ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how Jair Bolsonaro's campaign drew from, and participated in, the enregisterment of semiotic and linguistic forms that have figured in contemporary Brazil as a register of the “people.” It focuses on the historical conditions for the emergence of the populist register that the Bolsonaro campaign appropriated and commoditized in its digital strategy of recruiting voters. The chapter looks at indirect evidence of the discursive patterns of populist branding in Bolsonaro's campaign. It explains the two main opposing populist strategies in the Brazilian elections, in addition to showing how these populist accounts projected brands of Brazil for different transnational circuits. The chapter examines a folk rationalization of Bolsonaro's electoral marketing. It discusses the accomplishments and pitfalls of Bolsonaro's main branding trope, “Brazil above everything. God above everyone” – a slogan that is lodged in the same citational circuit as Donald Trump's main branding of the United States, “Make America great again.”.
