Cognitive warfare in modern political communication : An analysis of the weaponisation of political communication in the second Trump presidency

Sammanfattning

Political communication has experienced a complete upheaval with the advent of social media, even more so with modern technologies such as AI, and algorithms. This has opened up new ways to control narratives and reshape perceived reality. As these developments have been exponentially increasing in speed, scholarship has struggled to keep up. As such, this thesis aims to utilise cognitive warfare, and strategic narratives as analytical frameworks to explore the ways in which political communication have been utilised by the Trump cabinet during his second presidency to manipulate and control the US population's cognition, and refocus narratives in ways that benefit them. While there are a multitude of studies on disinformation and other strategies for psychological attacks, little scholarship has been made utilising the theoretical lens of cognitive warfare. None of this scholarship focuses their lens on political communication, which indeed could serve to be a serious threat to democracy. The goal of this thesis is therefore to start the process of recontextualising our understanding of how political communication can be utilised within this new media landscape. This could help create a foundation on which future research could create safety barriers against the usage of cognitive warfare in political communication, as well as strengthen scholarship produced on the topic. By conducting a qualitative case study of the Trump cabinet’s utilisation of political communication as a tool for cognitive manipulation and control during the second Trump presidency, this thesis has found that there is a need to further deepen our understanding of the ways in which political actors utilise political communication as a means for narrative control and normative change, as current scholarship seems unprepared to tackle the problematic ways in which cognitive warfare has been inducted into the political norm.