The study aimed to examine the role of political humor in American election discourse, with specific reference to Donald Trump's campaigns and their influence on public opinion and the candidates' political images. The research objective was to examine the role of humor as a persuasive instrument in political communication and whether humor strengthened or changed the prevailing political attitudes of American citizens. The theoretical framework was grounded in the general theory of verbal humor (GTVH), which was applied to explain the cognitive, linguistic, and pragmatic processes underlying political humor. The study employed a qualitative discourse-analytic approach, analyzing political texts from the 2016 to 2024 US presidential elections in terms of the six resources of knowledge in GTVH: script opposition, logical mechanism, situation, target, narrative strategy, and language. The findings of the study indicate that humor is not an unplanned process but a preconceived strategy implemented through weighted communication behaviors that target enhancing persuasiveness, establishing a collaborative relationship with the electorate, and instigating processes of irony that produce psychological distance between the voter and the political opponent. Those findings showed that political humor was always a textual antithesis, hyperbole, sarcasm, metaphors, and choice of language to create a persuasive meaning, redistribute symbolic power, discredit opponents, self-present, and group identify, and proved that humor was not solely entertainment but rather an integrated rhetorical and ideological instrument that also shaped the image of politics and the media spectacle into a fused space.
