Framing the Nation: Adversarial Frames in Trump and Harris’s Political Rhetoric

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Political Attitudes II (Table 19)

Abstract

The 2024 U.S. presidential campaign was not only a contest over policy but a struggle over legitimacy, morality, and the very meaning of democratic leadership. Drawing on sixteen speeches delivered by Kamala Harris and Donald Trump across nomination acceptance addresses, campaign rallies, and presidential debates, this paper examines adversarial framing as a central rhetorical strategy in the campaign. Building on sociological theories of framing (Snow and Benford 2000), Knight and Greenberg’s (2011) account of adversarial framing, and Fine’s (2006) work on reputational politics, I analyze how each candidate constructed the other not simply as politically wrong, but as a fundamental threat to democratic governance, economic stability, and national identity. Using an inductive qualitative coding strategy informed by Deterding and Waters’s iterative approach, I organize adversarial framing across five reputational dimensions: practices, moral character, competence and qualifications, social associations, and real versus apparent motivations. The findings reveal that both candidates relied heavily on reputational discrediting as a primary mode of political communication, consistently reframing policy debates as evidence of character deficiency, ideological capture, or dangerous intent. However, the analysis also demonstrates that adversarial framing operates strategically rather than uniformly. Trump concentrated his attacks on Harris's competence and ideological associations, portraying her as intellectually unfit and embedded in a radical leftist network whose governance would produce national decline. Harris, by contrast, centered her adversarial framing on Trump's moral character and motivations, constructing him as chronically dishonest, grievance-driven, and oriented toward personal retribution rather than public service. The paper contributes to sociological understandings of political rhetoric by demonstrating that contemporary electoral campaigns increasingly subordinate policy argumentation to legitimacy contestation, transforming electoral competition into an ongoing struggle over moral authority, trustworthiness, and fitness to govern.

Author

• Kaniz Fatema, University of Kansas