Impact of Trump’s Digital Rhetoric on the US Elections: A View from Worldwide Far-Right Populism

Abstract

A time of turmoil and uncertainty is invading the public sphere. Under the framework of the 2020 US elections, populist leaders around the world supported Trump’s speech on Twitter, sharing a common ideology and language. This study examines which issues (issue frame), and strategies (game frame) framed the messages of populism on Twitter by analyzing the equivalences through Trump’s storytelling and checking the bias of the media in the coverage of the US elections. We selected a sample of tweets (n = 1497) and digital front pages of global newspapers (n = 112) from the date of the Trump/Biden face-to-face debate (29 September 2020) until the Democratic party candidate was proclaimed the winner of the elections by the media (7 November 2020). Using a content analysis method based on triangulation (quantitative and qualitative-discursive), we analyzed the Twitter accounts of five leaders (@realDonalTrump, @MLP_officiel, @matteosalvinimi, @Santi_ABASCAL, and @Jairbolsonaro) and five digital front pages (The New York Times, O Globo, Le Monde, La Repubblica, and El País). The results show that populist politicians reproduced the discourse of fraud and conspiracy typical of Trump’s politics on Twitter. The negative bias of the media was also confirmed, giving prominence to a rhetoric of disinformation that overlaps with the theory of populism.

Keywords

• political populism
• Trump
• Twitter
• elections
• United States
• polarization