Donald Trump and the Cultural Atmospheres of American Populism
This article examines Donald J. Trump’s populism as a mediatized and culturally produced phenomenon shaped by popular entertainment and contemporary media economies. Unlike earlier American populists, Trump’s rise has been inseparable from his long-standing presence in celebrity culture, reality tel...
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| Udgivet i: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/map, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
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2026
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| Online adgang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | This article examines Donald J. Trump’s populism as a mediatized and culturally produced phenomenon shaped by popular entertainment and contemporary media economies. Unlike earlier American populists, Trump’s rise has been inseparable from his long-standing presence in celebrity culture, reality television, tabloid media, and digital platforms. The analysis foregrounds how Trump’s rhetorical style, affective appeals, and antagonistic performances draw on televisual conventions of spectacle, dramatization, and character-play, while aligning with authoritarian forms of personalization, demagoguery, and leader-centered legitimacy. Through qualitative analysis of speeches, media appearances, The Apprentice, and social-media messaging, alongside scholarship on competing conceptions of populism, the article shows how constructions of populism on the American screen have evolved from twentieth-century fictional models to contemporary reality-TV logics of governance. Situated within an attention economy structured by techno-capitalist imperatives, these logics privilege affect over deliberation and enable the normalization of authoritarian power. The case contributes to debates on the cultural foundations of contemporary right-wing populism and the role of entertainment media in producing political legitimacy. |
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