I got 40 million in my pocket: A functional idea analysis on a selection of President Donald J. Trump’s Tweets in relation to political populist theories

Sammanfattning: Through a functional idea analysis, this study explores and discuss what possible strategies President Donald J. Trump has on Twitter based on a selection of Mr. Trump’s tweets. The material is based on six tweets within three policy categories (Healthcare, the U.S./Mexican Border Wall and the Media) with two tweets in each category. The tweets were selected from the highest respectively lowest amount of retweets. The methods for the functional idea analysis are based on Evert Vedung’s theories and the theoretical framework is based on theories on political populism. The assumption was that President Trump uses populist rhetorical strategies in the tweets with the highest amount of retweets. In the least retweeted messages, the assumption was to find less populist strategies. The purpose of this study was to explore the functions of the tweets through the lens of populism in order to examine what can be said on Mr. Trump’s rhetorical approaches on Twitter. The findings show that Trump uses rhetorical populism throughout the material, regardless how many retweets the message had. Through the functional idea analysis and political populist theories, this study finds that the selected material consists of classic populist rhetorics which are strategically outlined in order to cover facts behind often antiestablishment arguments.