<![CDATA[This research is motivated by the President Prabowo Subianto's speech at the inauguration of the Marsinah Museum in Nganjuk, delivered amid a macroeconomic crisis marked by the extreme depreciation of the rupiah exchange rate. This study aims to dismantle the latent meanings, internal contradictions, and linguistic strategies used by the president to construct a dichotomy between the elite and the people, as well as to manage the unrest among the working-class public. The method employed is a descriptive qualitative approach grounded in the critical paradigm, applying the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework through the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) developed by Ruth Wodak. The primary data consists of the verbatim transcript of the presidential speech on May 16th, 2026, collected through documentation and note-taking techniques. The findings reveal an acute irony and fatal self-contradiction within the president's discourse structure. Through nomination and predication strategies, a binary opposition is constructed, positioning the president outside the power circle (as a protector of the poor) while simultaneously practicing institutional blame avoidance by shifting systemic failures onto lower apparatuses. Through argumentation strategies, the topos of history, topos of threat, and topos of benevolence are exploited to rationalize domestic economic failures as purely the impact of international pressure. Lastly, the extreme mitigation strategy in the rhetorical claim that “rural people do not use dollars” is identified as a form of discursive disinformation that negates the real impact of the crisis on the real sector to perpetuate the subordination of marginal classes and maintain absolute government hegemony.]]>
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