Pragmatic Analysis of Presidential Campaign Manifestos of Muhammadu Buhari and Donald Trump

The study examines the presidential campaign manifestos of Presidents Muhammadu Buhari of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 2015 and Donald Trump of the United States of America in 2016. Specifically, it sets out to analyse these presidents’ campaign speech promises on security using the cooperative principle, ascertain the conformity of their promises on job creation to the theory of cooperative principle. The study also sets out to examine the two presidents’ campaign promises on health care using the theory of cooperative principle. Using the secondary source as method of data collection, the analysis is based on one of the tenets of the Gricean (1975) Cooperative Principle- maxim of quality. The study, therefore, adopts Paul Grice’s (1975) Cooperative Principle (CP) as its theoretical framework. The findings of the study suggest that both Presidents Muhammadu Buhari and Donald Trump observed the conversational maxim of quality at some point in their presidential campaign speech promises on security, job creation and health care, but violated it at some other point.  In all, the maxim of quality as a conversational rule was not fairly observed by both presidents in their presidential campaign manifestos in 2015 and 2016 respectively.