International Journal of Sub-Saharan African Research (IJSSAR)

Background: Violent attacks and insecurity in parts of Nigeria have generated international concern over alleged religious persecution, particularly against Christian communities. The activities of extremist groups such as Boko Haram, Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), and armed herdsmen have intensified debates about religious violence, human rights, and national security. Global attention to the issue increased when former United States President Donald Trump delivered speeches that framed the violence against Christians in Nigeria as genocide, thereby shaping international discourse on the country’s security crisis. Despite growing scholarship on Nigeria’s insecurity and analyses of political rhetoric, limited attention has been given to the pragma-stylistic strategies embedded in Trump’s discourse on the issue.
Objective: This study examined the pragma-stylistic strategies in President Donald Trump’s discourse on the alleged "Christian genocide" in Nigeria, with particular attention to how linguistic choices construct moral narratives, attribute responsibility, and legitimise international concern or intervention.
Method: The study adopted a qualitative research design that integrates Searle’s Speech Act Theory with Leech and Short’s Linguistic Stylistics. Selected speeches, media reports, and social media posts produced by Donald Trump between November and December 2025 were purposively sampled based on the presence of evaluative language, threat rhetoric, and attribution of responsibility. The data were analyzed through pragma-stylistic analysis to identify the interaction between communicative functions and stylistic features in the discourse. Results: Findings revealed the strategic deployment of assertive, directive, and expressive speech acts to present claims about violence as factual realities, call for action, and express moral condemnation. These pragmatic functions are reinforced through stylistic devices such as lexical intensification, repetition, hyperbole, and deliberate syntactic structuring, which amplify emotional appeal and rhetorical force. Together, these linguistic resources frame the violence as morally urgent and construct a persuasive narrative that positions external attention and intervention as necessary.
Conclusion: The study concluded that Trump’s discourse on Christian genocide in Nigeria is shaped by the convergence of pragmatic functions and stylistic choices that simultaneously perform acts of assertion, evaluation, and persuasion. Through this interplay, the discourse constructs moral urgency, assigns responsibility, and legitimizes international engagement with Nigeria’s security challenges.
Unique Contribution: This study provided fresh insight into how pragma-stylistic resources function in international political discourse to shape narratives about conflict and humanitarian crises. It contributes to the fields of pragmatics, stylistics, and political discourse analysis by demonstrating how speech acts and stylistic strategies interact to produce persuasive meanings in global political communication.
Key Recommendation: Scholars and analysts of political discourse should pay closer attention to the combined role of pragmatic functions and stylistic devices in shaping international narratives about conflicts. Such an approach can deepen understanding of how political actors influence global perceptions and policy debates through strategic language use.