The Populist Leader. Self-Representational Strategies in Donald Trump and Matteo Salvini

This volume focuses on the self-representational strategies used by Donald Trump and Matteo Salvini in their far-right populist discourses. Looking at the recent revival of (far-right) populism worldwide, it is crucial to address why and how this is happening. The author’s main idea is to identify the most common discursive strategies that contribute to these leaders’ successfulness by revealing similarities and differences, while also investigating a possible evolution of populist discourse as both tweets and traditional speeches are analysed. This book provides a comparative analysis carried out combining Critical Discourse Analysis (Machin and Mayr 2023) and Corpus Linguistics (Baker 2006; Partington et al. 2013). The data (tweets and traditional speeches) were retrieved during the last three months of election campaigns and the first seven months in government to examine both discursive strategies related to Trump’s and Salvini’s self-promotion as leaders, as well as those used during their time in government. In order to investigate the self-representation of Donald Trump and Matteo Salvini as populist leaders, foregrounding their political storytelling and design of leadership, the author relies on Charteris-Black’s (2006) model for leadership communication and on Seargeant’s (2020) framework to analyse political storytelling.