'Make America Great Again'

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University of Amsterdam ‘English: Language and Society’ Master Thesis

‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Italians First’: a comparative Critical Discourse Analysis of two right-wing populist discourses on Twitter

Student: Alessia Sanghez Student Number: 11631325 Supervisor: Manon van der Laaken

Academic Year 2017/2018

Index 1. Introduction 5 2. Theoretical framework 9 2.2 The socio-political background of U.S. and Italy 13 2.2.1 America First 13 2.2.2 Italy First 16 2.3 The power of political slogans in the hashtag era 18 2.4 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Social Media 21 3. Methodology 23 3.1 Critical Discourse Analysis approaches 25 4. Analysis 31 4.1. Analysis, part 1: Analysis of ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Italians First’ tweets 31 4.1.1. Categorization 31 4.1.2 Critical Discourse Analysis of ‘Make America Great Again ‘ and ‘Italians First’ tweets 33 4.2.1. Analysis, Part 2: Analysis of Trump and Salvini’s anti-immigration rhetoric 53 4.2.2. Analysis of Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric 53 4.2.3 Analysis of Matteo Salvini’s anti-immigration rhetoric 58 5. Discussion and Conclusions 63 References 69

1. Introduction In recent years, the upsurge of right-wing populist parties (RWPPs) across Europe and beyond has drawn the attention of many scholars and politicians (Wodak and Krzyżanowski, 2017) to the number of ‘discursive shifts’ that has affected media and public discourses (Wodak and Krzyżanowski, 2017; see also Feldman and Jackson 2013; Muller 2017; Wodak et al. 2013; Wodak 2003, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017). As Wodak (2017) notes, the Eurobarometer Poll in Autumn 2015 indicated a general feeling of disillusionment all over EU towards the European institutions (Standard Eurobarometer, 2015, 84). The origin of people’s distrust can be dated back to 2008, when a global and European crisis affected the international situation on many fronts: economic crisis, Euro-zone crisis, refugee crisis, terroristic attacks. These last two issues, in particular, have fostered “an ethno-nationalist sentiment in many European countries” and beyond (e.g. in the United States, among others) (Richardson & Colombo, 2014; Bartlett et. al., 2012 on Hungary; Bartlett et. al., 2012 on Lega Nord). Many people believe that the phenomenon of immigration is the primary channel through which Islamic terrorism finds its gateway; at the same time, they have lost trust in the EU and their own national administrations which are considered not to be concerned enough about these problems (Richardson & Colombo, 2014). This climate of political unsteadiness has encouraged the gradual appearance of right wing populists and extreme right parties: “new and self-defined saviors of ‘the people’[…] present themselves as authentic and trustworthy […] in contrast to the untrustworthy political classes, perceived (and presented)1 by them as having failed” (Wodak, 2017; see also Hochschild 2016; Krzyżanowski and Wodak, 2009; Pelinka, 2013; Wodak, 2015). After the re-election of Victor Orban in Hungary in 2010, the success of the Polish right- wing populist ‘Law and Justice Party’, and the popularity of Recep Tayyp Erdogan in Turkey, both the unexpected election of Donald J. Trump and the so-called ‘Brexit’ generated a feeling of anxiety among mainstream political institutions (Wodak and Krzyżanowski, 2017), whose attention was then addressed towards those countries where the emergence of RWPPs coincided with the period of national elections. This is the case in Austria whose right-wing populist

1 Emphasis mine.

Austrian Freedom Party was expected to win the elections in December 2016, and the Netherlands where RWP politician Geert Wilders was considered one of the key candidates of March 2017. Even though these populist characters eventually lost against pro-Europe and more liberal figures, “the RWP election saga is far from over” (Wodak and Krzyżanowski, 2017). On March 4, Italy held a general election which was represented in the media - e.g. Financial Times - as another political test for the EU (see Sanghez, 2018). One of the key candidates of the election was Matteo Salvini, secretary of the ‘Lega’ (League), whose anti- immigration, anti-Europe and anti-establishment rhetoric was accompanied and represented by his slogan ‘Prima gli Italiani’ (Italians first), which became viral both on Twitter and Facebook (Sanghez, 2018). Not only have the elections shown that the League is the most popular party within the right-wing coalition (the League obtained 13% more of votes compared to the elections of 2013), they have demonstrated that the left-wing coalition has definitively lost the approval of the Italian people. The most voted party has resulted to be ‘Movimento 5 Stelle’ (M5S) - the Five Star Movement, a populist party which has no political flag, guided by Luigi di Maio. These two parties together have formed the so-called ‘Governo del cambiamento’ (‘government of change’) whose Prime Minister is Giuseppe Conte (M5S), and vice-presidents are Matteo Salvini and Luigi di Maio, respectively also Home Secretary and Minister of Labor. Even though scholars have affirmed that any expression of right-wing populism is “necessarily different” and must be approached in a context-dependent way, Wodak and Krzyżanowski (2017) note that ‘standardized models’ have emerged, such as ‘Orbanism’ or ‘Trumpism’. While the first one refers to nationalist and collectivistic versions of populism, the US-American ‘Trumpism’ came to indicate a form of populism characterized by the presence of a charismatic leader who presents himself – especially through the use of Social Media - as the savior of the country, fostering a politics of nationalism, protectionism, “our country first” and border security. Many of these Trumpist characteristics can be observed in the political campaign of the Italian politician Matteo Salvini who has personally declared his affiliation with the political project of the 45th President of the United States. In this sense, the so-called Trumpist model can function as a starting point for a comparative investigation, where Matteo Salvini’s right-wing populism is the second element of the analysis. Wodak and Krzyżanowski (2017) analyze the Trumpist model as a well-established type of populism, so searching for differences and similarities between the American and the

Italian variants of RWP may provide significant insights into the populist phenomenon at a global level; in particular into how Western countries (Italy, in this case, where right-wing- populist Matteo Salvini has become Home Secretary) are integrating foreign populist discourses (the American one, in this case), while developing their own national rhetoric. As both politicians have shown high skills in exploiting ‘the alternative public sphere of the web’ - in particular through the use of Social Media (Kreis, 2017; Sanghez, 2018) - the current thesis uses Twitter as the area of investigation of Salvini and Trump’s discourses. According to Wodak (2015) social platforms represent the ideal space for right-wing populists to express their rhetoric relying on the right-wing populist perpetuum mobile: namely a discursive style that includes an intentional and regular provocation of scandals, the dynamics of victimization and the launching of conspiracy theories, exploited by politicians to represent themselves as saviors. These particular discursive features characterizing the RWP way of elaborating imageries and ideologies is also indicated by Wodak (2017) as the representation of a ‘post-truth’ world in which extremely vague and provocative arguments are presented in a way that make them immune to any approval or denial. For example, Twitter has been widely used both by Trump and Salvini as a means to mobilize their voters during their political campaign, and their main slogans ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Italians First’ have been posted numerous times on their Twitter pages. Their political discourses on Twitter also included their anti-immigration rhetoric, an important part both of their political campaign as well as of their political discourse in general. Thus, considering that (a) both Trump and Salvini’s election campaigns have been characterized by the viral use of political slogans throughout public speeches and the media with a particular concentration on social platforms, and as (b) both politicians include anti- immigration rhetoric in their political discourses, the aim of the current thesis is to apply several approaches to CDA in order to: (a) investigate and compare Donald J. Trump and Matteo Salvini’s right-wing populist variants through the study of their ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Italians First’ tweets and (b) investigating and comparing their anti-immigration discourses on Twitter. As the main goals of Critical Discourse Analysis include studying how ideologies and identities are reproduced in discourse (Van Dijk, 2015; Fairclough, 2001), and considering that right-wing populist discourses always appeal to a sharp ideological division between ‘us’ and

‘them’ (Mudde, 2004; Wodak, 2017), the current research aims at exploring from different perspectives the societal differentiation promoted by the American and the Italian right-wing- populist variants in order to give a contribution to the existing literature on the 21st century right- wing populist phenomenon.

2. Theoretical framework

2.1. Right Wing Populism (RWP) Even though RWP has grown in popularity over the last few years, it has a long history, dating back to the 1970s when Marine Le Pen created the Front National, or to the 1980s and 1990s when, while in Austria Jorg Haider was the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, in Italy the era of Silvio Berlusconi was just at its beginning (Wodak and Krzyżanowski, 2017). Today, the political scenario of Western societies shows several examples of right-wing populist parties (RWPPs). The political landscapes of Poland, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Hungary, Italy, Turkey, USA and Germany have seen the emergence of right-wing populist factions. Even though scholars argue that each variant of RWP is different and context-dependent (Wodak and Krzyżanowski, 2017) some general features can be attributed to all the expressions of RWP. In particular, Wodak (2017) in her paper reports a definition of right-wing populism provided by Krasteva (2017):

Right-wing populism is an expression and catalyst for the transition from class politics to value politics, from party politics to symbolic politics, from ideological to identity politics, from socio-economic to cultural cleavages.

This definition indicates a controversial, direct, and highly provocative discursive style that is primarily designed to address ‘the people’, namely the part of the population that right-wing politicians claim to be devoted to: “populism is an ideology that considers society as ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people” (Mudde 2004, p. 544). Such a dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ represents the anchorage point for the “nativist exclusionary ideologies” of right-wing populism (Wodak and Krzyżanowski, 2017), according to which ‘the people’ have been betrayed, oppressed, defeated, stripped of their sovereignty by the corrupt establishment. The identity of ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ differs according to the social context where the populist discourse has developed. ‘The people’ can refer to the poorest part of the population, to the middle-class,

9 to the entrepreneurs. ‘The elite’ can refer to the political class, religious figures, mass-media, intellectuals. In general, as Wodak (2017) points out: Such a Manichean opposition portrays these two groups as vehemently opposed to each other, two epistemic communities, one defined as powerful, the other as powerless; one described as good, innocent, and hard-working, the other as bad, corrupt, criminal, lazy and unjustly privileged and so forth.

Another key feature of the RWP discourse is the idealization of the “heartland” (Taggart, 2000), also indicated by the analysts as “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983; Wodak, 2008): these terms refer to a territory - most of the cases corresponding to the nation-state – whose perimeter is not only delimited by its geographical borders, but also by its history, traditions and values. Within the RWP discourse, this supposedly homogenous entity is usually represented as being “threatened by the presence of residents supposedly belonging to a different culture” (Wodak, 2008, p. 66). The elaboration of a rhetoric against these ‘unwelcome residents’ represents another crucial characteristic of the RWP discourse: foreign people, usually corresponding to immigrants or ethnic minorities, are defined by RWPPs as threatening the safety and the integrity of the local people in many different ways. Scholars show that RWP discourses tend to work on an ideology that depicts foreign people as ‘the others’, people who are too different from ‘Us’, and such a difference may damage ‘Us’ (Van Dijk, 1993; Wodak, 2015; Wodak, 2017): ‘they’ are aliens, whose ‘race’, religion or language contrast with the principles of the ‘true population’. Wodak (2017) notes that within the RWP discourse ‘the others’ are also used as ‘scapegoats’, as they are usually blamed for stealing jobs from the local people and for taking advantage of the welfare benefits. ‘The others’ are usually immigrants, but they can also be homosexuals, welfare recipients, Jews, minorities, Brussels, the United Nations or capitalists and so forth (Wodak, 2017). RWPPs tend to appeal to an alliance between ‘the elite’ and ‘the others’, a sort of secret deal that undermines the interest of the ‘true people’, identified by the analysists as “elitist conspiracy” (Wodak, 2017; see also Bauman, 2016). The allusion to a threat of “enemies inside and outside” favors the RWPPs’ attempt to trigger people’s feeling of disenchantment - or ressentiment (Wodak, 2017) - with the establishment. However, not only does their discourse appeal to elitist conspiracies and people’s feelings of disillusionment, it is also characterized by promises of a radical change that would

