The purpose of this research is to show how the idea of presidential security is a construct that has taken on several different meanings and rationalities in the American context due to shifting power relations, new practices of presidential security, and the constant re-formulation of the friend/enemy distinction. The United States Service has had to continually think and re-think the concept of presidential security in order to provide suitable protection for the President of the United States. In creating these spaces of protection, the practices of the Secret Service have slowly contributed to re-constituting the sovereign to fit the agency's particular logics and rationalities. The capturing of the Chief Executive Officer does not only rest on disciplinary techniques that restrict, but are also founded on the truth production of the Secret Service: presidents begin to accept and internalize the modus operandi of the Secret Service. They begin to self-monitor their own desires and actions related to security concerns. The walls of protection are coupled with a conscious capitulation to accept the barriers of protection. The cage is no longer only imposed from without, but also emerges internally. By problematizing how this evolving security bubble encapsulates the president, this dissertation is able to examine how the Secret Service begins to reshape and reformulate key democratic governance values by protecting the public and private body of the president through a disciplinary apparatus that seeks to control and contain as well as display and deliberate. Democratic norms that privilege openness have to be challenged, if not curtailed, to adequately protect the Chief Executive Officer. Everyone and everything is a risk that must be inspected, catalogued, and watched, even the president cannot be trusted with his own safety. With its mission to protect, the Secret Service has constructed an organizational operation to ostracize the other, permanently put the president behind protective procedures, and present a pleasing public persona fitting to the status of the POTUS. These overt actions have allowed an administrative agency to redefine key democratic governance values. The agency has been able to delineate who is a suspicious other, justify the placement of barricades that separate the president from the people, instill a preventive/security ethos in the Office of the President, and display the president as the apex of a constitutional order. Because of its successes and failures, presidential protection has become normal, acceptable, legitimate, and absolutely necessary, which has provided the Service the ability to give shape to a particular rationality concerning what the president can and cannot do. This constitutive role of a public agency has had a dramatic impact on how the people come to experience and interact with the POTUS. The development of the Secret Service and its protective procedures, however, has been sporadic and tenuous. For the past 100 years, this emerging rationality was produced by a multitude of sources that have helped construct the idea and practice of presidential security. The subjects of insecurity and security mutually created the idea of POTUS endangerment and safety. Enemies of the state have helped mold state action while friends of the president have sought to project an image of presidential grandeur. In this context, the Service has had to secure territorial spaces in order to conceal and confuse threats while simultaneously having to display and disclose the presidential body to the public. The capacity to control threats and to coordinate the presidential spectacle has enabled the Service to direct the body and mind of the POTUS. With this disciplinary apparatus in place, the Secret Service is able to construct bubbles and bunkers that are designed to protect and trap the president's two bodies. / Ph. D.

Although the house that sits at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave in Washington, DC has had numerous books written about it and its occupants, the President of the United States and the First Lady, there is very little research to be found on the marriage of the two individuals who reside in the White House and, together, sit at the pinnacle of political power. Many argue the Vice-President is second-in-command, but when you think about it, spouses confess and mull over ideas with one another and may never speak to anyone else about those ideas in such an intimate setting. The marriage created by the interpersonal communication between the President and his wife can expose many elements to decision-making, the level of the First Lady's influence over her husband, and the level of respect each has for the sacredness of the traditional institution of marriage. Miss Hayes has researched the marriages and lives of five First Couples (John and Abigail Adams, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and George W. and Laura Bush) and the marital and family communication styles between the two spouses within the marriage. Those two individuals who occupy the residency of the White House are America's First Couple and the marriage the two create before their arrival in the nation's capital is a crucial element that should play a part in every American's decision before casting his or her vote for the presidency.

