Russia to him adopting policies which benefit the U.S., the former of which are seen as the ones he has enacted in reality. Trump benefiting Russia over the United States is the main theme of this article, and the ways this article uses legitimization reflect this fact. In one instance, the article quotes a professor to reinforce the sense that Russia truly is benefiting: 54 (28) “Trump’s announcement that they are leaving Syria is a gift, of course,” said Valery D. Solovei, a political-science professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. In quote 28, an instrumental rationalization is used to delegitimize Trump’s decision, but the way this is framed is more interesting. This quote uses expert authority to clearly show how important and reliable the information is, but it also more subtly influences the reader by the small insert of “of course”. Here, naturalization can be seen occurring, as the fact that Trump’s decision benefits Russia is almost taken as an expected thing, something that happens all the time. Similarly, a Russian foreign affairs analyst is quoted as saying: (29) Trump implements Russia’s negative agenda by default, undermining the U.S.– led world order, U.S. alliances, U.S. credibility as a partner and an ally. All of this on his own. Russia can just relax and watch and root for Trump, which Putin does at every TV appearance. This part of the article gives an interesting insight into how explanation can be used to create negative legitimacy. Trump is described in this article as working more for Russia than for the United States, and most importantly this is naturalized as something that is innately Trump- like behavior. In quote 29, a cautionary tale can also be seen, as the quote seems to imply that as long as nothing is done, Trump’s actions will continue to benefit Russia over the U.S. This creates a tale where those who either support or stay neutral regarding Trump’s actions create a situation where the United States loses advantage over Russia, while those opposing him are trying to stop this. However, the article does acknowledge that Trump is unpredictable and thus potentially dangerous to even the Russian interests, and likely not directly under Russian control. Trump is evaluated by another expert to be acting “impulsively and erratically” – manners in which a president should obviously not act, but the same expert is quoted, as above noted, to state that Trump is “eerily consistent” in adopting policies that benefit Russia. However, the article then notes that: “Nevertheless, not everything is flowing in Moscow’s favor”. Then, the article gives reasons why the United States leaving Syria and especially Afghanistan can be unlucky for Russia. Then, later, the article states that: (30) The Russian government also continued to harbor reservations that what Mr. Trump says and what he does are not always the same thing — and are subject to reversal at the drop of a tweet. 55 This part of the article uses explanations to create a sense of unpredictability and inconsistency about Trump, and interestingly delegitimizes the way Trump uses Twitter in his role as the President. This is also an abstraction, and implies that Trump is capable of reversing the decision to withdraw from Syria, which would obviously be a quite difficult position for the U.S. government to be in. The article also considers that Trump may suddenly become a problem for Russia due to this unpredictability. The article postulates that Russia is concerned that Trump would suddenly change course, and states that: (31) For now, his decisions are tilting in Mr. Putin’s favor, but there is also concern that they also could move in the other direction with equal speed. A prediction and an explanation can be found here, as the article seems to both take for granted that Trump is an irrational actor capable of changing mind in an instant, while also seemingly predicting that this would eventually happen. This seems to be an attempt at creating an image of Trump as an unpredictable force of nature, rather than as a dangerous Russian asset. This image can be found in the last part of the article, where the formerly mentioned Russian analyst is again quoted, this time saying that Russia will tolerate a degree of Trump’s unpredictability, and ending the article by saying that: “In Trump we trust… to do the right thing”. This is a very interesting phrase, because it seems to be an allusion to In God we Trust, the official motto of the United States. Here an analogy is made – in many different way. One part of this analogy is how Trump seems to be compared to God in the way the quote is phrased. In the context of the article, the most likely reason this comparison could be made is to emphasize the stubborn unpredictability of Trump, as God is often characterized as mysterious and inevitable. Another part of the analogy is that Trump is trusted to do the right thing, which is can be seen as a plea to Trump himself, or a prayer that Trump in his unpredictability happens to stumble into doing the right thing. The phrase can also be interpreted as saying that, currently, instead of following the best interest of the United States, he is acting against them. 56 5.5 Summary To start, this part will quantify the findings of the study, after which the general analysis of the articles will be discussed. The categories of van Leeuwen’s framework will be discussed individually, and then each newspaper’s tendencies will be discussed. Van Leeuwen’s categories can be considered the most important framework for this study, so it is natural to start with explaining the findings through it, starting with some important statistics. First, there were in total 767 instances where attempts at legitimization were detected. Second, the most instances of all types of legitimization in total in an article was 112, while the least was 32. Third, the average amount of detected instances of legitimization in an article was 63,9. Finally, the average number of words in an article was 1133, the least number of words was 576, and the most was 1555, explaining some of the discrepancies in numbers between articles. The following tables show the number of each type of legitimization in each article and in total. 57 Table 2. Number of instances per article, part one. Article NYT: Sanger NYT: Specia NYT: MacFarquhar WP: Warrick WP: Gearan & Dawsey WP: Ryan & Dawsey Personal Authority 9 3 7 5 13 11 Expert Authority 6 7 7 14 23 23 Role Model Authority 4 0 1 0 0 0 Impersonal Authority 0 0 0 0 1 1 Authority of Tradition 2 0 0 0 0 2 Authority of Conformity 1 0 0 0 3 1 Evaluation 10 3 5 7 3 14 Abstraction 8 5 7 3 6 14 Analogy 3 1 1 0 3 4 Instrumental Rationalization 21 19 17 4 9 16 Definition 6 6 4 3 7 13 Explanation 8 7 8 18 5 5 Prediction 0 6 1 7 4 4 Moral Tale 2 1 0 1 0 2 Cautionary Tale 0 0 2 5 1 2 Total 80 58 60 67 78 112 58 Table 3. Number of instances per article, part two. Article UST: Hjelmgaard UST: Vanden Brook & Jackson UST: Jackson WSJ: Nissenbaum, Youssef & Salama WSJ: Youssef & Ballhaus WSJ: Lubold & Donati Personal Authority 0 5 4 11 5 4 Expert Authority 2 12 3 8 6 9 Role Model Authority 0 1 0 1 2 0 Impersonal Authority 0 4 2 3 1 6 Authority of Tradition 1 0 1 1 1 1 Authority of Conformity 0 1 3 2 0 1 Evaluation 3 4 6 6 8 9 Abstraction 3 14 5 11 5 3 Analogy 0 1 1 3 2 4 Instrumental Rationalization 13 11 6 11 10 1 Definition 3 4 5 3 2 3 Explanation 5 2 8 3 7 5 Prediction 1 5 5 4 1 1 Moral Tale 0 0 0 0 1 0 Cautionary Tale 1 0 0 0 2 0 Total 32 64 49 67 53 47 59 Table 4. Total number of instances per category. Article Total Summary Personal Authority 77 Expert Authority 120 Role Model Authority 9 Impersonal Authority 18 Authority of Tradition 9 Authority of Conformity 12 Evaluation 78 Abstraction 84 Analogy 23 Instrumental Rationalization 138 Definition 59 Explanation 81 Prediction 39 Moral Tale 7 Cautionary Tale 13 Total 