10 guarantee that the people will have ‘their sovereignty back’. Although these promises are usually vague, unspecified, highly emotional and persuasive, Pels (2012) notes that it is “erroneous to think there is no substance behind its political style. […] It is precisely through its dynamic mix of substance and style that populist politics has gained an electoral lead position in current media democracy” (see also Wodak and Krzyżanowski, 2017). It may be possible to argue that the power of the right-wing populist perpetuum mobile lies in the politicians’ ability to take advantage of and to base their propaganda on the current ‘fear’ of the voters: “fear of losing one’s job; fear of ‘strangers’, such as e.g. migrants; fear of losing national autonomy; fear of losing old traditions and values; fear of climate change; disappointment and even disgust with mainstream politics and corruption; anger about the growing gap between reach and poor […]” (Wodak and Krzyżanowski, 2017). Thus, as Betz (1994) points out, “it is within this context of growing public pessimism, anxiety and disaffection that the rise and success of radical right-wing populism in Western Europe finds at least partial explanation”. However, also wider socio-political dynamics must be taken into account in order to explain the upswing of RWP and its discourse. Scholars (Wodak and Krzyżanowski, 2017; Galasinska and Krzyżanowski, 2009; Krzyżanowski and Wodak, 2009; Triandafyllidou, Wodak and Krzyżanowski, 2009) indicate the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 as one of the most crucial events in Europe in terms of change: among other factors, it marked the beginning of the political and societal development of Eastern and Central Europe (CEE), consequently generating a migration phenomenon. This allowed RWPPs to primarily focus their political agenda on anti-immigration and xenophobic rhetoric (Wodak and Van Dijk, 2000; see also Wodak and Krzyżanowski, 2017). More recently, the global crisis of 2008, the war in Syria and the consequent migration crisis, the upsurge of ISIS, and the rise of terroristic attacks have represented fertile ground for the anti-establishment, anti-Europe, anti-globalization and anti- immigration discourse of RWPPs. Even though RWPPs are all designed to respond to different social contexts and people’s concerns, scholars have noted that at least two standardized models are emerging: ‘Orbanism’ (named after the Prime Minister of Hungary, Victor Orbán) and ‘Trumpism’ (named after the 45th President of the USA, Donald J. Trump).

The term ‘Orbanism’ or ‘à la Orbán’ generally refers to the forms of RWP that have developed in CEE. Victor Orbán is gradually transforming the fragile democracy of Hungary in an ‘illiberal democracy’, the same way as Recep Tayyp Erdogan has been doing in Turkey (Wodak and Krzyżanowski, 2017): their political agenda is dominated by a nativist, xenophobic, anti-pluralist and anti-Europe rhetoric that challenges the principles of democracy as they have been traditionally adopted by Western countries. In the same way, the right-wing populist Law and Justice Party - which has governed Poland since 2015 - has crucially limited the freedom of expression, while spreading an euro-sceptic rhetoric (Wodak and Krzyżanowski, 2017). In particular, its Secretary Jaroslaw Kaczynski, “who holds no office other than MP, acts as Poland’s de facto leader” (see the article on the online magazine The Economist2), resulting as a threat for the democratic principle of political pluralism. Meanwhile, in the USA another right-wing populist voice won the approval of his voters: Donald J. Trump, elected President of the United States in November 2016. However, while the characterizing features of ‘Orbanism’ lie in its governing style, and ‘Trumpism’ partly shares the Orbanist political agenda, the defining feature of Trump’s right-wing populism seems to be its “mediatized and individualized style” (Wodak and Krzyżanowski, 2017). Trump’s victory is largely attributed to his perpetual use of social media, Twitter in particular, through which he constructed his image as a savior, the one who was going to ‘Make America Great Again’ (Wodak and Krzyżanowski, 2017; Kreis, 2017). His political campaign was consistently dominated by controversial tweets against the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, against the media and his opponents (Kreis, 2017). The ‘mediatized’ model has also been adopted by other right-wing populist exponents, like the Austrian Norbert Hofer who addressed his voters through Facebook during the presidential election of 2016; or Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League (the Italian right-wing populist party), who widely used Twitter and Facebook to promote his ‘Italians First’ rhetoric during the general elections of March 2018.

2 ‘Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party is doing lasting damage’, The Economist

2.2 The socio-political background of U.S. and Italy 2.2.1 America First The 2016 American presidential elections were considered “one of the most contentious ever” (Edwards, 2018). Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton’s differences in terms of political views were conspicuous on many fronts, concerning both their political programs as well as the style of their political campaigns (e.g. Trump’s campaign has been characterized by a wide use of social media). However, the most striking difference was related to “their foreign policy visions, particularly about the United States’ role in the world” (Edwards, 2018). When World War II was over, the primary goal of global institutions was that of guaranteeing “absolute security” (Christopher Layne, 2006; see also Dunmire, 2014). Because at that time the United States were recognized as the absolute leader of the world, the US thought that the key to reach that objective was constituted by the adoption of “strategic internationalism”: namely the idea that the hegemonic role of the United States at a global level was needed to preserve international steadiness and stability (Christopher Layne, 2006; see also Dunmire, 2014). Thus, in order for this liberal democracy to be preserved all over the world, the US post- Cold War administrations decided to undertake a “commitment to economic openness, cooperating among democratic governments, engaging multilateral institutions, and promoting a willingness for the United Stated to assume the responsibilities of a global leadership role” (Edwards, 2018). This commitment is also known as ‘Open Door’ approach (Williams, 1959), an “expansive conception” deriving from “the grand strategy of ‘extra-regional hegemony’, crafted during World War II” (Dunmire, 2014), and shaped on the basis of four key convictions: - first, “the security of the United States required the modernization of ‘emerging nations’” (Latham, 2000); - secondly, the “nation’s domestic well-being depended upon sustained […] overseas economic expansion throughout a world of nations ideologically sympathetic to US” (Dunmire, 2014);

- third, as America aimed at ‘expanding its zones of peace’, the paradigm “disconnectedness defines danger” was followed; - finally, the ‘Open Door World’ worked on the basis of “’the virtuos circle’: a complex set of linkages which marries US economic prosperity and the security of its core values” (Layne, 2006; see also Williams, 1959; and Dunmire, 2014).

Image 1. The virtuos circle of the ‘Open Door’ Principle: Deictic center

Overseas nations USA ideologically Liberal sympathetic Democracy to US

This set of beliefs led the American administrations of both Republican and Democratic flags to adopt and defend the ‘Open Door’ approach throughout the post-Cold War era, until the presidency of Barack Obama (Williams, 1959; Dunmire, 2014). On several occasions during his political campaign, Trump insisted on the fact that the “U.S. foreign policy was in a state of chaos” and that the postwar globalist ideology followed by his predecessors had to be replaced by the ‘America First’ principle: he claimed that the globalist approach “constituted a pollution that weakened U.S. sovereignty and its status as an exceptional nation” (Edward, 2018, p.181). In particular, Trump accused previous administrations to have switched the focus from national safekeeping to the promotion of nation-building abroad, from investing in national corporations to subsidizing foreign companies. In his view, both commitments have damaged the American economic system, as a significant number of American people are unemployed or live in poverty. Trump’s rhetoric thus appealed to people’s anger and discontent for this supposedly unfair economic system, promoting an idea of the elite being more interested in going into business with foreigners rather than in taking care of the American workers. In terms of trade, during his

14 political campaign Trump repeatedly scapegoated U.S. previous administrations for the trade deals they made, such as NAFTA and China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization. He claimed that those deals damaged American workers and diminished US freedom and independence (Edwards, 2018). He addressed the disillusionment of the people from other perspectives as well, concerning the unreliability of global institutions, the weakness of the trade deals and the US immigration policy. According to Trump, the globalist approach led his country “to lose control of its destiny” in that it made “the United States dependent upon others” (Edwards, 2018). For instance, he expressed his disappointment towards multilateral organizations like the NATO, claiming that only the US honors its financial commitments. Trump also criticized Obama and Clinton’s interventions into Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Libya, claiming that their interest in nation-building had highly damaged the US army, the US economic situation as well as the national safety (Edwards, 2018). In particular, after the terrorist attack in San Bernardino and in Orlando, Trump took advantage of the events to discredit Hillary Clinton’s proposal to increase Syrian refugee emigration to the United States: Trump considered those attacks to be a proof that the United States’ immigration system was importing Radical Islamic Terrorism. In his view, the construction of a “great wall” to the southern border and the limitation of immigration from Islamic countries was needed to fight the threat. To sum up, the 2016 Presidential election eventually signaled a change of direction in terms of what had been the American role in the world over the past centuries. Trump’s idea of converting the ‘Open Door’ approach into a politics of ‘my country first’ has achieved the approval of the American people who voted for him, thus trusting him as a President, and his “change of regime” (as reported by an article on The Economist3). On November 8th 2016, when Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States the US commitment to promote its international role as guarantor of global safeness (Dunmire, 2014) was eventually converted into a politics of isolationism and ethno-nationalism. The rhetoric of “build the wall” and “our country first” inaugurated the politics of fear (Wodak,

3 www.economist.com/news/leaders/21709951

2015) whose echo reached the ideology of many overseas right-wing populist parties, like Matteo Salvini’s ‘Lega’:

“We are gonna have a country that was never so great. You watch, in so many different ways. You hear a lot of talk about how we’re becoming a globalized world but the relationship people-value in this country are local. Families, cities, states, countries, they are local. We are competing in the world, we wanna compete in the world, but we are gonna compete in the world where is a two-way road, not a one- way road. The advantages are going to come back to our country and they haven’t for many many years. There is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship, we pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” (Donald J. Trump, Cincinnati, Ohio, “Thank You Tour 2016”, 12/01/2016)

2.2.2 Italy First Italy held a general election on 4th March 2018 that was defined by the media as a very important political test for the EU. The pre-election polls had indeed signaled that Matteo Salvini’s party, the League (L), and his anti-immigrant and anti-elitist rhetoric were reaching the approval of a huge percentage of Italian voters. The major protagonists of the elections have been: the PD, leading party of the center-left coalition, whose leader is Matteo Renzi; the Five Star Movement (M5S), an independent populist party characterized by its anti-establishment and Eurosceptic discourse, guided by Luigi di Maio; and the League, part of the center-right coalition together with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (FI), Brothers of Italy (FdI), Us with Italy (NcI) and Energies for Italy (EpL). The election results eventually confirmed the initial prediction: the League, which obtained 17.37% of the votes, is the most voted party within the center-right coalition - gaining 13% of votes compared to the elections of 2013 - followed by Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (14.01%). The center-right coalition collected in total 37% of the votes, 15% more than the left-wing coalition whose leading party, Renzi’s PD, obtained 18.75% (7% less compared to 2013). The other parties constituting the left-wing coalition have barely reached 2% of the votes. However, the actual winner is the Five Star Movement, which collected alone 32.66% of votes. These general elections have thus determined on the one hand the undisputed victory of the Italian populist factions, and on the other the dramatic decline of the left-wing parties.

