ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the discourse of Donald J. Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton on Twitter during the 2016 presidential campaign through a content analysis of their official accounts, @realDonaldTrump and @HillaryClinton, looking for traces of populism. A key ingredient of Trump’s rhetorical formula is the disqualification of the source of given information in 43% of the Republican’s tweets versus 20% of Clinton’s. The discourse of Donald Trump shows a higher recurrence of populist ideological features as compared to Hillary Clinton, especially when considering the traits of self-promotion and attacks to the political system. However sage, Trump’s online campaigning was marred by its unfair play on two dimensions: the circulation of conspiracy theories and the use of an extremely uncivil tone that received accusations of racism and sexism. Rhetorical devices and paralinguistic marks like exclamation points are more relevant than the populist thin ideological traits to explain the likelihood that a tweet would go viral.