767 Next, some important findings from this study will be reported, and then discussed. To begin with, an important peculiarity is the particularly high amount of instances of expert authority (120) and instrumental rationalization (138) compared to the other categories. The high amount of these types of legitimization is not surprising, as newspapers often use quotes from experts and people with assumed expertise in the subject under scrutiny in the article, and any background information on a conflict will inevitably mention the material and political conditions that have caused or contribute to the continuation of a conflict. In contrast, instances of role model authority (9), the authority of tradition (9), the authority of conformity (12), cautionary tales (13), impersonal authority (18), and analogy (23), were particularly few. It is interesting to note that so many categories had few instances of them, though still having at least some, while a couple categories had comparatively many instances. To conclude this overview of the categories, prediction (39), definition (59), personal authority (77), evaluation (78), explanation (81), and abstraction (84) were categories with an amount of instances that was not particularly high nor low. Next, each category of van Leeuwen’s framework will be 60 discussed individually. The following questions will be answered for each of these categories: how instances of the category distributed across the articles and newspapers; how did the category typically materialize in text; and how instances of the category aided in legitimating or delegitimating Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria. Individual important or interesting notes about each category will also be discussed. In van Leeuwen’s framework, legitimization by authority is divided into several subcategories, the first of which is personal authority. Personal authority comes from a person’s position in an institution with social or political importance, and such authority compels others to listen to that person’s word in matters relating to the institution the person represents. In terms of this study, a simple example is Donald Trump’s position as the President of the United States of America. This position represents the executive branch of the United States’ government, and as an elected position, the president is the symbolic representative of the American people. This means that the president is both the literal head of multiple important US political institutions, such as the army and the White House administration, and the representative of the institution of the American presidency, a position that can be considered as the highest representative leadership of the American people. Interestingly, Trump’s authority as the President was rarely used to legitimate his decision. Instead, his opponents’ and defenders’ positions, generally as elected representatives of the Congress or the Senate, or in the military or the White House administration, were very commonly used to both legitimate and delegitimate the withdrawal. This type of legitimization was used particularly often by the Washington Post, from which the article with most instances of this category was found, with 13 instances in article “Mattis's sway with the president continues to fade”. The other two Washington Post articles had 5 and 11 instances of this category. This can be explained by the article with the least instances of personal authority being an explanation of the situation leading to the announcement of withdrawal, with very few quotes, uncharacteristically for a news article. Another article with a similar theme was “Syria conflict explained: How did we end up here?” by USA Today, and this article had zero instances of personal authority used for legitimization. Interestingly, the article uses the title of President for Trump, but as the article in the next sentence also uses the title of President for Bashar Assad, the “enemy” in Syria, this cannot be considered an attempt at using personal authority. In general, the number of instances of personal authority used for legitimization varied between 3 and 10 in the articles examined, with only three being above this, and the aforementioned one having zero instances. This distribution can be explained by 61 the genre of newspaper articles being reliant on quotations, particularly from people of importance. Personal authority, in conclusion, was mostly used to delegitimate or legitimate Trump’s decision through increasing the weight of the statements from the quoted important people or by contrasting Trump’s rationales with those of his opponents in high positions within either the civil or military administration. Expert authority, unlike personal authority, is not tied to an institution, but to the presumed experience and knowledge of an individual. This means that, for news, it is particularly important how a person whose opinion is added into the article is referred to or what their expertise is portrayed as. There were 120 cases where expert authority was used as the method of legitimization, making this the second most common category. Expert authority was often used in articles to increase the credibility of other methods of legitimization, or to make the impact of legitimization greater. For example, quoting military officials and experts was common, as their statements can be considered more reliable, and impactful, than those of, for example, lawmakers’ or Trump’s statements. Expert authority was more commonly used to delegitimize Trump’s decision, as many of the articles emphasized the opposition Trump had from military officials and experts, as well as officials within his own administration. An interesting pattern that can be observed with these instances of expert authority is that the Washington Post had far more of them than any of the other newspapers. Both New York Times and Wall Street Journal had between 6 and 9 instances in each of their articles, while USA Today had two articles with far fewer, 2 and 3 instances, and one of the USA Today articles had 12 instances. In comparison, the Washington Post had an article with 14 instances, and two with 23. This reflects an interesting difference in perspective, as the Washington Post articles chose to object to Trump’s decision from a more purely strategic standpoint, while the other newspapers chose less military strategy-oriented objections to the withdrawal. In particular, USA Today’s objections to the decision were oriented toward the negative political consequences of the decision, and the history of the decision. In the case of role model authority, no article had more than 4 instances of this type of legitimization. In fact, several of the articles examined had no instances of role model authority being used. This is to be expected from journalistic articles, as the way role model authority works, to demand legitimacy on the basis of a person’s personal fame or reputation, seems to be counter to the journalistic principles of neutrality and informativeness. Of interest is that in most of the instances of role model authority Trump’s actions were compared to those of Barack Obama. This way of using role model authority is quite special, as Obama 62 can be considered a very politically divisive personality in American politics, as can also be seen from how the articles compared him to Trump, using him as a sort of example of a person Trump does not like, and so whose example he should not follow. This can perhaps be considered a form of delegitimization through use of negative role model authority. Another person who was also often brought up was defense secretary Jim Mattis, whose resignment seemingly seen as a sign of Trump losing the confidence of a “military figure considered a stalwart of national security” (Youssef and Ballhaus, 2018). In fact, in many cases Mattis’s