The great loss of votes registered by the left-coalition – by Matteo Renzi’s PD in particular - and the consequent emergence of populist parties like the M5S and the League can be related to the occurrence of some crucial events that led the Italian voters to mistrust the establishment: First, “Il decreto salva banche” (the “Save-banks decree”), a government operation to bail out its collapsing banks which caused outrage in Italy as the bank that the decree favored the most was Banca Etruria, where (cabinet secretary Maria Elena) Boschi’s father was vice president. At the same time many savers were left holding worthless bonds, which led to the extreme case of a bondholder committing suicide (Sanghez, 2018); Secondly, the left-wing administration’s inability to limit the growth of the number of immigrants entering Italy. The League’s anti-immigration rhetoric was particularly influential after a group of Nigerians brutally killed an 18-year-old girl on February 2018: during his campaign Matteo Salvini frequently appealed to episodes like this to raise a sentiment of fear among the Italian population and to consequently justify the necessity to ‘send immigrants home’. Another important factor that triggered people’s mistrust towards the government was represented by the series of earthquakes that devastated the center of Italy in 2016: the people accused the government of not providing sufficient aid and assistance to the victims, as very little seems to have been done for them (Sanghez, 2018). The post-election period has been characterized by three months of political instability during which Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio have attempted to form the new government together. Despite some concerns regarding the future of Italy in Europe which led President Sergio Mattarella to show some hesitation4, on May 31st 2018, he eventually approved Matteo Salvini and Luigi di Maio’s proposal for the so-called ‘governo del cambiamento’ (‘government of change’), whose Prime Minister is Giuseppe Conte (M5S). Luigi di Maio and Matteo Salvini are his vice-presidents, and have been respectively appointed as Minister of Labor and Home Secretary.

4 In their first proposal for the constitution of the government, Di Maio and Salvini proposed to President Mattarella a list of Ministers among which the name of Paolo Savona as Minster for Economic Affairs appeared. As in the past Savona had affirmed that leaving the Euro-zone would have benefitted the Italian Economy, Mattarella refused to appoint him as Minister for Economic Affairs. In the end, Giovanni Tria has been appointed.

President Sergio Mattarella’s concerns actually echoed a major concern coming from those European administrations that look at the Italian political stage as another possible ‘Brexit’: in spite of some differences between their two populist discourses (the anti-immigration discourse was not part of the M5S political campaign), the ‘Eurosceptic’ vision is an important aspect of both the League and the Five Star Movement’s rhetoric. As it happened in the US, it seems that also the Italian voters opted for a change of regime. The discontent with the previous governments led the Italian population to appreciate and believe in Matteo Salvini’s politics of “Italians First”. At the same time, the disillusionment with the major postwar institutions like Europe and with the left-wing rhetoric of internationalism, has caused the replacement of the model of ‘united nations without barriers’ with the rhetoric of ‘border’s protection’ and ‘my country first’.

2.3 The power of political slogans in the hashtag era Political slogans constitute an important characteristic of electoral politics. Usually very short and evocative, slogans summarize the main ideology of the candidate’s political propaganda. However, even though slogans have traditionally been used by politicians over the past centuries (remember Roosvelt’s “Happy Days Are Here Again” in 1932, or Silvio Berlusconi’s “Un Milione di Posti di Lavoro”5 in 1994), nowadays, thanks to the evolution of the Internet and the Social Media, hashtags are used as an efficient means to spread political catchphrases. As politics is increasingly becoming ‘social’, it is more and more common to follow entire political campaigns on Twitter, on Facebook, as well as on other social platforms (Liu, 2016; Sanghez, 2018). In order to understand the importance of the affordability of sharing political slogans on social media, an insight on the indexical power of slogans needs to be given. As Hodges (2014) points out “even in situations where detailed rehearsals of an overarching campaign narrative are not possible, slogans index that narrative and reinforce its message in the minds of voters.” According to the Bakhtinian principle of the intertextuality of discourse (Bakhtin, 1986), slogans have a key of interpretation that depends both on the context in which the phrase is pronounced and on the mental schema of the readers or hearers. The semantic value of the slogan

5 Tr. “One million jobs”

18 is thus determined by the societal ideology in which the phrase is embedded. This means that “fundamental to the circulation (and interpretation) of political slogans are the intertextual connections that link the usage of a slogan in single context (within its underlying ideology) to usage across multiple contexts (and thus across multiple ideologies) 6 where the slogan lives its’ socially charged life’” (Hodges, 2014; see also Bakhtin, 1981). This means that the initial semantic reference attributed by the speaker/writer to his catchphrase is going to be (re)shaped anytime it encounters a different context of usage (being it a TV program, radio, newspaper, the Internet) , thus reaching different audiences and different mental sets of interpretation. Even though, within a major event like a massive political campaign, mass media play a crucial role in spreading the slogan, Hodges (2014) notes that the news cycle is not sufficient for a political slogan to survive. This outcome is only guaranteed when a huge number of users assimilate and reiterate the coinage, which “requires propagation through an intertextual speech chain.” Agha (2003) defines a speech chain to be “a historical series of speech events linked together by the permutation of individuals across speech-act roles.” The speech chain generally follows this pattern: the candidate pronounces the slogan for the first time; the hearers become speakers as they repeat it both in the political speech context as well as in other context; journalists recontextualize the slogan within their report; additional audiences assimilate the slogan through journalists’ reports and join the speech chain. In brief, the speech chain determines the slogan’s social life. The current research will add a consideration about another important element of this chain: the diffusion of the slogan through social media. In recent years, social platforms are gradually replacing the use of TV, radio and other traditional means of communication for political purposes. Twitter, in particular seems to be highly popular among politicians during their political campaigns (Liu, 2016; see also Sanghez, 2018). Thanks to social media like Twitter and Facebook, sharing a catchy phrase or a political slogan is faster and more immediate, especially through the use of hashtags. An hashtag is “a word or phrase preceded by the symbol # that classifies or categorizes the accompanying text (such as tweet)” (Marriam Webster Dictionary). In this sense, its value is highly indexical as it includes in itself a series of key

6 Emphasis mine

19 concepts, arguments or ideologies, such as the whole discourse of a political campaign. It may constitute a tweet on its own - with no additional text – (i.e. #MakeAmericaGreatAgain), it can be inserted within additional text (i.e. ‘The most important thing right now is to #MakeAmericaGreatAgain’), or it can be placed at the end of the additional text as an index or a reminder of the underlying ideology of the post (i.e. ‘American people need safety. #MakeAmericaGreatAgain’)7. In terms of functions, the traditional political slogan and the political slogan by hashtag share the same objectives: they summarize the key points of a political campaign. However, in terms of ‘sociometric bias’ – e.g. the connectedness among people that affects the diffusion of the slogan - (Hodges, 2014), the political slogan by hashtag benefits from a large-scale transmission process which is fast and immediate. The crucial difference between the traditional mass media and modern social platforms lies in the fact that, while TV news, radio or newspaper constitute a passive one-way communication, social media are designed to be interactive. This means that as soon as a candidate – or supporter, or any other user – publishes a tweet containing a political slogan, any reader can click on the ‘sharing’ or ‘re-tweet’ button in order to activate the intertextual speech chain. In addition, when re-posting a tweet, the user has the chance to add his own comments, thus also accelerating the recontextualizing process. Furthermore, while the intertextuality of a traditional slogan (or any other ‘offline’ discourse) is hidden in extra- linguistic factors, the intertextual history of an hashtag is provided by the hashtag itself: when a user clicks on the hashtag, a window appears, showing both all the posts containing that particular phrase as well as related hashtags and discourses. It is also common that more hashtags, or an hashtag and a catchphrase, appear together, signaling their affiliation to the same macro-argument. As both Donald J. Trump and Matteo Salvini have made extensive use of Twitter to spread their political slogans, the current research aims at studying their right-wing populist rhetoric on Twitter through the analysis of their ‘Make America Great Again’ (or #MakeAmericaGreatAgain, #MAGA) and ‘Prima Gli Itliani’ (or #Primagliitaliani) tweets.

7 The examples are invented by the author on the basis of Donald’s Trump real tweets.

2.4 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Social Media The current study combines several approaches and theories to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in its attempt to provide a detailed picture of Donald J. Trump and Matteo Salvini’s right- wing populist discourses on Twitter. Critical Discourse Analysis is a multidisciplinary approach to the critical study of “social problems and political issues” (Van Dijk, 2015) which relies on a number of different methods and fields of research (Hart and Cap, 2014). CDA can be defined as discourse analytical research whose main goal is to investigate “the way social-power abuse and inequality are enacted, reproduced, legitimated and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context” (Van Dijk, 2015). As power relations are enacted through discourse and discourse reproduces the power relations at work, it is possible to argue that “discourse is socially constitutive as well as socially conditioned” (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997). That is, the relationship between discourse and social reality (e.g. the ideology at work) is dialectic (Fairclough, 2001) because discourse, other than “being shaped by situations, social contexts” and their underlying ideology, shapes and “constitutes itself these situations” and their ideology (cf. Hart and Cap, 2014). These dynamics of power dominance often correspond to “manipulation”, namely a cognitive mind control exerted through discursive interaction (Van Dijk, 2006). It is performed when the addresser is “manipulating the addressee in his or her role as a member of dominant collectivity”, as it is the case of a politician or the media, among others, exploiting their dominant roles (Van Dijk, 2006; see also Sanghez, 2018, p. 5). As manipulation can operate on many levels and through different channels of communication, researchers in CDA devote their attention to different aspects of power dominance, “working at different locations on the continuum that links the ‘micro-level’ (the linguistic) and the ‘macro-level’ (the social)” (Lemke, 1995; Benke, 2000; see also Hart and Cap, 2014). Among the wide number of channels of communication that are accessible nowadays, social platforms - Twitter in particular - are increasingly being used by mainstream and anti- establishment politicians to address (and manipulate, exerting their power over) the citizens (Enli & Eli Skogerbo, 2013; see also Sanghez, 2018). For this reason, many researchers recognize Twitter as an appropriate space where to investigate the dynamics of dominance realized by politicians through their use of the language (Engesser et. al., 2016; Enli & Eli Skogerbo, 2013; Enli, 2017; Theocharis et al, 2016; Kreis, 2017; Sanghez, 2018). Several studies show that social

21 media like Twitter are indeed the ideal tool for right-wing populists to perform their rhetoric of scandal and victimization (see Wodak, 2015), as they represent a semi-public platform where the border line between the public and the private space is blurred. Most importantly, the absence of the journalistic gatekeeper mediating the discourse between the speaker and his public, allows the politicians to directly address their public, through the use of an informal language (Kreis, 2017; Sanghez, 2018). The current thesis aims at providing an in-depth analysis of the spread of the right-wing populism rhetoric of Donald J. Trump and Matteo Salvini on Twitter, thus constituting an expansion of existing studies about Trump’s post-election tweets (Kreis, 2017) and Salvini’s ‘Italians First’ tweets (Sanghez, 2018). More specifically, the comparative investigation between Donald J. Trump and Matteo Salvini’s right-wing populist discourses will try to provide an answer to two explorative research questions:

RQ1. What differences/similarities – concerning their right-wing populist rhetoric – emerge from the Critical Discourse Analysis of Donald J. Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ and Matteo Salvini’s ‘Italians First’ tweets? 1a. Does their political discourse on Twitter include the iconic populist categories of ‘the people’, ‘the elite’, ‘the others’ and ‘the heartland’? Hence, can their political catchphrases be considered right-wing-populist expressions? 1b. If so, who belongs to each of these categories according to Trump and Salvini’s RWP discourses? And how is their RWP discourses elaborated in relation to these categories? RQ2. Do their right-wing populist discourses on twitter (e.g. ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Italians First’ tweets) include anti-immigration rhetoric? 1a. If so, how do the politicians legitimize their anti-immigration discourses in their tweets? i.e. how do they construct the rhetoric about the ‘us-them’ distinction?

