Accounting for (strategically) ambiguous facework using Trump as a case study

Archer’s (2015) Goffman-inspired facework scale was designed to capture both overt im/politeness and, more importantly, strategically ambivalent facework strategies that afford users a level of plausible deniability, allowing them to manipulate others’ views of their target(s) without being found to have acted impolitely (Archer 2011). This paper nonetheless proposes an enhancement: the addition of a third “ambiguous-as-to-speaker-intent” space between the “intentional” face enhancing (FE) and face threatening (FT) zones. This third space complements the two “ambiguous-as-to-speaker-intent” spaces already sitting between the “intentional” and “incidental” FE zones and between the “intentional” and “incidental” FT zones of Archer’s original scale (cf. Goffman 1967). We demonstrate the utility of what has effectively become a facework loop using fourteen comments made by Donald Trump – a globally known figure regularly associated with overt impoliteness – from the 1990s onwards (some of which were deemed more controversial than others). Our primary foci, in consequence, are those facework moves that leave targets and/or audiences uncertain as to whether praise and/or criticism and/or something more politic was intended by him.