decision to resign was immediately followed with very positive appraisals of his career and character, making it clear that the articles supported his choice to resign over Trump’s decision to withdraw. Attempts at using impersonal authority for legitimization were found in limited numbers across the articles examined, and only in half of the articles. One article from Wall Street Journal, “U.S. News: Next Troop Drawdown: Afghanistan”, had six instances of impersonal authority, while all other articles with instances of this type of legitimization had four or less cases where it was used. An institution that was often mentioned was the Pentagon, referring to the high military leadership of the United States. This is related to the fact that Trump did not consult the military commanders in charge of the situation in Syria when making his decision, thus effectively undercutting the proper institutional authority of the military. Similarly, Trump seemingly failed to consult his own administration, and this was also mentioned often to delegitimate the decision-making process that arrived at the withdrawal. This lack of consultation is delegitimizing especially due to the fact that President Trump’s administration was already clearly in disarray, with a divide between Trump and Mattis in opinions about the withdrawal. The authority of tradition is an interesting category for this study because it does not seem immediately applicable to Trump’s decision to withdraw beyond a claim that the reason to stay in Syria would be simply because of earlier commitments to stay in Syria. However, seven of the articles studied had at least one instance of this type of legitimization, two of the articles had two instances, but none had more than that. The distribution of this category is fascinating, as only five articles had zero instances of the authority of tradition, and each newspaper had at least one article with at least one instance of this category. This category generally materialized in two different ways: as reminders of earlier actions, mostly of the previous administration; and as reminders of earlier commitments either for or against the decision of various parties, including Trump’s campaign promises. The former of these were 63 generally used to criticize Trump’s abandonment of pre-existing attachments to the area, while the latter were used to defend Trump’s decision as a natural conclusion from the promises he had made earlier, making the choice consistent with Trump’s promises. Most cases of authority of conformity from the articles analyzed emphasize the bipartite opposition to Trump’s decision, and particularly Wall Street Journal and USA Today mentioned the concerns of both parties about the decision. As both Democrats and Republicans are emphasized to be against the decision, opposition to the decision can be seen as something both political sides are supposed to do. This example is also a case where the lines between different types of legitimization blur, as Republican and Democrat representatives are holders of personal authority. While Wall Street Journal and USA Today emphasized the bipartite opposition, New York Times only once mentioned that Trump had “a contrarian’s view of American military power” (Sanger 2018), and the Washington Post chose to focus on the internal opposition within the President’s advisors and supporters. The most cases of authority of conformity found in an article was three, found in two different articles, while seven articles had any instances at all. Evaluation, a subcategory of moral evaluation, had 78 instances in the analyzed material. The amount of these instances in each article varied from 14 to 3, with an average of 6,5 instances per article. The number of cases varied greatly across all newspapers, and seemed to correlate more with how explicitly informal or opinionated an article was. This category is generally the clearest in its attempts of legitimization, and this comes across in the articles. Particularly obvious were instances of evaluation where the decision itself was evaluated either negatively or positively, or as correct or incorrect. Evaluations of the decision’s abruptness and controversiality were also common, as these factors strongly affect the legitimacy of any political decision. Although few things in politics are uncontroversial, significant dissenting opinions among one’s own party are particularly condemning for a decision of national importance. Similarly, well-deliberated political decisions are often considered more desirable than those which are seen as either rushed or impulsive, and this was clearly one complaint about the process behind the decision. Abstraction, another subcategory of moral evaluation, means using abstract phrasing to refer to an action to change the discourse it is associated with. For example, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders’s statement that was quoted in multiple articles stated that “We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this 64 campaign” (Brook and Jackson, 2018). This statement disconnects the action of withdrawing the troops from the discourse of defeat or disgraceful withdrawal, and connects the action to the discourse of a planned military operation. There were 84 cases of abstraction, ranging from three to fourteen in the articles studied, with a fairly even distribution across the newspapers. The variation in this category happened mostly across individual articles, with two articles reaching 14 cases, and three articles having only four. Interestingly, the articles with 14 instances were from different newspapers, Washington Post and USA Today, and all of the articles with four instances were also from different papers. An interesting commonality between the articles with 14 instances was that both extensively commented on and quoted the comments from Trump, his administration, or his political supporters or opponents. From this, a correlation between the use of “political language” in the articles and the number of abstractions can be found. The final subcategory of moral evaluation, analogies, is based on comparing an action with another action directly. An example of such a comparison is the statement that: “A small number of American service members have died in Syria, far fewer than in some in other recent wars.” (Ryan and Dawsey, 2018). This analogy compares the deaths of American soldiers in Syria directly to their deaths in other recent wars, and so clearly gives an opinion about the necessity of the withdrawal. Of course, this kind of legitimization has the assumption that Americans are willing to tolerate casualties as long as they are not as large as in other recent wars. Analogies were often used in the articles studied to connect the actions of Trump to the actions of the previous administrations, or to those of participants in other historical conflicts, for example the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. This means that the perceived failures or successes of those earlier examples were also connected to Trump’s decision, creating either legitimacy or illegitimacy to the choice to withdraw. The most cases found in an article was four, and two articles had no cases of analogy, so this was not a particularly popular method of legitimization. This is not a surprise, as there are relatively few earlier events that Trump’s decision could be compared to due to the complexity and importance of withdrawal from a warzone. Instrumental Rationalization is the first subcategory of rationalization, and it uses the goals of an action to legitimate said action. The reason for using this type of legitimization is also straightforward, as decisions which are seen as beneficial to a goal that the reader agrees with are also considered more legitimate by those readers. Since defeating the Islamic State, or, more broadly, defeating