3. Methodology The current research is divided in two parts: (1) the analysis of ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Italians First’ tweets and (2) the analysis of the anti-immigration tweets. 1. Part one: (a) Data collection: the first part is constituted by the analysis of 110 Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ and 142 Salvini’s ‘Prima gli Italiani’ (Italians First) tweets, published on their Twitter pages @realdonaldtrump and @matteosalvinimi during their election campaigns. The online application ‘Twitter Advanced Search’ has been used to filter the search results, in order to obtain only those tweets containing the words or hashtags ‘Prima Gli Italiani’ and ‘Make America Great Again’ - or ‘MAGA’ (including the word ‘America’ by itself as constituting the key element of the slogan). This online tool has also been useful in limiting the search in terms of the period when the posts have been published: in Trump’s case only the tweets published between June 2016 and November 2016 have been taken into account, while in Salvini’s case only those published between December 2017 and March 2018 (namely the equivalent of their election campaign periods). The tweets have been then collected in two separated Word documents for the analysis. (b) Categorization: ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Italians First’ tweets have been subdivided according to the populist principle they refer to (i.e. ‘the people’, ‘the elite’, ‘the others’, the ‘heartland’), in order (a) to establish whether the two political slogan can actually be considered two populist expressions and, if so, (b) to establish the differences and/or similarities concerning the importance that these categories play in their discourses. (c) Critical Discourse Analysis of ‘MAGA’ and ‘Italians First’: the analysis of the discourse expressed by each category relies on the application of four different approaches to Critical Discourse Analysis. The investigation of ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Italians First’ tweets also relies on the consideration that any discourse, including political slogans, has an intertextual history (Hodge, 2014), and that on Twitter this history can be derived by the discursive association of different hashtags within a Tweet. For instance, within the ‘Italians First’ set of tweets, the hashtag #ItaliansFirst is often accompanied by the hashtag #StopInvasion, thus indicating that the ‘Italians First’ discourse is related to the anti-immigration discourse. At the same time, the ‘Italians First’ tweets (as well as the ‘Make America Great Again’) can include phrases or

23 expressions that appeal to an anti-immigration rhetoric. Thus, the first part of the analysis also serves as a screening process to identify the hashtags or phrases that, within Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ and Salvini’s ‘Italians First’ tweets, refer to an anti-immigration rhetoric. Once the intertextual relation between Trump and Salvini’s political slogans and their anti- immigration rhetoric has been established, the second part of the analysis can take place. 2. Part two: (a) Data collection: in this case the analysis has tried to cover a publishing period that precedes, includes and follows Donald J. Trump and Matteo Salvini’s election campaigns. The online application ‘Twitter Advanced Search’ has been used again to filter the search, in order to find only those posts containing the hashtags or words ‘immigration’, ‘immigrants’, ‘illegals’, ‘wall’, borders (in Trump’s case); and only those containing ‘stop invasione’, ‘immigrazione’, ‘espulsione’, ‘espellere’, ‘clandestini’ (in Salvini’s case)8. The publishing period under analysis covers 13 months in Trump’s case and 9 months in Salvini’s case. As the current thesis relies on a qualitative analysis, the difference of the length of the periods under analysis should not be regarded as an issue: the most important factor affecting the comparison of the two sets of tweets is constituted by the relevance and equality of the contexts in which the two anti-immigration discourses develop. For this reason, the investigation takes into account: - Trump’s anti-immigration tweets published between March 2016 and June 2016 (pre- election campaign); between June 2016 and November 2016 (election campaign); and between December 2017 and May 2018 (post-election campaign, and also contemporary to the whole development of the anti-immigration rhetoric of Matteo Salvini); 98 tweets in total. - Matteo Salvini’s anti-immigration tweets published between September 2017 and December 2017 (pre-election campaign); between December 2017 and March 2018 (election campaign) and between March 2018 and May 2018 (post-election campaign); 96 tweets in total. The posts have been then collected in two separated Word documents and analyzed. (b) Critical Discourse Analysis of Trump and Salvini anti-immigration tweets: five approaches to CDA are implemented to establish the differences and/or similarities between Trump and Salvini’s .

8 Translation: ‘no more invasion’, ‘immigration’, ‘to expel’, ‘expulsion’.

3.1 Critical Discourse Analysis approaches In order to answer RQ1, Reisigl and Wodak’s Linguistic Model in Discourse Historical Approach (2009) together with Van Leeuwen’s (1996) Socio Semantic approach and Van Dijk’s (2006) Short Term Memory and Long Term Memory manipulation are going to be implemented. For what concerns RQ2, Reisigl and Wodak (2009), Van Leeuwen (1996) and Van Dijk’ (2006) models will be used again together with Van Dijk’s (1993) theory about the socio-cognitive formation model and Cap’s (2013) proximization theory. The last two approaches will provide two different perspectives from which to analyze Trump and Salvini’s anti-immigration rhetoric, and the related ‘us-them’ distinction.

Reisigl and Wodak (2009) in their linguistic model in Discourse Historical Approach use ‘triangulation’ (i.e. collecting data from different sources, or using different methods of data collection) to extrapolate as many information about context as possible. The study of the context involves the analysis of the use of language in texts in the attempt to relate these discursive events to the historical sources and the socio-political background in which they are embedded (Baker & Ellece, 2011). In practice, the researcher analyzes the ‘discursive strategies’, i.e. the linguistic features adopted to achieve particular ideological constructions - such as stereotypes or generalizations - that reflect the socio-political and historical context in which they take place (Baker & Ellece, 2011). In order to define and relate the socio-political and historical context of Trump and Salvini’s right-wing populist rhetoric to their ideological constructions, their (populist) slogans (‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Italians First’) on Twitter are going to be analyzed. In particular the analytical categories selected for the analysis include: ‘nomination strategies’, indicating the way ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’ are constructed (i.e. who are the social actors of a given discourse); ‘predication strategies’ which attribute positive or negative evaluation to social actors; ‘argumentation strategy’ (use of certain topoi) adopted to justify positive or negative evaluations; ‘perspectivisation’ or ‘discourse representation’, through which authors express their involvement in discourse; ‘mitigating strategies’, i.e. “ways of modifying the epistemic status of a proposition by mitigating the illocutionary force of an utterance” (Baker and Ellece, 2011), such as the use of impersonal constructs, using a question instead of an assertion, the use of the plural pronouns to express assertions; ‘intensifying strategies’, i.e. a way of

25 emphasizing an argument that involves the use of intensity markers or adverbs like ‘very’, ‘really’, absolutely’, or the adoption of modal and semi-modal verbs like ‘should’, ‘must’, ‘have to’.

Van Leeuwen’s (1996) socio-semantic approach to discourse analysis considers the representations of different social actors according to the link between their socio-semantic categories and their linguistic realizations. Van Leeuwen’s socio-semantic categorization (1996) can be included in DHA’s nomination and predicational strategies (KhosraviNik, 2009). The current research uses this model to investigate the way social actors are represented within Trump and Salvini’s right-wing populist discourses, i.e. how ‘the elite’, ‘the people’, ‘the heartland’ and ‘the others’ are presented by the two politicians. Some of Van Leeuwen’s (1996) most relevant categories are: ‘aggregation’, which involves “collectively representing people by referring to numbers or amounts” (Baker & Ellece, 2011), often implemented to validate assertions and gain the consensus of the readers or hearers; ‘collectivization’ is a form of ‘assimilation’ which involves the collective representation of people without the use of numbers and figures. ‘Collectivization’ strategies rely on the use of words like ‘our community’, ‘this nation’, the name of the nation itself, as well as the pronoun ‘we’, in order to achieve a sense of collective identity (Baker & Ellece, 2011); ‘impersonalization’, i.e. “representing social actors as other than human” (Baker & Ellece, 2011), by means of ‘abstraction’ (as it is often the case with refugees being labelled as ‘problems’) or ‘objectivation’, when social actors are identified with a place or thing which is close to their person or to the activity they are engaged in (Baker & Ellece, 2011); ‘personalization’ is the inverted strategy: it can be realized both through ‘functionalization’ - thus representing social actors on the basis of what they do - or through ‘identification’ - representing social actors in terms of what they are; ‘suppression’, a form of ‘exclusion’ taking place when social actors do not appear in the text, thus a strategy that is often achieved through passive agent deletion; ‘genericization’, “a way of representing social actors as classes rather than as specific individuals” (Baker & Ellece, 2011). Van Leeuwen (1996) notes that authors are likely to adopt this strategy when their aim is that of representing social actors as distant ‘others’; ‘specification’ is the opposite strategy used to represent social actors as specific cases.

The current thesis relies on Van Dijk’s (2006) study on manipulation strategies to investigate how Trump and Salvini’s discourses work on people’s Short Term Memory (STM) and Long Term Memory (LTM) to promote their right-wing populist rhetoric. Van Dijk (2006) builds on the interplay of discourse, society and cognition through his view of manipulation, i.e. the exercise of a form of illegitimate influence by means of discourse:

Manipulating people involves manipulating their minds, that is people’s beliefs, such as the knowledge, opinions and ideologies, which in turn control their actions. […] Since the mind is extraordinary complex, the way discourse may influence it inevitably involves intricate processes that can only be managed in real time by applying efficient strategies. (Van Dijk, 2006, p. 365)

He divides these strategies into Short Term Memory Manipulation (STMM) and Long Term Memory Manipulation (LTMM). The first one refers to manipulating the way people process information and, as such, involves understanding processes of the micro-linguistic elements of the discourse. The writer/speaker may manipulate this understanding process in a way that the reader/hearer pays more attention to some pieces of information than to others: this strategy may involve the use of eye-catching writing style such as capital letters, bold font, basic lexical items, or raising the tone of the voice when the addressee is a speaker; LTM stores issues of knowledge, attitudes and ideologies, and is also built up by people’s personal memories defined by particular experiences of their lives and events they have heard about (Van Dijk, 2006).

The processes of manipulation described by Van Dijk (2006) can also be detected in the discourse about ‘the other’, which represents an important feature of both Trump and Salvini’s anti-immigration rhetoric that the current research is going to investigate. As Van Dijk (1993) points out, any kind of discourse about ‘the other’ involves the power of dominance. Dominant groups (the political class in this case) represent the ‘us-them’ distinction relying on strategies of “justification and denial of inequalities”, involving “the positive representation of the own group and the negative representation of the Others” (Van Dijk, 1993). Arguments of this kind tend to emphasize the tolerance and sympathy of ‘us’ and the cultural difference and the negative behavior of ‘them’. When these ‘polarized models’ are

27 constantly reiterated by the dominant group “they may be used to sustain existing attitudes or form new negative attitudes” (Van Dijk, 1993), as well as generalizations (Van Dijk, 2006) about ‘the others’. Generalization strategies involve the transformation of “a concrete specific example that has made an impact on people’s mental model” into a “more general knowledge or attitudes, or even fundamental ideology” (Van Dijk, 2006). Usually, in order for such generalizations to be validated, the dominant group fosters the idea that these polarized models are ‘typical’, and that the deviant attitude of the out-group is fixed and ‘cannot be excused’ (Van Dijk, 1993). According to Van Dijk (1993) the linguistic strategies used to make such generalizations credible consist of: - Semantic content: “statements that directly entail negative evaluations of ‘them’ or positive ones of ‘us’”; - Argumentation: the facts that justify the negative or positive semantic evaluations; - Rhetorical figures: “hyperbolic enhancement of ‘their’ negative actions and ‘our’ positive actions; euphemism, denials, understatements of ‘our’ negative actions”; - Lexical style: micro-linguistic choice of words that refer to negative or positive evaluations; - Storytelling: accounting for negative experiences that have personally affected the speaker; providing details about the negative features of the experience; - Structural emphasis of ‘their’ negative actions: visual emphasis on some words within the text; sentence syntax, “mentioning negative agent in prominent, topical position”; - “Quoting credible witnesses”.