Cette thèse s’intéresse à l’utilisation par le 43ème président des États-Unis, George W. Bush, des déclarations de promulgation, ces documents écrits qui permettent au président américain de donner son opinion sur une loi qu’il vient de promulguer et dans lesquels il peut faire part de sa réticence à faire appliquer certaines des dispositions de la loi en question car il les juge potentiellement inconstitutionnelles, et ce quand bien même il a accepté de promulguer la loi en question. Une telle pratique peut sembler contraire à l’esprit même de la Constitution américaine, qui contraint le président à « veiller à la fidèle exécution des lois » qu’il promulgue sans lui laisser la possibilité de sélectionner au sein desdites lois les disposions qu’il souhaite ou ne souhaite pas voir appliquées.A travers un travail de comparaison des déclarations de promulgation de George W. Bush à celles de ses prédécesseurs à la Maison-Blanche et une analyse de la capacité théorique et pratique de cet outil présidentiel à influer sur le processus d’exécution des lois, on se proposera de démontrer que les déclarations de promulgation sont davantage l’outil rhétorique d’une affirmation des pouvoirs de la présidence visant à renforcer cette dernière sur le long terme qu’un levier d’action immédiate permettant à la présidence de mettre la main sur l’exécution des lois. / This thesis focuses on the use of presidential signing statements by the Bush 43 Administration. Presidential signing statements are written documents that allow the President to give his opinion of a bill he signed into law and to say that even though he willingly signed the law, he does not necessarily plan on executing all of its provisions as he believes some of them to be potentially unconstitutional. Such a behavior may seem problematic constitutionally speaking as the American Constitution forces the President to « faithfully execute the laws » without affording him the opportunity to pick and choose the provisions he wants to execute.Through a comparison with the signing statements of previous presidents as well as an analysis of both the theoretical and practical capacity of presidential signing statements to allow the President to control the execution of the laws, this thesis will describe signing statements as tools of the rhetorical presidency that allow the executive to assert and defend its constitutional prerogatives in order to strengthen them in the long run, rather than weapons of the administrative presidency with an immediate effect on the execution of the laws.

The diploma thesis The White House Presents: The Media Image of Barack Obama examines the media presentation of the President of the United States, Barack Obama, through the official media channel of the White House. Five video recordings of President Obama's speeches are analyzed with a focus on linguistic, visual and auditory sign systems with the use of the qualitative semiotic content analysis. Before the analysis itself, an explanation of theoretical terms related mostly to the representation of reality is provided. On these grounds the analysis is then approached as a description of different means of achieving media construction of reality, to which both the President himself and the White House Office of Communications contribute. This Office is in charge of the content of the above-mentioned channel. To broaden the context, general information about the functioning of the President's media communication is included. The aim of this thesis is an interpretation of the communication tools presented by the White House media channel and the analysis of their symbolic meaning in order to explicate the process of a specific media image of the President coming into existence. The approach to the analyzed content from the perspective of intercultural communication is also of importance. It must be...

Abstract The American president’s serving period always begin with an iconic inaugural address. It is a function wherein the president can unify the audience, ratify the ceremony, and present his political and administrative direction for his term. Promises are a vital rhetorical tool and strategy at the president’s disposal; however, they can also be a demerit if used incorrectly. Within the discipline of pragmatics, promises are included in the category of the commissive speech act: an utterance which binds the speaker to a future course of action. The focus of the present study is what proportion commissive speech acts are used in relation to other speech acts by the four American presidents inaugurated in the 21st century in their inaugural addresses, as well as how these commissive speech acts are realized in terms of various pragmatic features (e.g., vagueness, deictic use, selfpositive representation, and implicature). The methodological approach adopted in thisstudy is both qualitative as well as quantitative in character. To reflect this, the study was operationalized through speech act analysis and political discourse analysis. The findingsshowcase that the presidents affiliated with the Republican party make use of commissive speech acts to a higher degree than their Democratic counterparts. Donald J. Trump appears as a clear outlier with an exuberant amount of commissive speech acts in comparison with the other three presidents. Furthermore, the findings point out that the most common strategy in how commissive speech acts were realised was to shape them as an assertion and using the inclusive deixis “we”. However, Joseph R. Biden diverged from this pattern. Instead, he used explicit promises featuring the individual deixis “I”. In addition, he often employed rhetorical vagueness which made his promises hard to measure if upheld or not.