Browsing by Subject "tweets"

Populist leaders are often studied when they are in opposition, providing an alternative to a failing democracy. The case of Donald Trump in the aftermath of the United States presidential election 2020 is different, as he is a populist leader in the position of power, trying to be re-elected as president. Thus, my aim in this thesis is to study the use of populist rhetoric by Donald Trump on Twitter following election day, 3 November 2020, as a populist who is no longer in the opposition, but rather a president trying to maintain office. By mainly drawing on the characteristics of populist rhetoric mapped out by Benjamin Moffitt (2014), I analyze a selection of tweets from November 2020 to January 2021 with the goal of identifying characteristics of populist rhetoric in his tweets. Moffitt identifies three main characteristics of populist rhetoric: ‘the people’ versus ‘the elite’, performing a notion of crisis, and ‘bad manners’. My results show that both ‘the people’ versus ‘the elite’ and the performance of crisis are both explicitly present in Donald Trump’s tweets. He creates a typically populist binary, identifying himself and Republicans with the true American Heartland, ‘the people’. Trump elevates the election results to a level of crisis, claiming a stolen election and voter fraud as the reasons for Biden’s victory. ‘Bad manners’ is almost Trump’s trademark. While visible in his tweets, it is at times difficult to draw the line between the rhetoric of Twitter and populist rhetoric, as there is significant overlap between the two. My results show, that even when losing power, Trump follows traditional populist rhetoric. However, in an interesting turn of events, he also changes the limits of ‘the people’ and ‘the enemy’, calling out other Republicans and Fox News in his tweets when he feels that they are betraying him and no longer supporting him. Thus, he diverts from the traditional populist ‘us’ and ‘them’ binary, creating a third category, a sort of purgatory, where Republicans who formerly were ‘the people’ now reside.