Cap’s (2013) Prozimization theory consists in a methodological approach relating to Chilton’s Discourse Space Theory (DST) (2005). The notion of ‘proximization’ generally indicates “a discursive strategy of presenting physically and temporally distant events and states of affairs (including ‘distant’ adversarial ideologies) as increasingly and negatively consequential to the speaker and her addressee” (Cap, 2014, p. 190). Following the Discourse Space Theory (Chilton, 2005), this narration develops within a specific Discourse Space (DS) whose deictic center constitutes the starting point for measuring the distance among the actors of the discourse. The actors are indeed defined according to their being outside or inside the deictic center: the entities that are situated within the inside-deictic-

28 center (IDC) are the speaker and his - or her - addressees; those situated in the outside-deictic- center (ODC) are the peripheral entities (cf. Chilton, 2005), the ‘foreign’, ‘alien’, ‘antagonisic’ elements of the discourse. Any discourse of proximization implies a narration based on the peripheral entities physically and ideologically invading the IDC, e.g. the people, their ‘home’ and their values. For these reasons, even though proximizaton theory has been proven to suit a wide range of public discourses - including preventive medicine or policies to contain climate change – it is often adopted for the analysis of political discourses, such as anti-immigration or war- intervention rhetoric (Cap, 2014), where the enemy can be the immigrants, an ethnic minority, a far-away nation that is involved in a war that does not have any tangible implication with the home country. The threat is described as invading the speaker-addressee space on three levels, according to which three types of proximization emerge: ‘spatial-proximization’, ‘temporal proximization’ and ‘axiological proximization’. ‘Spatial proximization’ relies on construals depicting the entities placed outside the deictic center as approaching - and in some cases literally invading - the space of the in-group. This argumentation is supported by referential and predicational strategies providing a negative connotation of ‘the others’ and a positive description of ‘us’. (Cicin-Sain, 2014); the ‘temporal proximization’ refers to the speaker’s attempt to represent the threat as being not only imminent, but also “historic and thus needing immediate response and unique preventive measures” (Cap, 2014, p. 191); the ‘axiological proximization’ involves the representation of an ideological conflict “between the ‘home values’ of the DS central entities (IDCs) and the alien and antagonistic (ODC) values (Cap, 2014, p. 191).” These aspects of proximization are known as Spatial-Temporal-Axiological (STA) analytic model. Because this analytic model “assumes that all the three aspects of proximization contribute to the continual narrowing of the symbolic distance between the entities/values in the Discourse Space and their negative impact” on the speaker-addressee, the three levels of proximization may be more or less emphasized according to the need and the development of the rhetorical construction. In general, the addressees are more prone to believe in and to support a plan of intervention, when they perceive that the ‘enemy’ is going to affect them personally. These features seem to indicate the proximization theory as applicable to the analysis of right-wing populist discourses: on the one hand, their nationalist rhetoric is designed to construct

29 an opposition between ‘central national’ and ‘peripheral-international’ interests and values; on the other hand, their discourses of racism, social exclusion and anti-immigration policies are based on a sharp ‘us-them’ distinction, where ‘us ‘represents the deictic center - ‘the good people, our great nation and our values’ - and ‘them’ the periphery -‘the bad elite, the other, the aliens’. Even though the validity of the proximization approach to CDA has been demonstrated by several studies (e.g. Cap, 2013; Cap, 2014 among others), the current research represents the first attempt to use proximization theory to investigate a rhetoric of legitimization which is part of a right-wing populist discourse. This particular use of proximization theory is also innovative in terms of its field of investigation: as far as the author is aware, proximization theory had never been implemented for the study of discourse on Twitter. Hence, the current thesis implements a “distance crossing” perspective in order to define how Donald J. Trump and Matteo Salvini legitimize their anti-immigration rhetoric on Twitter. More specifically, how they associate the need of an intervention with a sharp ‘us-them’ distinction, where ‘them’ – the outside-deictic-center entities - are approaching ‘us’ - the inside- deictic center entities – from a spatial, temporal and axiological point of view.

4. Analysis 4.1. Analysis, part 1: Analysis of ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Italians First’ tweets 4.1.1. Categorization Prior to the in-depth analysis of the ‘Make America Great Again’ and the ‘Italians First’ tweets (that will be addressed in section 4.1.2), the ‘categorization part’ aims at establishing whether the two slogans include the key features of the populist discourse categories, i.e. references to ‘the people’, ‘the elite’, the ‘others’ and ‘the heartland’; furthermore, a comparison between the two slogans is going to be made in terms of the importance that each populist category plays in Trump and Salvini’s discourses. The criterion used for categorization consists in subdividing the tweets on the basis of their main theme, i.e. prevailing presence of arguments referring to ‘the elite’, ‘the people’, ‘the heartland’ or ‘the others’. The author has read all the tweets collected in two Word Documents (one collecting Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ tweets and the other collecting Salvini’s ‘Italians First’ tweets) and has divided the posts in four different tables (each table representing one of the four categories). Those tweets that did not match with any of the categories have been excluded from the analysis: in Trump’s case those tweets in which only the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ appears, and those tweets functioning as advertisements for Trump’s rallies (in the form of ‘Big crowd tonight in Louisiana, #MakeAmericaGreatAgain’); in the second case those tweets in which only the slogan ‘Italians First’ appears, and those tweets functioning as advertisements for Salvini’s rallies (in the form of ‘Tomorrow in Milan I want to hear a lot of people screaming #ItaliansFirst). Thus, the remaining 71 ‘Make America Great Again’ and the remaining 99 ‘Italians First’ tweets have been taken into account for the analysis. The categorization of the ‘Make America Great Again’ tweets has revealed that within the 71 tweets: 44 (62%) have the ‘elite’ as their main theme, 12 (17%) refer to the ‘heartland’, 10 (14%) to ‘the people’ and 5 (7%) to the ‘others’. The categorization of the ‘Italians First’ tweets has shown that within the 99 tweets: 30 (31%) have ‘the elite’ as their main theme, 28 (28%) refer to ‘the people’, 24 (24%) to the ‘heartland’ and 17 (17%) to ‘the others’.

Table 1a:

Make America Great Again Italians First

50 44 35 30 30 28 40 24 25 30 20 17 20 15 12 10 10 10 5 5 0 0 The People The Elite The The Others The People The Elite The The Others Heartland Heartland

The percentages indicate that, even though ‘the elite’ is the most addressed category in both cases, it appears to be the dominating feature of Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ posts: the ‘Make America Great Again’ bar chart shows that the gap between ‘the elite’ and the other categories is striking, while the ‘Italians First’ bar chart illustrates a more homogenous situation in which there is only a slight difference between the number of posts referring to ‘the elite’ and those referring to the other categories. However, in both cases the lowest percentage of tweets can be observed in relation to the category of ‘the others’, constituting the narrowest feature of the ‘Make America Great Again’ and the ‘Italians First’ slogans during their election campaign on Twitter (5% of the posts in one case and 17% in the other). The posts addressing the ‘heartland’ and those addressing ‘the people’ are almost equal in number in both sets of tweets. Nevertheless, while the discourse of ‘Make America Great Again’ appears to be more concerned about the theme of the ‘heartland’ - constituting 12% of the posts against 10% registered by the category of ‘the people’ - the ‘Italians First’ discourse is more focused on ‘the people’ (28% of the posts against 24% registered by ‘the heartland’). This result seems to mirror the linguistic formula of the slogans themselves: while Trump wants to make America (the ‘heartland’) great again, Salvini wants to put Italians (‘the people’) first. Now, having established that (a) both the ‘Make America Great Again’ and the ‘Italians First’ tweets include the populist categories of ‘the people’, ‘the elite’, ‘the heartland’ and ‘the others’ and (b) having determined the percentages and thus the importance that these populist

32 features play in both discourses during their political campaigns, the following section is going to provide an in-depth discursive analysis of the two slogans.

4.1.2 Critical Discourse Analysis of ‘Make America Great Again ‘ and ‘Italians First’ tweets In what follows, Trump and Salvini’s populist discourse is going to be investigated according to the categories in which (a) the ‘Make America Great Again’ and (b) the ‘Italians First’ tweets have been subdivided. In both cases the analysis will proceed from the most recurrent category to the least recurrent one.

(a). ‘Make America Great Again’: 1. ‘The Elite’ This category - the one which is addressed the most within the ‘Make America Great Again’ set of tweets - contains the most important dichotomy within Trump’s populist discourse, i.e. the distinction between ‘the people’ and ‘the establishment’. The dichotomy is usually constructed through a ‘negative other-presentation’ in contrast with a ‘positive self-presentation’ (Kreis, 2017). The following tweet, published one day before the election, provides a clear exemplification of this division:

1a. America must decide between failed policies or fresh perspective, a corrupt system or an outsider! @realdonaldtrump, 7 Nov 2016

Trump in this post primarily refers to the upcoming elections. He refers to his voters through the word America: he relies on the use of ‘collectivization’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996) to emphasize the sense of national identity shared by his voters who must decide. The semi-modal verb must is an ‘intensity marker’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) that stresses the importance of the upcoming vote, as a chance to change America as a whole. Trump emphasizes the value of the elections by presenting them as a decision between ‘failed policies or fresh perspective’, ‘a corrupt system or an outsider’. Trump makes a comparison between the opposition (Hillary Clinton and the democrats) and he himself. Hillary Clinton is referred in both cases through the use of ‘impersonalization’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996), i.e. failed policies and a corrupt system. More specifically, both expressions are a form of

‘objectivation’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996), as in both cases Hillary Clinton is identified with things (policies and system) that are associated with the activity she is engaged in. Furthermore, failed policies can also be intended as a form of ‘genericization’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996): written in the plural form and with no article next to it, it associates the social actor to an undefined number of policies that have been detrimental for the reader - negative connotation stressed by the adjective failed. Trump is also referred to through ‘impersonalization’ when he identifies himself with a fresh perspective. Nevertheless, not only is the connotation of the reference highly positive in this case, it also shows how Trump works on people’s LTM (Van Dijk, 2006) as he stresses an important difference between himself and his opponent: while he himself represents the future of America (fresh perspective), Hillary Clinton represents the past (failed policy). Trump is then referred to as an outsider through the use of ‘individualization’ (Van Leuween, 1996), probably in the attempt to emphasize the difference between his image as a singular person and that of a whole corrupt system, thus representing himself as the unique true fighter of the establishment. The same idea of himself fighting alone emerges from the following tweet:

1b. @HillaryClinton has been a foreign policy DISASTER for the American people. I will #MakeAmericaSafeAgain #Debate #BigLeagueTruth @realdonaldtrump, 19 Oct 2016

Also in this case the social actors of the tweet are Hillary Clinton (the elite) and Trump, this time both addressed explicitly. Hillary Clinton is described through ‘predication strategy’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) as a foreign policy DISASTER. She is thus associated again with the idea of failed policies as in example 1a. The use of ‘generalization’ (Van Dijk, 2006) is visible in the fact that Trump does not specify which foreign policy he is referring to, thus working on an existing mental model about Hillary Clinton’s wrong-doing. He also uses capital letters for the word DISASTER - an example of STMM (Van Dijk, 2006) – in order to emphasize this ‘generalization’. His assumptions are not supported by any details: his vague and evocative expressions constitute part of his right-wing populist perpetuum mobile (Wodak, 2017) on which Trump relies on in order to make his reader believe that Hillary Clinton’ decisions have been detrimental for the American people. He makes use of ‘collectivization’ - the American people -

(Van Leeuwen, 1996) to stress the fact the whole community has been affected by Hillary Clinton’s actions. Trump then refers to himself through ‘individualization’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996), as the first person singular I is used. He affirms that I will make America safe again, using the term safe instead of great to stress the fact that his political rival’s decisions have undermined the safety of the American country. The following tweet presents the same type of dichotomy between Hillary Clinton (representing ‘the elite’) and Trump. Trump criticizes again Hillary Clinton for her decisions in terms of foreign policy.

