“I think that maybe I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Twitter”. Donald Trump’s Populist Style on Twitter

This paper discusses the discursive strategies employed by Donald Trump, the newly-elected President of the USA, in his prolific activity on Twitter, and localizes them in the context of populism. Trump made extensive use of Twitter to articulate his narrative as a presidential candidate and develop his own populist “style” (Moffitt 2016). This paper therefore analyses Trump’s communication strategy by addressing the political and the linguistic dimensions of his activity on Twitter: it specifically analyses some of the thematic and the lexico-grammatical features employed by Trump in the construction of his policies. Trump’s tweets of the thirty days leading to his election on 8 November 2016 have been compared with the dataset of tweets of the same period by Trump’s main opponent, Hillary Clinton. It has been argued that Trump’s use of hashtags, a function of Twitter based on topic which is fundamental for the “ambient affiliation” (Zappavigna 2011, 2012) typical of Twitter, is a defining element of his populist style and played to his advantage in his competition with Clinton.