The Velvet Glove: Benevolent Sexism in President Trump's Tweets

The present article is part of a preliminary study concerning the discursive manifestations of US President Trump’s sexist beliefs. While many studies have focused on Trump’s usage of hostile sexism, this work examines the linguistic strategies utilised by Trump to convey benevolent sexism, a form of discrimination based on the idea that women are weak and need to be protected, that they should respect traditional male-centric gender roles, and that they should be idolised by men. Drawing upon Fiske and Glick’s Ambivalent Sexism Theory, the study will analyse a corpus of all the positive tweets addressing women tweeted by Trump since the beginning of his 2016 campaign (July 2015). The study sheds a light on how President Trump’s usage of hostile and benevolent sexism are actually two sides of the same coin: they both confirm the idea of women as an inferior sex.