1c. Hillary Clinton’s open borders are tearing American families apart. I am going to make our country Safe Again for all Americans. #Imwithyou @realdonaldtrump, 23 Jun 2016

In this case Trump is slightly more precise about which kind of foreign policy he is referring to, i.e. the open borders, thus appealing to the immigration issue that he describes as tearing American families apart. However, the assumption lacks again of further details about the supposed ‘open borders project’, and about the way it could undermine American families’ safety. It constitutes an example of Long Term Memory Manipulation (Van Dijk, 2006), as the idea of an open border triggers the public cognition of a shared macro-topic: the possibility of terrorists or criminals entering the country. His own image as a savior of the country is provided again through the use of ‘individualization’ (I am going to; and #Imwithyou), and is emphasized through ‘collectivization strategy’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996), which is visible in the expressions our country and for all Americans. These micro-linguistic features (in particular I am going to make our country safe; and #imwithyou) also indicate the author’s ‘perspectivization’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009), namely his direct involvement into the matter. Together with Hillary Clinton, Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ tweets have shown that the category of ‘the elite’ also include the media. In particular, the following tweet has been chosen as an example of Trump’s allusion to a conspiracy between the media and the establishment:

1d. I am not only fighting Crooked Hillary, I am fighting the dishonest and corrupt media and her government protection process. People get it! #DrainTheSwamp #maga @realdonaldtrump, 14 Aug 2016

In tweet 1d Trump appeals to his idea of corruption characterizing his political opponent (Hillary Clinton), the media and the government. ‘Predicational strategy’ (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009) is visible in the use of negative adjectives describing Hillary as crooked, and the media as dishonest and corrupt. Furthermore, the hashtag #DrainTheSwamp constitutes a very informal and controversial expression that – as an article on the online magazine Business Insider9 notes - derives from “removing mosquitos carrying malaria from a region by removing the fluids from inside of a swamp”. The metaphoric expression thus represents an example of STMM (Van Dijk, 1996), appealing to Trump’s intention to erase any kind of corruption within the establishment. As in the previous cases, Trump relies on ‘individualization’ (Van Leuween, 1996), i.e. the use of the first person singular when he refers to himself, in order to defend his narrative about himself fighting the system alone. Furthermore, he stresses the value and the difficulty of his personal fight as he affirms that he is not only fighting Crooked Hillary, I am fighting the dishonest and corrupt media and her government protection process. The author’s ‘perspectivization’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) can be detected in his final comment - People get it! - which should be read as Trump’s attempt to align and combine his point of view with that of the people. In this way Trump is trying to give more credibility to his claim (the supposed conspiracy between the media and the establishment), as he affirms that everybody (the people) can perceive it. In the following tweet, the figure of Hillary Clinton is associated with that of Barack Obama, as another constituent of ‘the elite’.

1e. Look what is happening to our country under the WEAK leadership of Obama and people like Crooked Hillary Clinton. We are a divided nation! @realDonaldTrump 10 Jul 2016

9 “Here’s what Trump means when he says ‘drain the swamp’ – even though it’s not an accurate metaphor” nordic.businessinsider.com

The core message of the tweet appeals to the supposed weakness of the leadership of Obama and Hillary. Trump does not provide any argumentations to support his claim. He relies on the use of ‘generalization’ (Van Dijk, 2006) throughout the post: when he exhorts his readers to look what is happening to our country, when he refers to the WEAK leadership of Obama and people liked Crooked Hillary Clinton, and when he says that We are a divided nation. These expressions all constitute non-falsifiable information, as the author does not provide any source, numbers or reliable data supporting what he is claiming. These sentences work on people’s LTM and STM (Van Dijk, 2006) as they represent catchy and evocative sentences that trigger people’s feeling of disappointment towards ‘the elite’ (represented in this case by Obama and people like Crooked Hillary Clinton). ‘Collectivization strategy’ (Van Leuween, 1996) is visible in the reference to our country and to We (in We are a divided nation), both aimed at emphasizing the sense of collective identity that aligns Trump’s point of view with that of his readers. Even though it is not possible to find an explicit interdiscursive relationship between Trump’s assumption that America is a divided nation and the weakness of Obama and Clinton’s leadership, Trump tries to construct into the mind of the readers an ideological association between these two factors by putting them together in the same tweet and presenting them as a shared knowledge. Overall, the in-depth investigation of this category has confirmed the insights provided by previous studies concerning Trump’s discourse on Twitter. In particular, as in Kreis’ (2017) analysis of Trump’s post-election tweets, the current investigation has demonstrated that Trump relies on negative other-representation when referring to the ‘the elite’, and opposes it to a positive self-representation: while Trump associates ‘the elite’ to a corrupt system and failed policies (Trump in the analyzed Tweets addresses his criticism to foreign policies in particular), he himself is associated to the idea of a ‘fresh perspective’, an ‘outsider’ that will fight the “out- of-touch elite” (Kreis, 2017). As indicated by Kreis’ (2017) analysis as well, the current investigation has shown that Trump alludes to a conspiracy between the media and the elite, thus constructing “the image of an unreliable, biased and untrustworthy press that [together with the Democrats] wants to harm him and deceive the people” (Kreis, 2017).

2. ‘The heartland’ This category represents the second most important feature of Trump’s political discourse, constituting the main theme of his political slogan ‘Make America Great Again’. His political catchphrase primary refers indeed to the American country and, in particular, to the need of re- building the U.S.: as the adverb again suggests, according to Trump there it has been a time when America had been ‘great’, while now it is not great because of the wrong-doing of ‘the elite’ (as it has been partly observed in the previous section ‘1. The Elite’). This idea of ‘re-building’ is reiterated all over his ‘heartland’ posts, and it is also very frequently accompanied by expressions of national pride:

1f. New Virginia poll- thank you! We are going to show the whole world that America is back – BIGGER, and BETTER, and STRONGER than ever before! @realdonaldtrump, 5 Oct 2016

The tweet starts with Trump indirectly thanking the people from New Virginia for the supposedly positive results of the poll (actual results and numbers are not provided in the tweet). This introduction supports Trump’s following claim, i.e. We are going to show the whole world that America is back. As opposed to ‘the elite’ posts where the first person singular was preferred, Trump in this case uses the first person plural We are going to show. This choice can be explained by the fact that, while when addressing ‘the elite’ Trump foregrounds his personal fight against the establishment, when referring to the ‘heartland’ he emphasizes a sense of ‘collective identity’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996). In this post, in particular, he emphasizes an idea of nationalism in his will to show the whole world that America is back. His national pride is also visible in the use of STM elements (Van Dijk, 2006), i.e. the choice of capitalizing the adjectives BIGGER, and BETTER, and STRONGER. In the following tweet, a parallelism between the American and the Scottish country is provided:

1g. Just arrived in Scotland. Place is going wild over the vote. They took their country back, just like we will take America back. No games! #maga @realdonaldtrump, 24 Jun 2016

Trump refers to the ‘Brexit’ episode, showing admiration towards Scottish people’s choice to claim their independency from the EU. Nevertheless, the author cannot determine whether Trump is misinformed or simply ignores the fact that 62% of the Scottish voters decided to remain in EU, like Northern Ireland (55.8%). The vote to leave was in England (53.4%) and Wales (52.5%). Probably, Trump in this tweet is only referring to those Scottish people constituting 51.9% of the overall UK voters that voted to leave, avoiding to mention the part of the population (the majority) that actually decided to stay. If this is the case, this linguistic strategy is known as ‘backgrounding’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996), i.e. the exclusion or de-emphasis of a particular social actor from the text for ideological reasons. The tweet also shows a wide presence of ‘predicational strategy’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009), aimed at providing a positive description of Scotland after the vote. Trump makes use of an hyperbolic expression the place is going wild to support his underlying ‘argumentation’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009), namely the fact that in order America to be great again, Americans should claim the U.S. abandonment of its international role. This narrative is expressed in 1g through a parallelism between Scottish people taking their country back thanks to Brexit, and American people taking their country back by voting for Trump. More precisely, through the use of ‘collectivization’ (Van Leuween, 1996) he affirms that we will take America back. This expression can also be considered a LTMM as Trump re-shapes and triggers an underlying shared knowledge which implies that ‘us’ is currently ‘owned’ by foreigners and by ‘the establishment'. The first person plural also signals an attempt of ‘perspectivization’ of the writer, who wants to align himself and his will with that of the American people. Thus, as it has been observed, the term ‘America’ should not be read as only referring to the country in its geo-political sense. The term undergoes a process of both ‘collectivization’ and ‘personalization’, according to which ‘America’ both indicates the American collective identity and represents all the American people (at least those Americans that Trump considers to be ‘the true people’). This idea of collectivity is clearly expressed in the following tweet:

1h. We will bring America together as ONE country again – united as Americans in common purpose and common dreams. #MAGA @realdonaldtrump, 20 Aug 2016

The first person plural ‘we’ is used again and combined with other micro-linguistic features expressing unity and ‘collectivization’ (Van Leuween, 1996): together, ONE country, united as Americans, common purpose and common dreams. These expressions can be considered elements of both Short Term and Long Term Memory Manipulations (Van Dijk, 2006): not only are these words catchy, they also appeal to a feeling of traditional national cohesion that needs to be re-stored. This sense of restoring is emphasized by the adverb again. To conclude, the analysis of the category of ‘the heartland’ has shown that Trump in his tweet refers to America as the primary custodian of the American people’s collective identity uniting them geographically and spiritually. Also Kreis (2017) in her paper indicates Trump’s tendency to represent the people as a homogenous entity. Unlike the category of ‘the elite’ in which Trump emphasizes his individual image capable of fighting alone against the whole system, in this case Trump refers to a collective commitment to ‘Make America Great Again’. In particular, his tweets show two main ideas: first, emphasizing the American national pride (We are going to show the whole world) and secondly, re-building ‘the heartland’ (that America is back – BIGGER, and BETTER, and STRONGER than ever before!).

3. ‘The people’

This category, together with that of ‘the elite’ which has been previously discussed, includes those tweets where the ‘us-them’ distinction is foregrounded. The good qualities of ‘us’ are emphasized so that it is possible to understand who is ‘the people’ and what ‘the people’ want according to Trump.

1i. Wow, Hillary Clinton was SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of amazing, hard-working people. I think it will cost her at the Polls! #maga @realdonaldtrump, 10 Sep 2016

In this tweet the ‘us-them’ distinction is constructed through a parallelism between ‘the elite’ and ‘the people’. ‘Referential strategies’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) in this post include the ‘individualization’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996) of the ‘enemy’ - Hillary Clinton - who is introduced by the exclamation wow i.e. an ‘intensity marker’ that emphasizes the author’s involvement into the episode and determines his perspective (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009). In particular, Trump wants to align his perspective with that of his people by presenting the event as a shared cause of

40 astonishment. Then Trump foregrounds Hillary’s negative attitude through the use of capitalization - STM feature (Van Dijk, 2006) - to describe her as SO INSULTING to his supporters. ‘The people’ are referred to both through the use of ‘functionalization’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996) – my supporters – to indicate the fact that his voters represent ‘the true people’, and through the use of ‘aggregation’ (Van Leuween, 1996) which includes a metaphor of large quantity to emphasize their positive qualities, i.e. millions of amazing hard-working people. In the following tweet, Trump expresses the will of the people supported by the use of ‘argumentation strategy’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009):

1l. Two policemen just shot in San Diego, one dead. It is only getting worse. People want LAW AND ORDER!

@realdonaldtrump, 13 Oct 2016

In this tweet Trump foregrounds the will of ‘the people’ which is LAW AND ORDER. Through this statement, Trump implies that the current American socio-political situation is unstable and does not assure ‘law and order’ to people. In order to support his assumption, Trump relies on the account of two policemen shot in San Diego, as a demonstration of the supposed unsafe situation in which the American people live. The author’s ‘perspectivization’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) is visible in Trump’s statement it is only getting worse, which expresses Trump’s concern about the imminent future of the country. Because no details are given, it is possible to note Trump’s attempt to work on people’s LTM (Van Dijk, 2006), as his ‘generalization’ about ‘things getting worse’ triggers people anxiety and fear. The lack of details about this general assumption represents an example of manipulation (Van Dijk, 2006) as it represents a non-verifiable information. Overall, the analysis of this category has shown that Trump alludes to a sharpen distinction between the ‘good American people’, represented as amazing and hardworking, and ‘the elite’ who disrespects these people. Trump also foregrounds the will of the people, which is that of living in a safer country.

