Trump's populist discourse and affective politics, or on how to move 'the People' through emotion

Recursively in history, emotions such as social anger, moral satiety, distrust of the elite and the Establishment, among others, have all contributed to politicians' encouragement and exploitation of a rather emotionally charged discourse (Block, E., and R. Negrine. 2017. "The Populist Communication Style: Toward a Critical Framework." International Journal of Communication 11: 178-197). In their self-imposed capacity as mouthpiece for 'the People', populist leaders have successfully given vent to the expression of some of these emotions. The fact that emotion permeates all levels of linguistic description (Alba-Juez, L., and G. Thompson. 2014. "The Many Faces and Phases of Evaluation." In Evaluation in Context, edited by L. Alba-Juez, and G. Thompson, 3-23. Amsterdam, PA: John Benjamins, 10-11) makes its examination a fascinating enterprise. In this paper, we discuss the role played by emotion in the production of populist discourse; to this end, we examine a very well-known example of populist rhetoric, i.e. Donald Trump, under the lens of Appraisal Theory (Martin, J. R., and P. R. R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; Bednarek, M. 2008. Emotion Talk Across Corpora. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). In particular, we employ a refined model of the affect subsystem (i.e. Benitez-Castro, M. a., and E. Hidalgo-Tenorio. 2019. "Rethinking Martin and White's Affect Taxonomy: A Psychologically-Inspired Approach to the Linguistic Expression of Emotion." In Emotion in Discourse, edited by L. Mackenzie, and L. Alba-Juez, 301-332. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) to analyse seven speeches delivered by the US President in the last four years. Our study helps uncover a set of strategies and patterns showing how this unconventional politician's emotion-driven language manages to develop a more inclusive in-group identity uniting the members of an angry, scared, frustrated and unsure audience.