Politicians’ greetings are usually studied for their symbolic significance as media events rather
than as interactional practices. This article uses conversation analysis to study the greetings that
occur just before the start of a stage-managed White House media event. We first operationalize
and illustrate the constellation of co-constructed practices that enable a ‘greeter’ to pivot between
multiple ‘greeteds’, and we show how such an activity reconstitutes participants’ situated social
identities. We then broaden the scope of our inquiry to consider how such interactional practices
contribute to Trump’s political persona. We conclude by arguing that our approach can
illuminate both the communication styles of specific individuals, as well as the generalized
methods through which political personae are constructed in and through social interaction.
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Language & Communication and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.08.001