The development of Trump’s political style towards a toxic mix of populism with elitism

This paper examines the development of Donald’s Trump political style from 2016 onwards, based on speech analyses of Trump’s rallies before, during, and after his presidency. The analyses are executed with a method investigating populism as a political style in connection to elitism and pluralism. A conceptual analysis demonstrates the three concepts as closely related, even sharing one underlying semio-linguistic structure defining the meanings of the three relatively. This structure forms the core of a speech analysis model outlining all possible political styles as populist, pluralist, elitist, or a mixture of these. The analysis of Trump’s speeches with this method shows that Trump’s style was mainly populist (with some pluralist touches) during the presidential campaign in 2016. During his presidency, his style developed towards a mix of populism with elitism. The populist-elitist blend has the potential danger of encouraging undemocratic behavior, as it combines a belief in oneself as the best leader with the endorsement of the people who vote for you as the best people because they vote for you. This is a fallacy; moreover, it is principally anti-democratic, as promoting one people as better than other people is essentially at odds with democracy. The paper holds parts of a doctoral thesis analyzing speeches from 2016-2018, defended in 2020 (Schoor, 2020), supplemented with analyses of speeches after Trump resigned from his presidency.