Donald Trump in Power

Discourse, Performativity, Identification

Bibliographic Data

ID7737352
AuthorsGiorgos Venizelos (0000-0002-4007-4245, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume49
Issue4-5
Pages647-667
Publication date2023-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCritical Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0896-9205 • E-ISSN: 1569-1632
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/08969205221118223
OpenAlexW4292860089
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited59

Donald Trump’s style is often described as provocative and his administration as catastrophic. Despite this, his popularity remained high throughout his term in office, and in the 2020 US elections, he received 10 million votes more than in 2016. This paper investigates the paradox of political identification through a discursive, performative and stylistic framework. It argues that policy outcomes and rhetorical consistency do not suffice in understanding identification. Rather, transgression – which is typical of populist performativity – plays a pivotal role in interpellating affective collective subjectivities. This article investigates the case of Donald Trump, from his emergence in 2015 until the 2021 Capitol insurgence. It employs discourse and visual analysis to study Trump’s rhetoric and performativity, integrating this with in-depth interviews and ethnographic research to examine the ways his style resonated with his supporters. It concludes that charismatic performativity and transgression play a crucial role in political identification regardless of the quality of institutional performance

Aesthetics · Linguistics · Performative utterance · Performativity · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Gender Studies · History · Law · Populism, Right-Wing Movements · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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