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Abstract
Maintaining ethics has always been one of the crucial concerns of different scholars all around the globe. Considering the direct impact of political leaders’ attitudes on people’s minds, decisionmaking, and behavior, maintaining ethics by politicians in society is specifically emphasized. Moreover, the battleground has given way to the cultural, social, and ideological arena in recent years. In a global village, the attitude of leading politicians has extensive side effects, locally to globally, depending on how political players use their language’s power to influence people’s minds. This qualitative research investigated the maintenance of ethics by the two candidates of the US Presidential Election, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, in the first presidential debate on September 29, 2020. The framework applied in this research was the Faircloughian three-dimensional critical discourse analysis (CDA) model. The results showed the failure of the two representatives of the red and blue parties to maintain ethics during the debate. More significantly, regarding ethical discursive structure, Joe Biden performed worse than Donald Trump in this chaotic debate. Although, Trump’s performance cannot be considered ethical. Moreover, this paper interpreted and explained the social effects of their speeches.