terrorists, is a goal that most people would agree with, it is quite 65 beneficial for those advocating for staying in Syria to mention that their position would further that goal. It is likely because of the intuitive and simple nature of instrumental rationalization that it was very commonly used, as 138 instances of this category were found in the articles studied. The most cases in a single article was 21, while the least was one, although the second least was four. In particular, the New York Times was very fond of using this type of legitimization, with their articles having 17, 19, and 21 cases. This can be explained by two of the articles clearly being written from the perspective of who received the most benefits from this decision, while the article with the most cases of this category was the most clearly against Trump’s decision, and so used the reasons for why U.S. armed forces were in Syria to delegitimate his choice. Theoretical rationalization, unlike instrumental rationalization, relies on abstract “truths”, or things that are generally considered to be true because they are such in the societal consciousness. Theoretical rationalization can further be divided into definition, explanation, and prediction. In order to be precise, definition as a subcategory will be examined next, followed by the other subcategories of theoretical rationalization. Definition means defining an action in terms of another, moralized, action. There were 59 examples of this type of legitimization in the articles analyzed, with most in an article being 13, and the least being 2. The second most cases in an article was 7, so the article with 13 cases in an outlier. This particular article talks about the background of the decision, and the actions that lead to it. This shows that the definitions used are mostly about judging the decision to withdraw when considered in the context of the opposition it has received and how the decision was rushed. Similar ways of using definition are also found in other articles. Explanation, or the act of defining an actor involved in an action, was found in 81 instances from the studied articles. In one article, 18 instances were found, but other articles had between eight and two instances. The reason for the article with significantly more instances of this type of legitimization can be found in the nature of explanation, and in the theme of the article. Explanation uses the innate attributes of an actor to legitimate or delegitimate their actions, for example by arguing that it is in the nature of said actor to do the action, making it thus natural and essential to the being of that actor. By naturalizing an action in this way, it becomes legitimate, and something to be expected from the actor. The article with an exceptionally high amount of this category considered the implications of the withdrawal on the main beneficiary of Trump’s action, and the target of the actions Trump canceled by making his decision, ISIS. Here, another aspect of this category of legitimization becomes 66 clear: the actor need not be the only one whose actions are explained, as the target of the action can also be used to naturalize an action through this category. To clarify this with an example, by explaining ISIS to be growing, the article legitimates actions taken against the group, since it is assumed that it is in the nature of ISIS to be a threat to the United States. Prediction is, as its name implies, a type of legitimization based on making predictions of the consequences of an action. Prediction is based on expertise, not authority, so it can also be denied by contrary experience. This was visible in the analyzed articles, as predictions supporting and opposing Trump were both discussed. The number of predictions in the articles ranged between seven and one, with only one article having zero instances. The total number of instances of this category was 39, meaning that the number of times prediction was used was neither particularly high nor low compared to the other categories studied. Predictions were generally made about the consequences of the decision to withdraw, and particularly often were concerned about the resurgence of ISIS and the weakening strength of U.S. allies in the region. This meant that legitimization was mostly done on the basis of what would happen to the opponents and allies in the area. Interestingly, this way of using predictions for legitimating or delegitimating was mostly contingent on whether the article considered Trump’s declaration of the defeat of ISIS true. Moral and cautionary tales are a specific type of legitimization that rely respectively on rewarding those “who engage in legitimate social practices” and on punishing those who “do not conform to the norms of social practices” (van Leeuwen 2008, 117-118). Moral tales were found in five articles, while cautionary tales were found in six. In total, there were seven cases of moral tales, with only one article having two instead of one, and 13 of cautionary tales, with one article having five and one two cases, and the others having a single case. For moral tales, the only article with two cases can be inferred to have multiple because it explicitly used the example of how learning from previous mistakes had been beneficial to the United States in the past, both in the post-9/11 era, and when Trump acted differently from Obama in the issue of chemical weapons in Syria. Meanwhile, cautionary tales were often used to compare the shortcomings of the previous administrations’ policies to Trump’s policy of withdrawal. It is interesting that the point of comparison in both cases is how Trump could learn from previous mistakes, but instead has chosen to redo them. Another means of interest of how tales were used was the case of Mattis, whose rise and fall was implicitly told as a tale with a lesson about the duplicity of Trump by Wall Street Journal article of Youssef and Ballhaus (2018). 67 To finalize this overview of the findings of this study, the results of the analysis will be briefly summarized, and the research questions posed by this paper will be answered. A summary of the analysis conducted for this paper is necessary to answer the research questions of this study, so this will be presented first. This article studied twelve articles, three each from four different newspapers, relating to former President Donald Trump’s announcement of withdrawal from Syria. These articles were analyzed utilizing van Leeuwen’s Categorization of Legitimacy with the goal of finding out how legitimization and delegitimization were used in these articles to support or oppose the withdrawal from Syria. The distribution of the cases of legitimization between each category of van Leeuwen’s framework is a natural starting point for summarizing the findings of the analysis. Instrumental rationalizations and expert authority were the most prevalent categories identified, and this is a finding that shows both the political aspects of newspaper discourse and how it relies on loaning the authority of experts to reinforce the legitimacy of the information relayed. In addition, as the subject itself is in the field of political discourse, the aspect of goal-seeking and instrumental thinking seems to bleed in to the discourse utilized by the articles. The instrumental benefits of defeating the Islamic State and predictions of who would receive benefits from the decision were particularly discussed. Expert authority, however, was used quite differently, as it was mostly used to amplify the effects of other types of legitimization. This can be inferred to be the consequence of how newspapers tend to use expert opinions to validate the messaging of their articles, perhaps even unconsciously simultaneously also making the political biased within more effective. Aspects of newspaper articles as a genre also explains