”A great and beautiful wall”. Racism and populism in Donald Trump’s discourse on immigration

This paper focuses on Trump’s aggressive language on immigration. By analyzing a data set made of public speeches, interviews, and statements from Trump’s official website,, the paper will look at how certain lexico-grammatical and intertextual choices in Trump’s representation of immigration display all the typical features of a populist agenda. Trump’s texts will be analyzed according to Wodak’s Discourse-Historical approach: Trump’s own “politics of fear” and language on immigration are evidence of the strong currency of values associated with right wing, ethno-nationalist populism, once the core ideological tenets only of certain fringe movements such as the Tea Party, but now firmly established in mainstream politics.