Volume 29, Issue 3
DOI: 10.24205/03276716.2020.957
American Populism in Digital Era: Strategies of Manipulation in Donald Trump’s Election Tweets
Abstract
This paper examines the recurring perceptions emerging in the social-media arena concentrating on Donald Trumps’ electoral Tweets. It mainly focuses on a language/discourse analysis of tweets posts by President Donald Trump interacting with the people of America. Drawing upon the operational settings of populism, a critical discourse analysis is carried out on the electoral tweets of Donald Trump. Data was collected through Python web-crawling and then analyzed to identify possible pattern. The study reveals Trump’s strategy of manipulation remains classical populism. Trump mostly engages in promoting himself as an extraordinary and right leader, attacking rivals as part of the political establishment, proposing overly simplified solutions to problems and promoting alternative truth to enhance his creditability as well as political influence. The success of such strategy and its adoption by other politicians has led us to believe American populism has been enhanced by social media in the digital era.
Keywords
populism, political discourse analysis, CDA, Social media