much of why certain types of legitimization were rarely used, often due to a need to appear neutral or formal. As Steffek (2023, 225) notes, informality in itself is a form of legitimacy, as it denotes a certain kind of lack of social distance. Lesser used categories are easiest to explain through exceptions, articles that were different from the general template. For example, in article “President Trump Defends Pulling U.S. Troops Out of Syria After Bipartisan Backlash”, due to its outwardly opinionated and informal perspective, had a significant number of explanations and predictions, which were also clearly connected in terms of meanings, as explanations were used to justify the predictions (Jackson 2018). For example, explaining that the Islamic State is naturally a threat to the United States can be used to predict dire consequences if the Trump administration leaves them to grow in power. Similarly moral and cautionary tales, which were both used to indicate the importance of learning from the mistakes of previous 68 administrations, were rarely used because they do not seem to fit the short form of a newspaper article very well. Role model authority was often used to make comparisons to the previous Obama administration as well, and authority of tradition appealed to previous commitments by the earlier administrations. Similarly, analogies were used to connect President Trump’s decision to other, earlier wars and actions of previous administrations. These types of legitimization clearly had a historical dimension to them, and relied on the reader’s knowledge about these historical actions and events. There were several types of legitimization that were connected to the context surrounding the process of decision-making through which Trump arrived at his choice of plan. These are an example of the fact that the context of moralizing discourse is vital (Skog and Lundström 2022). Impersonal authority was especially connected to references to various institutions President Trump failed to consult, while definition was used to emphasize the opposition to the decision and its rushed process. Similarly, authority of conformity was used to highlight the bipartite opposition to the withdrawal, which painted a picture of Trump being rogue against his own supporters. There were also three categories that were correlated with factors within the language of the article: personal authority, evaluation, and abstraction. Personal authority was connected to the number of quotes, as it was used to enhance the messaging done through those quotations. A similar role was served by abstractions, which were used both to comment on said quotes and within quotes which used vagueness as a tool, one which is often denied from newspaper articles otherwise due to the demand for precise informativeness within journalism. Finally, evaluation was clearly correlated with degrees of informality and explicit opinions allowed within an article. The analyzed articles, even ones that were not explicit with their perspective, were almost unanimously against the withdrawal from Syria, using delegitimization to make the decision seem rushed and poorly planned. There were some isolated points where the decision was legitimized, but these were usually either immediately delegitimized themselves through various strategies or buried under several other delegitimizing factors. The methods of delegitimizations varied widely, with instrumental rationalization and expert authority being most common. This is consistent with the characteristics of journalistic and political genres’ features, and gives a good starting point for further studies about the use and legitimization in journalism. A common strategy was that the choice of whether to withdraw from Syria was often framed in terms of concrete benefits or negatives, and these conclusions were then reinforced through the opinions of various experts, institutions, and other political actors. It is 69 interesting that most efforts by the newspapers were spent on delegitimizing President Trump’s choice of pulling out, but very few alternative options were considered. Another important note is that there was a clear focus on the process of decision-making utilized in arriving at this decision, and the consequences were mostly framed in terms of history or instrumental factors, with little focus on the specifics of the withdrawal. To conclude, the decision of withdrawing was thoroughly delegitimized in the studied articles by appealing to various instrumental factors and expert opinions. The personal authority of various political actors weighing in on the decision was also a key strategy of delegitimization. In addition, various types of moral evaluation and rationalization were used to a lesser degree, and mythopoesis was practically absent with some rare exceptions from the studied articles. Next, the significance of the findings will be discussed, further possible research topics will be proposed, and the concluding remarks will be given. 70 6 Discussion and Conclusions In this part, the study will be discussed further, and the general findings will be considered and explained. Finally, concluding remarks will be given. From the analysis performed for this study, a clear trend for certain types of legitimization being used in the type of material studied was revealed. In particular, expert authority and instrumental rationalization were very common compared to other categories. This outcome was expected due to the characteristics of newspaper discourse, which relies heavily on quotations from experts to increase the legitimacy of the information it conveys. Having an expert quote is a simple way for a newspaper to borrow legitimacy for its reporting, but it also serves the secondary purpose of legitimizing the perspective of the particular news article. Newspapers often also purport to be objective, while carrying inherent ideological values in their reporting, which are given legitimacy by expert opinions. The political nature can additionally be considered the reason for the commonality of instrumental rationalizations, as these are often seemingly objective goals which are justified through ideological means. Instrumental rationalizations also fit the political character of the subject, as political decisions are always justified through their end goals. The prevalence of these two categories is therefore not surprising, and their associated methods of legitimizing predictable. An interesting finding is that expert authority and personal authority were the only forms of authorization commonly used. This can be inferred to be due to the fact that they were the types of authorization that were most closely used with quotations. Since both people in important institutional roles and experts were often quoted by articles, it was quite certainly the factor that caused these two categories to be so widely used. Other forms of authorization were for various reasons rarely used, most likely due to the fact that journalism is supposed to not be influenced by authority, and it itself is a source of legitimacy. However, the prevalence of expert authority and personal authority, two forms of authorization that may be quite difficult to detect without deeper inspection, shows this to be a mere illusion of independence. The illusion of neutrality is another commonly attributed to quality journalism, but it too is undermined by the fact that moral evaluations were commonly used to delegitimize President Trump’s decision. Both evaluation and abstraction were fairly common, and there were several instances of analogy, signifying an interesting tendency to delegitimize the withdrawal through either direct evaluations of it or by detaching it from its own context and attaching it to another, differently moralized one. 71 Besides instrumental rationalization, which was already discussed, other