Functional matching and strategic mismatching in political impoliteness reciprocity: unpacking 2025 Trump–Zelenskyy Oval Office meeting

In political contexts, how impoliteness and reciprocity are deployed and represented remains under-specified yet crucial for understanding interactional power and its public perceptions. Drawing on the impoliteness strategy theory and the principle of (Im)politeness reciprocity (PIR), this study examines how impoliteness strategies and reciprocity unfold in high-stakes political communications during the 2025 Trump–Zelenskyy Oval Office meeting. Findings show that Trump preferentially deployed positive impoliteness strategies, and Zelenskyy responded with negative impoliteness, while Vance engaged in off-record impoliteness that reframed and complicated a dyad confrontation into a triad dynamic.

Two reciprocity patterns emerged: functional matching, steered by Trump’s topic control, where direct impoliteness is returned in kind, thereby escalating the use of impoliteness; and strategic mismatching, catalysed by Vance’s engagement in which Trump pursues gratitude demands and Zelenskyy shifts to rights-asserting overlaps. The thank-you coercion strategy was frequently used in mismatching, presenting coercive gratitude demands which discount prior thanks and convert geopolitical aid into interpersonal debt, implying an imbalanced power relation. Overall, reciprocity in political contexts is normally, functionally matched and power-sensitive.

These findings extend PIR to institutional political communications and theorise thank-you coercion strategy in reciprocity. The publication of this research was supported by the Lancaster University Open Access Fund. Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom Correspondence to Tianxing (Luke) Liu or Yuxin (David) Wu.

The authors declare no competing interests. Ethical approval was not required for this study as it involved analysis of publicly available media content and did not involve human participants, human data, or human tissue. Informed consent was not required for this study as it did not involve human participants or personal data collection.

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