4. ‘The others’ Within Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ only 5 tweets directly address ‘the others’:

1m. Once again someone we were told is ok turns out to be a terrorist who wants to destroy our country & its people - how did he get thru system? @realdonaldtrump, 19 Sep 2016

In this tweet, Trump refers to ‘the other’ through the indefinite pronoun someone and through ‘functionalization’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996), i.e. a terrorist. In particular, he relies on ‘generalizations’ (Van Dijk, 2006) to stress the fact that once again (he underlines the fact that ‘it is always like this’) an immigrant (someone) we were told is ok turns out to be a terrorist who wants to destroy our country & its people. Trump does not specify the agent of we were told - thus relying on ‘suppression’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996) – in order to work on people’s mental model about who might be the agent. It is an example of LTMM (Van Dijk, 2006) that triggers people’s idea that once again the American administration (i.e. the agent suppressed by Trump) has deceived the people about the identity of an immigrant ‘who turned out to be a terrorist’. He then concludes his tweet with a rhetorical question (how did he get thru system?) that functions again as a ‘generalization’ which also supports the previous one about the American administration ‘deceiving’ the people. This ‘generalization’ alludes to the foreign policies of the United States that Trump considers to be ‘weak’, and which are supported by the political plan of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (Trump’s political opponents). In the following tweet he then provides an argumentation to support his will to limit the immigration to America:

1n. Five people killed in Washington State by a Middle Eastern immigrant. Many people died this weekend in Ohio from drug overdoses. N.C. riots! #maga @realdonaldtrump, 25 Sep 2016

The three episodes indicated by Trump are not connected to each other. They all represent separated events. The first one refers to the Washington mall shooter Arcan Cetin who, according to what an article on the Daily News10 affirms, is actually a “legal permanent resident of the United States”, having left Turkey when he was a child. The second account refers to the alarming number of overdose deaths in Ohio. The third episode refers to the Charlotte Riot of

10 “Donald Trump labels alleged Washington mall gunman as ‘Middle Eastern immigrant”, nydailynews.com

2016 after the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, an African-American man who was shot on September 20, 2016, in Charlotte, by an African-American police officer. The three episodes are thus linked together by Trump in his tweet through the elaboration of an ideological association that manipulates people’s cognition of the events and re-shapes people’s mental model about immigrants. In particular, by referring to the first social actor as a middle-eastern immigrant, Trump explicitly defines the main message of his post i.e. his criticism about pro-immigration policies. Hence, those readers that are not informed about these three episodes are likely to think that these events are correlated to the presence of immigrants in the United States: the overdose deaths are caused by the presence of immigrant drug dealers, and the riot in Charlotte is also related to the immigration issue. Through the ‘topoi’ of threaten and danger (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) he thus strengthens the concept that ‘we’ are threatened by ‘them’ and ‘we’ are in danger because of ‘them’. Overall, the analysis of the category of ‘the others’ has shown Trump’s tendency to indicate - both implicitly and explicitly - that any immigrant entering the country is a terrorist, a drug dealer or a criminal, an outcome that confirms the investigation of Kreis (2017). She also noted that Trump usually relies on references to terrorism and the ‘Middle East’ in order to show the people that “the terror is ‘very real’” (Kreis, 2017).

(b) ‘Italians First’

1. ‘The elite’ As in Trump’s case, this category contains the highest number of tweets. The main addresser of this category is the left-wing coalition, namely the ‘League’ direct opponent.

1o. Per qualcuno è “prima le banche”, per noi è PRIMA GLI ITALIANI! Finalmente tra poco potremo VOTARE e rispedirli a casa! According to someone it is “bankers first”, for us it is ITALIANS FIRST. We can finally VOTE and send them back home! @matteosalvinimi, 20 Dec 2017 In this post, Matteo Salvini’s slogan ‘Italians First’ is used as the main distinctive feature that divides his and his party’s ideology from that of his political rivals. Salvini does not specify which member of ‘the elite’ he is criticizing: he refers to an undefined someone and a general them to be sent home. It is possible to observe how Salvini works on LTM manipulation by using

43 the pronoun ‘someone’ to indicate a very specific social actor, the ‘elite’ (the left-wing party), whose rule is ‘bankers first’. As Sanghez (2018) notes, Salvini relies on ‘generalization’ (Van Dijk, 2006) to turn the episode of the PD’s ‘save-banks’ decree into a generalized assumption that triggers people’s social cognition, i.e. for ‘them’ it is bankers first, for ‘us’ it is Italians first. In this tweet the use of the first person plural ‘us’ and ‘we’ constructs the in-group. As Sanghez (2018) points out “the first one (us) refers to himself and his party as a political group, while the second one (we) refers to and foregrounds Salvini’s image as a member of the people”, thus merging his own will and the will of the people in a ‘we’ that can finally VOTE to send them back home. ‘The intensity marker’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) finally is used to emphasize people’s discontent and will to act. Another important feature of Salvini’s criticism towards the establishment is represented by the allusion to a conspiracy between the left-wing parties and the EU. Not only does the following tweet constitute an example of Salvini’s belief, it also provides a striking demonstration of the right-wing populism perpetuum mobile (Wodak, 2015), as the language used by Salvini is extremely vague and appeals to the people’s feeling of resentment.

1p. Per salvare le banche STRANIERE agli italiani sono stati chiesti 50 MILIARDI, invece quando si tratta di aiutare gli italiani i soldi non ci sono. Il Governo Salvini andrà a Bruxelles a riprendere questi soldi e ripagherà i truffati dalle banche #PRIMAGLIITALIANI @matteosalvinimi, 25 Feb 2018

In order to save FOREIGN banks, Italians have been asked for 50 BILLION while, whenever it’s about helping Italian people, there is no money. Salvini’s Government will go to Bruxelles to take that money and give it back to people who have been robbed by the banks.

Social actors are not specified in the first part of the tweet, as Salvini uses a passive form in which the agent is not mentioned - a strategy of social actors representation that Van Leeuwen (1996) calls ‘suppression’. However, Salvini works on ‘generalization’ (Van Dijk, 2006) again as he implicitly triggers people’s mental models according to which the Italian government has more interest in helping foreign European banks rather than its own citizens - topoi of conspiracy (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009). Salvini’s attempt to legitimize his claim is achieved through the presentation of vague information expressed through eye catching words within the text. Salvini, for example does not explain when or who has asked Italian people for money, he only specifies that 50 BILLION have been requested: details are given to reproduce the topoi of burden (Reisigl

44 and Wodak, 2009). Immediately after, Salvini relies on the topos of disadvantage (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) when he affirms that when Italian people need help, there is no money available. Hence, he triggers Italian people’s resentment towards ‘the elite’ and the European institution. However, social actors are specified in the second period of the tweet in which Salvini’s action is foregrounded: he projects himself in the imminent future when the government of Salvini will go to Brussels to reclaim the Italian people’s money and give it back to the people who have been robbed. However, the vagueness is maintained in Salvini’s lack of reference to a possible plan to actually bring this money back. Overall, the analysis of the category of ‘the elite’ has shown that Salvini indicates his political opponents - the left-wing in particular - as enemies of ‘the people’. The same situation was illustrated by Sanghez’ (2018) analysis that illustrates how the will of ‘the people’ is disrespected and ignored by ‘the elite’. Salvini also alludes to a conspiracy between ‘the elite’ and the European Union - accused of stealing money to ‘the people’.

2. ‘The people’ While in Trump’s case ‘the heartland’ is the characterizing feature of his slogan, in Salvini’s case it is ‘the people’ i.e. the Italians. The identification of the Italian people usually relies on arguments and on the related topos of victimization (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) used to depict Italian people as suffering the consequences of a bad and corrupt policy that privileges the banks and the immigrants. Within this scenario, Salvini portraits himself and his party as the needed solution.

1r. Terremotati al freddo, clandestini in albergo. Questo è RAZZISMO. Per me sempre e solo #PrimaGliItaliani @matteosalvinimi, 29 Dec 2017

Earthquake victims in the cold, illegals in the hotel. This is RACISM. For me it’s only and always #ItaliansFirst

As Sanghez (2018) notes, Wodak (1996) in her study about racist discourse in Austria introduces the notion of self-justification within the ‘we’ discursive construction. She observes that the use of self-justification “allows the speaker to portray himself or herself as free of

45 prejudice or even victim of so-called ‘reverse’ prejudice” (Wodak, 1996, p. 116; see also KhosraviNik, 2009, p. 480; Sanghez, 2018). Salvini usually describes ‘the people’ as victims of reverse prejudice within his discourse (Sanghez, 2018). In example 1r, the reverse prejudice is elaborated through a comparison between the issue of Italian earthquake victims living in the cold and that of the immigrants hosted in some Italian hotels. He triggers people’s mental model about two correlated beliefs: on the one hand the fact that government is racist because it allows immigrants to have a place to sleep, while earthquake victims live in the cold; on the other, the idea that immigrants are a burden to get rid of. Another argumentation is used by Salvini to describe Italian people as victims: the fact that divorced parents represent a category of ‘new poor people’:

1s. FARE vuol dire garantire un contributo che arriva a 400 euro mese per milioni di nuovi poveri che sono quei papà e quelle mamme che dopo la separazione hanno perso la casa e la dignità e ora vanno a mangiare alla Caritas #PRIMAGLIITALIANI @matteosalvinimi, 24 Feb 2018

TO DO means guaranteeing a contribution of 400 euros per month for millions of new poor people, namely those dads and mums that, after divorcing, have lost their home and their dignity, and now they eat at Caritas. #PRIMAGLIITALIANI

In this case Italian people’s victimization is used to promote his future activity as a Prime Minister, rather than to denigrate the policy of previous governments. Salvini starts his tweet without inserting any subject: he introduces the verb TO DO which, in its indefinite form and capitalized format, foregrounds the expression of an imperative commitment. Salvini then explains what the verb to do stands for: he provides a narration that is rich and detailed in terms of ‘predicational strategy’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009). He chooses a series of adjectives that trigger the readers’ sense of compassion towards millions of new poor people (metaphor of large quantities). He refers to divorced parents, indicated as mums and dads, thus using colloquial expressions to emphasize the reader’s sense of empathy. This empathy is accentuated by the use of words that contribute to the ‘humanization’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996) of the parents that have lost their home and their dignity. Salvini also adds that these divorced parents now eat at Caritas, thus referring to his previous assumption that these people represent a ‘new’ category of poor people (generally in Italy homeless people eat at Caritas, not divorced parents).