forms of rationalization were also represented in medium quantities. Both the definition of actions and explanation of actors were quite common, and this reveals a tendency of treating various actors and actions as given within journalistic discourse. Predictions were also, quite simply, used to illustrate the potential consequences of what Trump had decided. These methods of delegitimization were quite simple in how they were used and what they revealed. Categories related to mythopoesis were, finally, used to make connections between the actions of previous presidents and those of Trump, as well as to legitimize his opposition in the form of Secretary of Defense Mattis, who was given a heroic role in tales. Overall, a clear correlation between expert authority and quotations was found in the study. This is not an unexpected finding, as experts are commonly used in newspaper discourse to give credibility to certain points of view. Instrumental rationalization was found to be a common category of delegitimization, and this can be attributed to the goal-seeking nature of political discourse. A link between predictions and explanations was found, as these were commonly used together, with explanation-related assumptions giving the basis to predictions. This is problematic because it naturalizes the essentialization of actors, which can be a dangerous direction for journalism to take. The prevalence of evaluations and abstractions, two forms of moral evaluation, gives rise to questions relating to the neutrality of press, as these were often used to delegitimize President Trump’s choice in difficult to detect ways. Finally, the findings of the study will be summarized, and further implications to the study of legitimization will be discussed. This paper has studied the use of legitimization in newspaper discourse about President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria. The method used to study this has been van Leeuwen’s categorization of legitimization, which has allowed the study of which categories of legitimization the newspapers studied have used for creating, denying, or changing a (de)legitimization discourse. The material studied was twelve articles taken from four different newspapers, three from each, and these were manually inspected for different types of legitimization instances. After analyzing the results of the study, the findings are interesting. In particular, the high amount of references to expert authority and instrumental rationality, while expected in journalism, are important to acknowledge as means of not only increasing the legitimacy of the article, but also of the discourse the article takes a stance on. The low usage of other types of legitimization is also important to note, as while these types of legitimization were not common, there were still instances where they could be 72 found. This gives some indication to how the types of legitimization used in journalism are much wider than may be commonly thought. Interesting is also the almost unanimous delegitimization of President Trump’s choice to withdraw, revealing that the potential various biases of authors and newspapers are relatively easily forgotten when a large shock such as the pullout surprises journalists. The findings of this study give a preliminary idea of how legitimization as a discourse phenomenon materializes in newspaper articles. The findings are necessarily limited in generalizability by the small sample size of articles and the partially subjective nature of the used method. However, the results do have use as a general signpost for future studies, as they reveal important trends. In particular, future studies could focus further on the connection between expert authority and newspaper quotations. This connection seems to be significant for the entire genre of newspaper articles, and could reveal deeper biases and methods of legitimization that can affect how newspaper discourse is constituted. Another significant correlation is between predictions and explanations. This relationship shows a worrying tendency of newspapers to treat various actors as essentialized to base politically motivated predictions off their assumed future actions. There is a need for more research on this relationship and its implications. Finally, van Leeuwen’s framework on which this study is based on has proven quite useful for studying legitimization in journalistic discourse. However, some notes must be made about this framework. There are problems with the somewhat vague nature of some categories, particularly within mythopoesis, and distinguishing between various types of authority can be somewhat difficult. However, these minor problems do not detract from the fact that van Leeuwen’s framework has proven a useful, and relatively comprehensible, means of categorizing legitimizations. 73 Bibliography Primary Sources Brook, Tom Vanden and David Jackson. 19 December 2018. “Trump Orders US Troops Out of Syria, Declares Victory Over ISIS; Senators Slam Action As Mistake.” USA Today. Gearan, Anne and Josh Dawsey. 20 December 2018. “Mattis’s Sway With the President Continues to Fade.” The Washington Post. 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Tiivistelmä Presidenttikautenaan Donald Trump teki useita kiistanalaisia päätöksiä, mutta erityisesti päätös poistua Syyriasta sisällissodan vielä siellä riehuessa sai paljon kritiikkiä sekä Republikaanipuolueesta että Demokraateilta. Tämä tutkimus on kiinnostunut siitä, miten yhdysvaltalaiset sanomalehdet käyttivät legitimaatiota keinona vaikuttaakseen yleiseen mielipiteeseen. Legitimaation tutkimisen perusteena tässä tutkimuksessa käytetään van Leeuwenin legitimaation kategorioita. Niiden avulla tämä tutkimus pyrkii ensin löytämään ja sitten kategorisoimaan kahdestatoista valitusta artikkelista legitimaation keinoja. Kun tämä prosessi on tehty, tutkimus analysoi sitä, miten eri kategoriat jakautuivat sanomalehtien ja artikkelien välillä. Tämän jälkeen analyysistä pyritään löytämään johtopäätöksiä, jotka voivat olla kiinnostavia nykyisen tietämyksen kannalta. Tämän tutkimuksen kysymyksiä ovat siis: 1. Minkälaista legitimoinnin diskurssia artikkelit käyttivät Trumpin perääntymispäätöksen legitimoinniksi tai epälegitimoinniksi? 2. Miten eri sanomalehtien legitimointistrategiat erosivat toisistaan, jos mitenkään? Näiden kysymysten tarkastelemiseen tarvitaan ensin katsaus teoriaan, johon tämä tutkimus perustuu. Ensin tarkastellaan laajemmin diskurssia ja puhetekoja, minkä jälkeen esitellään legitimointi ja tarkemmin van Leeuwenin kategoriat. Lopulta tehdään pieni katsaus sanomalehtidiskurssiin sekä poliittiseen diskurssiin ja siihen, miten Donald Trump liittyy näihin. Kieli on käytännössä läsnä lähes kaikessa ihmisten välisessä kanssakäymisessä, ja sen vaikutus yhteiskuntaan on kiistämätön. Kielen käyttäminen on aina puhetekojen tekemistä, ja puheteot tarkoittavat sitä, että puheella tehdään jotain mikä vaikuttaa maailmaan (Searle 1969, 18). Puhetekojen toiminta perustuu näkymättömään sääntöjen ja oletusten verkkoon, joka on läsnä aina puhetilanteissa (Searle 1969, 42-43). Tätä verkostoa kutsutaan diskurssiksi. Diskurssi koostuu sosiaalisista teoista, jotka tehdään kielen kautta (van Dijk ja Blum-Kulka, 2011). Diskurssi on käytännössä hyvin monimutkainen käsite, ja se on varsin monipuolinen. Erityisen tärkeää tämän tutkimuksen näkökulmasta on se, että diskurssit voivat luoda ja uudelleen tuottaa valtasuhteita (van Dijk ja Blum-Kulka, 2011). Valta tästä näkökulmasta määritellään parempana julkisten diskurssien saatavuutena ja hallintana (ibid.). Kun valta 77 määritellään näin, on selkeää, että uutismedialla on huomattavaa valtaa, sillä ne pystyvät yleisesti määrittelemään paljolti sen, mitä julkisessa diskurssissa käsitellään. Legitimaatio on yksi tapa, jolla media pystyy muuttamaan julkisen diskurssin suuntaa. Tässä tutkimuksessa keskitytään