Who’s to Blame? Framing “Them” During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Throughout the pandemic, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have been prominent voices in American political discourse. Since the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump’s right-wing and Sanders’s left-wing populist rhetoric has seemed to resonate with Americans. Both have used the internet to spread populist messages to their audience, thereby framing an antagonism between an in-group, “us”, and an out-group, “them”. In Trump’s case, “they” are liberal elites and the Democratic Party, in Sanders’s case, “they” are big businesses and the wealthy. When the COVID-19 crisis hit the U.S. in early 2020, however, both re-adjusted their framing of who “they” are and how they are to blame for the state of the country. During the course of the pandemic in 2020, Trump re-aligned his framing of the out-group multiple times. Opposing a country-wide lockdown in the spring, he blamed ‘liberals’ and the Democratic Party for wanting to slow down the economy. When governors of the Democratic Party took action to contain the pandemic, Trump spoke out against their ‘authoritarian’ measures. While he retained Democrats and liberals in the out-group, the signifier “them” increasingly referred to medical experts, whose opinions were largely disregarded. As the administration took the pandemic more seriously in the following months, medical experts were briefly embraced in the in-group in terms of Trump’s rhetoric, only to be relegated to “them” once again, when expert advice did not align with Trump’s views or undermined his statements. During his presidential campaign, Sanders had stayed true to his long-term framing of Wall Street, billionaires, and large corporations as “them”. When the suspension of Sanders’ presidential campaign coincided with the surge of COVID-19 cases in April of 2020, he too re-aligned his framing. Sanders turned from rallying political support to responding to the coronavirus spread, thereby adapting his portrayal of the out-group to include not only the wealthy, but also Trump and the Republican Party. Calling for bipartisan legislative action, such as coronavirus relief, he framed Republicans as unwilling to cooperate, although the lives of Americans were at stake. He had no hope of “them” using their power to stop the virus from spreading, thereby failing “us”, the American people. Analyzing both Trump and Sanders’s speech shows how they strategically changed the framing of their out-groups. This also allows for a comparison of populist communication strategies of differing ideological backgrounds during a crisis. A corpus analysis of their public statements released since early 2020, coupled with a qualitative analysis of the texts, traces the adaptation of their positions, and provides insights into how framing can serve as a malleable strategy that can be reapplied towards a variety of situations.