This dissertation offers a new model to analyze political rhetoric: political Frames of Reference (FoRs) which analogically map our ability to describe navigating in three-dimensional space onto the ideological need to describe how our socio-political world functions. Through their messages, the twenty-two candidates who ran for president in 2016 offered their own unique yet party-approved ideological worldviews, and laid out paths of logic, demarcated by various semantic parameters or Grounds, for voters to follow in order to properly assess the policy prescriptions on offer, both their merits and whether they would indeed chart a better course forward for the nation. Three FoRs and the nature of their different Grounds are described: the Republicans’ Absolute, the Democrats’ Conjoint, and Trump’s unique Decompetitive FoR.

Through the rhetorical tactics of decontestation and rhetorical erasure, the Republican candidates reified a series of supposedly shared, extra-human social constructs, such as Christian Morality, American Exceptionalism, and Economic Supremacy, as Absolute fixed bearings which permeate the socio-political landscape and delimit the standards of behavior and assessments that Americans should accept if they want to properly make sense of what is happening in America. The Democratic candidates acknowledged that policy issues are discussable from multiple viewpoints, and contextualized the socio-political landscape by referring to the perspectives which people take on the commonplace behaviors and assessments everyone engages in within the social systems created by people’s mutual interactions with one another. Trump offered his ideological worldview through mutually entailing Grounds, victory and defeat, as he refereed what was fairly or unfairly happening in the world. Through these winner-take-all and by-any-means-necessary conceptual routines, Trump was able to engage in zero-sum thinking about e.g. how much wealth or justice exists in the world and its proper distribution, activating a series of “folk’’ knowledges as a means to speak more directly to the fears and concerns of voters as he argued how he would Make America Great Again.