pääasiassa van Leeuwenin legitimaation kategorisointiin (van Leeuwen 2008, 105-106). Legitimaatio on kuitenkin monipuolinen käsite, joka vaatii jonkin verran lisää selittämistä. Van Leeuwenin (2008, 17-21) mukaan legitimaatio pyrkii liittämään arvot ja sosiaaliset käytännöt, näin liittäen positiivisia arvoja käytäntöihin, joista puhuja pitää ja negatiivisia arvoja käytäntöihin, jotka puhuja haluaa epä-legitimoida. Arvojen tunnistaminen ja tuottaminen vaativat molemmat tietoja sosiaalisesta kontekstista ja diskurssista, eräänlaista resonaatiota (Simonsen 2019). Legitimaation avulla pyritäänkin luomaan tunne siitä, että jokin toiminta on positiivista, hyödyllistä, eettistä, ymmärrettävää, tarpeellista tai muuten hyväksyttävää tietyssä kontekstissa (Vaara ja Tienari 2008, 986). Tämä tarkoittaa sitä, että legitimaatio on kontekstiriippuvaista, ja tämän takia vaikeaa havaita. Legitimaatio kuitenkin samalla sisältää aina viittauksia siihen mikä on ”oikein”, eli se vetoaa laajempiin oikeellisuuden käsitteisiin ja universaaliuteen (Lundgren ja Nilsson 2018). Sillä pyritään luomaan sosiaalista tilaa, jossa toimijat voivat tehdä mitä haluavat vapaasti ja heidän toimintansa on sosiaalisesti hyväksyttyä. (Wang 2020). Legitimaatio siis yhdistää arvoja ja universaaleja oikeutuksia sosiaalisissa tiloissa, ja se on vahvasti kontekstisidonnainen, vaatien kuulijoilta tiettyjä uskomuksia toimiakseen, ja näillä keinoilla se tekee tietyn ryhmä voiman käyttöä hyväksyttäväksi muille ryhmille (Mackay 2015). Legitimaatio on siis tavallaan ”itsensä puolustamisen” puheteko (van Dijk 1998). Eräs oleellinen erotus on legitimaation ja noudattamisen välillä. Noudattamisessa pelko tai hyöty saavat jonkin toimimaan tahdotulla tavalla vaikkeivat he muuten niin tekisi, kun taas legitimaatiossa normi pitää hyväksyä sitovaksi, jolloin sitä noudatetaan lähes automaattisesti, ilman lisäetuja tai -rangaistuksia (Steffek 2003, 254). Legitimaatio tapahtuu siis silloin, kun tahdotaan, että jotain normia noudatetaan ilman, että siitä joka kerta annetaan palkkio tai sen noudattamisesta jättämisestä uhataan rangaistusta. Myös institutionaaliset paikat, roolit tai instituutiot itse voidaan legitimoida (van Dijk 1998, 235). Seuraavaksi esitellään van Leeuwenin legitimaation kategoriat. Ne on järjestetty neljään ylälajiin: auktorisointi, moraaliset arvioinnit, rationalisaatiot ja mythopoeesit. Auktorisoinnissa korostuvat viittaukset auktoriteettiin, perinteisiin, lakiin, henkilöihin tai muihin ulkopuolisiin legitimiteetin lähteisiin (van Leeuwen 2008, 105-119). Sen on jaettu 78 kuuteen alalajiin: henkilökohtaiseen auktoriteettiin, asiantuntija-auktoriteettiin, roolimalliauktoriteettiin, epähenkilökohtaiseen auktoriteettiin, perinteen auktoriteettiin sekä yhdenmukaisuuden auktoriteettiin (ibid.): 1. Henkilökohtaisessa auktoriteetissa legitimiteetti tulee henkilön institutionaalisesta asemasta. 2. Asiantuntija-auktoriteetissa se lähtee henkilön tiedoista ja taidoista tietyllä alalla. 3. Roolimalliauktoriteetti perustuu sille, että vaikutusvaltaisen henkilön ottaessa tietyn elämäntyylin käyttöön muut hänestä mallia ottavat tekevät samoin. 4. Epähenkilökohtaisessa auktoriteetissa oikeutus tulee laeista ja säännöistä. 5. Perinteen auktoriteetti puolestaan perustuu sille, että jotain on tehty ’aina ennenkin’, joten ei ole syytä muuttaa suuntaa. 6. Yhdenmukaisuuden auktoriteetti perustuu sille, että ’kaikki muutkin tekevät näin’, eli eräänlaiselle sosiaaliselle paineelle tehdä samoin kuin muut. Siinä missä auktoriteetit tuovat legitimiteettiä ulkopuolelta johonkin toimintaan, moraalinen arviointi luo legitimiteettiä tarkastelemalla toiminnan tai toimijoiden omia ominaisuuksia ja arvostelemalla niitä. Tämäntyyppinen legitimointi liittää hyviä ominaisuuksia haluttuihin tekoihin ja pahoja ei-haluttuihin (van Leeuwen 2008, 110-112). Se jakautuu kolmeen alakategoriaan (van Leeuwen 2008, 110-112): 1. Arvioinnit käyttävät useimmiten adjektiivejä liittämään eri arvoja halutulla tavalla toimintaan tai toimijoihin. Se on varsin yksinkertainen toimintaperiaatteessaan. 2. Abstraktioissa viitataan toimintaan epätarkoilla tavoilla, jotta se voidaan erottaa kontekstistaan ja liittää johonkin toiseen kontekstiin, jossa siihen liittyy eri merkityksiä. 3. Analogiat ovat käytännössä vertailuja, joissa vertailun kohteista siirtyy toisiinsa eri arvoja. Rationalisaatiossa pyritään löytämään rationaalisia syitä jonkin toiminnan legitimiteetille. Se vaatii usein tietynlaista toiminnan tai toimijoiden kategorisointia. Tämän tyyppinen legitimointi pystytään jakamaan kahteen alalajiin (van Leeuwen 2008, 105-106, 113-118): 1. Instrumentaalinen rationalisointi viittaa toiminnan maaleihin, hyötyihin tai vaikutuksiin, eli se vetoaa toiminnan syihin. 79 2. Teoreettinen rationalisointi vetoaa totuuksiin, joita pidetään itsestäänselvyyksinä. Tämä kategoria on läheisessä suhteessa luonnollistamiseen, mutta sen sijaan, että se käyttäisi jaettuja oletuksia, tässä kategoriassa ääneen sanotaan, mikä ’todellisuus’ on. Tämä kategoria jakautuu vielä kolmeen tarkempaan alakategoriaan: 2a. Määrityksellä puhuja pyrkii määrittämään toiminnan jonkin toisen, moralisoidun, toiminnan kautta. 2b. Selitykset pyrkivät sen sijaan määrittämään jonkin toimintaan liittyvän toimijan olemuksen. Se siis katsoo, että toiminta on legitiimiä koska se on jonkin toimijan olemuksen kannalta luonnollista. 2c. Ennustukset perustuvat periaatteessa asiantuntemukselle, ja niiden avulla pyritään osoittamaan mitkä toiminnan seuraukset ovat. Mythopoeesit, eli tarinaan perustuvat legitimaatiot, perustuvat narratiiviselle tyylille, jonka avulla kerrotaan tarinoita, joissa palkitaan legitiimejä tekoja ja rangaistaan ei-legitiimejä toimia (van Leeuwen 2008, 118-119). Tämä kategoria koostuu kahdenlaisista tarinoista: 1. Moraalisissa tarinoissa päähenkilöitä palkitaan siitä, että he osallistuvat legitiimeihin tekoihin tai auttavat legitiimin järjestyksen palauttamisessa. 2. Varoittavat tarinat antavat esimerkkejä siitä, mitä rangaistuksia tulee, kun sosiaalisia normeja ei noudateta. Koska tämä tutkimus käsittelee uutislehtien politiikkaa koskevia artikkeleita, viimeiseksi tarkastellaan lyhyesti uutisdiskurssin ja poliittisen diskurssin erikoispiirteitä. Massamedia edustaa yhteiskunnan vallassa olevia intressejä, ja kaikki uutisointi on poliittisesti sitoutunutta ja ideologisesti kehystettyä (Khosravinik 2015, 72-73). Pääsy massamediaan itsessään on pehmeää valtaa (Oddo 2011, 289). Poliittinen diskurssi puolestaan on yhteiskunnallisesti merkittävää, koska kieli on keskeistä politiikassa ja sitä käytetään osoittamaan mikä on hyödyllistä ja mikä politiikkaa määrittävien jaettujen arvojen kannalta (Chilton 2004, 5). Kun tarkastellaan Presidentti Donald Trumpin retorista tyyliä, hän on erittäin kuuluisa riidanhakuisuudestaan, ja hän usein esittää itsensä voittajana ja muut häviäjinä (Ross ja Rivers 2020). Tässä tutkimuksessa analysoitiin artikkeleita neljästä yhdysvaltalaisesta sanomalehdestä: New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Nämä olivat tutkimuksen teon aikana neljä laajasti levitettyä sanomalehteä, joilla siten on paljon 80 kulttuurista ja poliittista merkitystä. Tutkimukseen valituille artikkeleille oli seuraavat vaatimukset: niiden piti käsitellä Syyriasta poistumisen ilmoitusta; niiden piti olla tarpeeksi pitkiä, vähintään 500 sanaa; ja niiden piti olla ensimmäiset sanomalehdessä julkaistut Trumpin ilmoituksen jälkeen. Tärkeä asia huomata on se, että monet artikkeleista sisälsivät useita lainauksia eri lähteistä. Näiden sisältämä teksti otettiin myös mukaan tähän tutkimukseen, koska sanomalehdillä on käytännössä täysi valta valita, mitkä lainaukset sisällytetään artikkeleihin, ja näin myös ne kantavat samaa diskurssia kuin loput artikkelista. On myös huomattava, että tämän tutkimuksen laajuus on väistämättä melko rajoitettu johtuen aika- ja sivumäärärajoitteista. Tämä tarkoittaa, että tutkimus on lähinnä alustavaa laatua, ja suurempien yleistysten tai syy-seuraussuhteiden todistamiseksi on suositeltavaa, että aihetta tutkittaisiin laajemmin. Seuraavaksi selostetaan tutkimuksen metodit. Tämä tutkimus perustuu van Leeuwenin legitimaation kategorioihin, ja se on tärkein analyyttinen työkalu valittujen artikkeleiden tutkimiseen (van Leeuwen 2008, 105-106). Ensinnäkin valitun metodin käyttäminen vaatii ryhmien ideologisia ja diskursiivisia tarkoitusperiä ajavien legitimaation tapausten tunnistamisen ja kategorisoinnin (van Leeuwen 2008, 105-123). Tämä tarkoittaa ensin sitä, että toiminta, jota legitimoidaan tai epä- legitimoidaan täytyy tunnistaa, ja tässä tutkimuksessa se on määritelty Donald Trumpin Syyriasta poistumisen ilmoitukseksi. Seuraavaksi paikat teksteissä, joissa tapahtuu “resonaatiota”, kuten Simonsen (2019) sitä kutsuu, etsitään teksteistä. Nämä ilmentyvät paikkoina teksteissä, joissa sosiaalisia käytänteitä käytetään hyökkäämään Syyriasta poistumista vastaan tai puolustamaan sitä. Legitimointia tapahtuu, kun tarkoituksia, jotka tekevät jotain sosiaalista toimintoa lisätään näihin sosiaalisiin käytäntöihin (van Leeuwen 2008). Legitimointi on yritys saada jokin toiminta näyttäytymään positiivisena (Vaara ja Tienari 2008, 986). Tämä siis tarkoittaa, että legitimointia tekevien tekstin osien tunnistaminen vaatii sellaisten paikkojen etsimisen, joissa tiettyjä sosiaalisia käytäntöjä käytetään näyttämään legitimoitavan toiminnan paremmassa valossa. Kun legitimointia tekevät tekstin kohdat on etsitty, ne pitää jakaa van Leeuwenin kategorioihin. Tämä tehdään ensin tutkimalla miten nämä legitimaation esimerkit yrittävät liittää arvoja legitimaation kohteeseen, ja päättelemällä siitä, miten ne pyrkivät vaikuttamaan lukijoiden käsityksiin Trumpin ilmoituksesta. Tutkimusmetodissa on luonnollisesti selkeitä subjektiivisia elementtejä, mutta käyttämällä johdonmukaisesti tätä metodia ja olemalla avoin niistä kohdista, joissa tutkijan omat puolueellisuudet voivat vaikuttaa, tulokset ovat tieteellisesti käytettäviä. 81 Tämän metodin esittelyn jälkeen voidaan jatkaa varsinaisiin analyysin tuloksiin. Ensinnäkin analysoiduissa artikkeleissa löytyi 767 esimerkkiä legitimoinnista, ja suurin määrä näitä yhdessä artikkelissa oli 112, ja pienin 32. Keskimääräisesti yhdessä artikkelissa oli 63,9 tapausta legitimointia. Keskimääräinen määrä sanoja artikkeleissa oli 1133, ja sanojen määrä vaihteli 576 ja 1555 välillä, mikä voi selittää vaihtelua legitimoinnin esimerkkien määrässä. Tarkempi erittely analysoinnin tuloksista löytyy taulukoista Table 2, Table 3 ja Table 4. Tarkastelussa erityisesti esille tuli se, että artikkeleissa käytettiin paljon asiantuntija- auktoriteettia ja instrumentaalista rationalisointia. Nämä selittyvät artikkeleiden yhteydellä sekä sanomalehtidiskurssiin että poliittiseen diskurssiin. Asiantuntijoiden auktoriteetti tuli esille erityisesti lainauksista, sillä niitä käytettiin paljon Presidentti Trumpia vastaan olevien mielipiteiden esille ottamiseen. Samoin henkilökohtainen auktoriteetti, jota kuitenkin oli vähemmän esillä artikkeleissa, oli vahvasti yhteydessä lainaamiseen. Sen sijaan instrumentaalinen rationalisointi on suurella todennäköisyydellä yhteydessä poliittisen diskurssin maalisidonnaiseen näkökulmaan. Usein politiikassa tärkeää ovat erityisesti erilaisten päätösten hyödyt ja haitat, mikä voi mahdollisesti selittää instrumentaalisen rationalisoinnin yleisyyden. Muita korrelaatioita ja huomautuksia tutkimustuloksista ovat muun muassa se, että artikkelin vapaamuotoisuus ja mielipiteiden avoimuus niissä olivat vahvasti yhteydessä tiettyjen kategorioiden yleisyyteen. Esimerkiksi selitykset ja ennustukset olivat yleisempiä vähemmän muodollisissa artikkeleissa, ja niiden välillä oli myös havaittavissa yhteys, jossa selitysten avulla luonnollistettiin tiettyjen toimijoiden ominaisuuksia, ja näiden pohjalta sitten tehtiin ennusteita. Tällä havainnolla on hälyttäviä seurauksia, ja lisätutkimus olisi tärkeää. Muita kategorioita, joissa epämuodollisuus oli ennustava tekijä kategorian yleisyydelle olivat moraaliset ja varoittavat tarinat. Ne tulivat erityisesti esille kahdessa yhteydessä – viittauksissa edellisten presidenttien toimintaan vastaavanlaisissa tilanteissa, ja puhuttaessa Puolustussihteeri Mattisin erosta. Mattisista tehtiin usein eräänlainen tarinan sankari, jota rangaistiin siitä, että hän oli luottanut Trumpin kykyyn tehdä oikeita päätöksiä. Myös roolimalliauktoriteetillä oli selkeä historiallinen ja epämuodollinen ulottuvuus, ja sitäkin käytettiin menneiden konfliktien sitomiseen nykyajan päätöksiin. Erityisesti kaksi kategoriaa olivat hyvin kontekstiriippuvaisia: epähenkilökohtainen auktoriteetti ja yhdenmukaisuuden auktoriteetti. Epähenkilökohtainen auktoriteetti erityisesti liittyi instituutioiden reaktioiden kuvailuun ja niiden edustajien lainaamiseen, kun taas yhdenmukaisuuden auktoriteettia käytettiin Syyriasta poistumisen vastustajien poliittisen 82 molemminpuolisuuden alleviivaamiseen. Myös kielellisillä tekijöillä artikkelien sisällä oli merkitystä joidenkin kategorioiden näkökulmasta. Arviointi oli erityisesti artikkelin epämuodollisuuteen sidonnaista, mikä ei ollut yllätys, sillä uutisjournalismi usein karsastaa avointa mielipiteiden ilmaisua. Henkilökohtaista auktoriteettia ja abstraktioita puolestaan käytettiin laajalti lainausten vaikutusten syventämiseen tai niiden korostamiseen. Lähes kaikki tutkitut artikkelit keskittyivät Trumpin päätöksen epä-legitimointiin, ja vaikkakin joissain oli yksittäisiä kohtia, joissa Trumpin päätökselle annettiin legitimiteettiä, nämä kohdat usein painuivat monien muiden epä-legitimoinnin tapausten alle. Yleisenä strategiana kaikissa sanomalehdissä voidaan huomata päätöksen käytännön hyötyjen ja haittojen punnitseminen, jota vahvistettiin lainauksilla, joiden legitimiteettivaikutuksia vahvistettiin puolestaan muilla legitimoinnin kategorioilla. Huomattavaa oli myös se, että artikkelit tarjosivat vain vähän vaihtoehtoja, ja näitä ei erityisesti legitimoitu. Erityinen kiinnostuksenkohde oli päätöksentekoprosessi, josta erityisesti hätäisyys ja muiden toimijoiden vaillinainen konsultointi olivat kritiikkejä. Sanomalehdet väittävät usein olevansa neutraaleja uutisoinnissansa, mutta samalla niiden artikkelit sisältävät väistämättä ideologisia arvoja raportoinnissaan, jolle antavat legitimiteettiä asiantuntijoiden mielipiteet. Esimerkiksi instrumentaaleja rationalisointeja voidaan usein pitää objektiivisina maaleina, mutta todellisuudessa ne perustellaan ideologisin keinoin. Kiinnostavaa tutkimuksen tuloksissa oli se, että moraalisia arviointeja käytettiin Syyriasta poistumisen epä-legitimoinniksi, mikä osoittaa osaltaan journalistisen neutraaliuden illuusion olevan jokseenkin harhaanjohtava. Myös se, että legitimoinnin keinoja käytettiin kaikkia ainakin yksittäisissä tapauksissa osoittaa, että journalismin legitimoinnin tapoja tulisi tutkia pidemmälle. Tärkeää on myös huomata, että kaikki tutkitut artikkelit pääasiassa epä- legitimoivat Presidentti Trumpin päätöstä, mikä osoittaa sen, että tietynlaiset shokit voivat luoda painetta irrota ideologisista perusteista, ja sen sijaan liittyä laajempaan rintamaan päätöksen vastustajia. Tutkimuksen löydöt ja niistä tehdyt päätelmät antavat vain pienen kuvan uutisoinnissa tehdystä legitimoinnista, ja lisätutkimus on selvästi tarpeellista. Myös tutkimuksen rajoitettu laajuus osoittaa, että nämä löydökset ovat pain pintakatsaus tärkeään ja tieteellisesti kiinnostavaan vallan legitimoinnin koneistoon. Erityisiä tulevan tutkimuksen kiinnostuksenkohteita voisivat olla esimerkiksi asiantuntijalainausten ja asiantuntijoiden auktoriteetin yhteys sekä selitysten ja ennustusten luonnollistava toimintamalli. Van Leeuwenin kategorisointi on osoittautunut hyvin toimivaksi tavaksi analysoida legitimointia, vaikka siinä on ongelmia erityisesti kategorioiden välisten harmaiden alueiden takia.