As in Trump’s case, Salvini also alludes to a conspiracy between the establishment and the media. ‘The people’ are described as victims of this conspiracy:

1q. Piazza di Milano strapiena, CENSURATA da tutti i tigí. Mi date una mano a farlo girare ovunque in rete? #primagliitaliani #4marzovotoLega @matteosalvinimi, 25 Feb 2018

Milan square is crowded, CENSORED by all the News channels. Can you help me to spread this throughout the web? #italiansfirst #4marchIvotefortheLeague

In this tweet, Salvini foregrounds the idea of a conspiracy between ‘the elite’ and ‘the media’: his message is stressed through both the capitalization of the word CENSORED and the use of the ‘intensity marker’ all (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) to say that the amount of people participating to his political rally is censored by all the News channels. ‘Predication strategy’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) is visible when Salvini describes Milan square as crowded: he wants to give readers the impression that one-sided media are trying to hide to the people the success of his party. More specifically, Milan square constitutes a ‘reference strategy’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) that Salvini relies on in order to represent ‘the people’ themselves. Social actors are thus ‘functionalized’ and ‘collectivized’ - see Van Leeuwen’s (1996) ‘functionalization’ and ‘collectivization’ strategies - in order to identify ‘the true Italian people’ both with the people who are going to vote for him and with Milan square itself which is the main square of Salvini’s hometown (Salvini and the people’s identity are thus merged). The last sentence of the tweet Can you help me to spread this throughout the web? constitutes an example of ‘perspectivization strategy’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009), as Salvini wants to foreground the complicity between himself and his readers by asking them to spread what the media wants to hide. Salvini underlines the idea that he himself and ‘the people’ are both victims of the conspiracy between ‘the elite’ and the media. Overall, the analysis of this category has shown that Salvini depicts the Italian people as victims of ‘reverse prejudice’, elaborated in the form of ‘the elite is racist because they favor immigrants and bankers over the true people’. Italians are always described as disadvantaged people who are unemployed and live in poverty. Salvini also indicates his people as victims of a

47 conspiracy between ‘the elite’ and the media, which are blamed for hiding to the people the success of the League and to discredit its credibility. As demonstrated by the analysis of Sanghez (2018), the current investigation has confirmed that Salvini tends to foreground the idea that he is part of the people and if he’s going to be elected Prime Minister he will always put ‘Italians First’.

3. ‘The heartland’ This category includes Salvini’s considerations about the Italian country. He enhances the Italian touristic attractions, the beauty of the landscape and its traditional delicacies. In the following tweet Salvini appeals to people’s national pride, alluding to the fact that, unlike what ‘some enemies of the heartland’ say, Italy measures up the standards of the other European countries:

1t. Ci hanno convinto, in questi anni, che noi non siamo all'altezza degli altri Paesi. Si sono costruiti una gabbia per danneggiare i commercianti e le piccole imprese italiane. Andremo in Europa senza cappello in mano. Io porto in Europa VOI, l'ITALIA. #PRIMAGLIITALIANI @matteosalvinimi, 28 Jan 2018

We have been convinced, over these years, that we don’t live up to the standards of the other Countries. They built up a cage for themselves to damage the traders and the Italian small companies. We are going to Europe without hat in hand. I take YOU to Europe, ITALY. #ITALIANSFIRST

The post is characterized by the ‘suppression’ of the agent (Van Leeuwen, 1996), which can be read as Salvini’s attempt of triggering people’s mental models about who is they. This means that Salvini works on people’s idea about who might be the ‘enemies’ of ‘the heartland’ (Italy) - and what they might do to ‘the heartland’ - and re-shapes their mental cognition through the use of vague expressions and ‘generalizations’ (Van Dijk, 2006; see also Van Dijk, 1993). The reader guesses that Salvini is referring to ‘the elite’, and to the PD in particular, for two reasons: first because Salvini affirms that we have been convinced over those years, namely when Matteo Renzi and Paolo Gentiloni (both from the PD party) have been Prime Ministers; secondly because he affirms that they built up a cage for themselves to damage the traders and the Italian small companies, thus making an implicit reference to the PD’s ‘save-banks’ decree and the deriving ideology according to which ‘for them it is always bankers first’. Furthermore, the metaphoric expression they built up a cage for themselves constitutes a reference to the PD’s

48 elitist attitude, in line with Salvini’s frequent criticism about Renzi and ‘the leftists’ being disinterested about the Italian everyday people’s needs. Hence, even if the agent is not explicitly referred to in this tweet, Salvini’s generalizations appeal to people’s existing mental models about who is the ‘enemy’ of Italy in order to confirm them. Two different ‘perspectivizations’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) of the author emerge from the tweet: in the first part of the post - from we have been convinced until hat in hand – Salvini represents himself as part of the ‘people’, united with them in a ‘we’ that emphasizes the ‘collective identity’ of the in-group, i.e. ‘collectivization’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996). In the second level – I take YOU to Europe, ITALY! – Salvini relies on ‘individualization’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996) through the use of the first person singular I in order to stress his image as a positive outsider. While in the first part Salvini underlines the fact that he is part of the in-group who is living a situation of disadvantage, in the second part he foregrounds his image as a savior of the community. At the same time, while in the first part of the tweet the reader can identify himself with the we, i.e. the in-group, in the second part Salvini identifies the reader with the ‘heartland’ itself, in the form of YOU, ITALY! ‘The people’ and ‘the heartland’ in this tweet constitute one single entity. The tweet is rich of metaphoric expressions that appeal to Italian people’s national pride. In particular, as it has been showed, the key message of Salvini’s tweet is that the national value of Italy has not been defended and preserved by the previous governments that have allowed the European Institutions to underestimate the Italian country. Thus, the expressions we have been convinced that we don’t live up the standards of the other countries and we are going to Europe without hat in hand triggers the readers’ mental model about Italy being considered economically inferior to the other European countries. Salvini with his last exclamation I take YOU to Europe, ITALY wants to make clear that with him as Prime Minister the Italian national value will be respected again. In 1u Salvini expresses his concern about the Italian beauties. He shows again a profound disapproval about previous governments’ choices:

1u. Ci sono Governi che hanno venduto pezzi di spiagge, di mare, di musei. Rimettiamo al centro le bellezze di questo Paese. Com'è possibile non avere un ministro che si occupi di turismo? #PRIMAGLIITALIANI There have been governments that sold parts of beaches, sea, museums. Let’s foreground again the beauties of this Country. How is it possible not to have a Minister for the tourism? #PRIMAGLIITALIANI

Unlike the previous case, Salvini now does express the agent: governments. Nevertheless, he does not give any further details about which governments he is referring to. He relies on the use of ‘assimilation’ (Van Leewuwen, 1996) as he refers to an aggregation of different undefined groups of people i.e. there have been governments. He relies on the use of ‘generalization’ (Van Dijk, 2006) when he accounts for a supposed selling action of the past governments regarding parts of beaches, sea, museums. Salvini’s language is very vague, and the use of plural nouns without preceding articles emphasizes the idea of these selling actions happening many times and affecting several places in the country. The following sentences Let’s foreground again the beauties of this country is an index of national pride and indicates what would be Salvini’s commitment if he was going to be elected Prime Minister. He also indirectly promotes the institution of a Minister of Tourism through the use of a rhetoric question How is it possible not to have a Minister for the tourism? thus relying on his usual language of scandal and indignation i.e. how is it possible? To conclude, the analysis of the category of ‘the heartland’ has shown that Salvini alludes to the fact that with him as Prime Minister the Italian national value and the Italian touristic attractions will be respected again. He blames the previous administration (thus ‘the elite’ again) for not promoting the Italian beauties and for deceiving Italian people about the real value of the Italian country.

4. ‘The Others’ This category includes a crucial part of Salvini’s discourse: the representation of ‘the others’, namely those immigrants that he often refers to as ‘clandestini’ (the illegal immigrants). They are usually described as a burden for the Italian people: not only do these people bring crime and violence in the Italian country, they are also accused of stealing Italians’ jobs.

1v. Con cinque milioni di italiani in povertà, con 3 milioni di DISOCCUPATI, io apro le porte di casa mia, però fino a che questi italiani non avranno una casa o un lavoro, il concetto è chiaro: PRIMA GLI ITALIANI.

@matteosalvinimi, 24 Feb 2018

With five millions of Italians living in poverty, with 3 millions of UNEMPLOYED Italians, I open the door of my house, but as long as these Italians have no home or no job, the concept is clear: ITALIANS FIRST

The tweet can be interpreted as Salvini’s attempt to justify his anti-immigration view. He relies on the use of ‘generalizations’ (Van Dijk, 2006) to re-shape people’s mental model about the fact that, as Italian people live in poverty, the government should help Italian people first. In particular, he depicts himself as the guarantor of the ‘Italians First’ principle as he affirms I open the door of my house but…Italians first! Salvini legitimizes this ideology through the use of ‘argumentations’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) that present Italian people as victims. In particular he uses ‘aggregation strategies’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996) i.e. five millions of people, 3 millions to emphasize the topos of ‘victimization’ (Van Leeuwen, 2006): five millions of people living in poverty, 3 millions of unemployed Italians. Salvini relies on these (unverified) numbers to work on the readers’ LTM (Van Dijk, 2006) and re-shape an ideological association implying that as long as all these Italian people live in poverty, I open the door of my house but the concept is clear: Italians first. Through the use of this metaphoric expression I open the door of my house but… Salvini establishes a connection between the poor conditions in which part of the Italian people live and the immigration issue. The expression also works as a disclaimer alluding to the fact that he is ‘obliged’ not to open ‘the door of his house’ because ‘millions of Italians are unemployed and live in poverty’. In the following tweet, Salvini triggers people’s resentment towards the immigrants through the construction of a parallelism between old people - obliged to scavenge, and illegals - protesting for better food.

1z. ANZIANI costretti a rovistare negli scarti del mercato, CLANDESTINI protestano perché non "gradiscono" il cibo...! Un video che vale più di mille analisi. Questo nei telegiornali non lo fanno vedere, chissà perché... CONDIVIDI almeno in rete. #primagliitaliani #4marzovotoLega

@matteosalvinimi, 17 Feb 2018

OLD PEOPLE obliged to scavenge among the trash of the market, ILLEGALS protest because they “don’t like” the food…! A video that is worth a thousand analysis. This is not broadcasted by TV News, guess why… SHARE it at least on the web.

Salvini’s tweet is accompanied by a video showing an old man scavenging. He makes a parallelism between two completely unrelated episodes (old people scavenging on one side and illegals protesting for better food on the other) thus establishing a connection between old people

51 living in poverty and the immigration issue. Salvini works on people’s STM (Van Dijk, 2006) to make the parallelism more evident: he capitalizes the words OLD PEOPLE and ILLEGALS. He also works on people’s LTM (Van Dijk, 2006) when he puts the phrase they “don’t like” the food in between quotes: in this way Salvini both appeals to the high frequency of this attitude (i.e. the immigrants disliking the food that the humanitarian associations provide) and to the scandal generated by this expression (while immigrants can even afford to protest for better food, old Italian people are obliged to scavenge). He also affirms that this video is worth a thousand analysis, i.e. another example of Salvini working on people’s LTM (Van Dijk, 2006): he is referring to those analysis about the immigration issue - which involve the implement of numbers and figures - made by the intellectuals or the ‘leftists’ in general, who usually attack Salvini for his anti-immigration rhetoric. He then concludes his tweet by saying that this video is not going to be shown in TV, alluding to the supposed conspiracy existing between the media and ‘the elite’. His expression guess why can be considered a LTM element (Van Dijk, 2006) signaling the existence of a people’s shared mental model about this conspiracy on which Salvini is working on. Overall, it can be affirmed that the analysis of the category of ‘the others’ within Salvini’s ‘Italians First’ discourse has positively answered to the first point of RQ2, i.e. do their right-wing populist discourses on twitter (e.g. ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Italians First’ tweets) include anti-immigration rhetoric? The investigation of the tweets belonging to this category has shown the presence of an ‘us-them’ distinction: ‘us’ is represented by the disadvantaged Italian people (people living in poverty, unemployed Italians, old people scavenging…) and ‘them’ is represented by the immigrants. Coherently with the outcome provided by Sanghez (2018), the current research shows that Salvini discursively elaborates a cause-and-effect relationship between Italians being victims of poverty and unemployment, and the presence of immigrants in the Italian territory. Now, the following section is going to investigate Trump and Salvini’s discourse on Twitter in order to determine how they elaborate this ‘us-them’ distinction as a form of legitimization of their anti-immigration rhetoric.

4.2.1. Analysis, Part 2: Analysis of Trump and Salvini’s anti-immigration rhetoric This second part of the analysis aims at giving an insight into the discursive strategies emerging from Trump and Salvini’s construction of their anti-immigration rhetoric on Twitter. Two more approaches to Critical Discourses Analysis are going to be added in this second part of the analysis: while Van Dijk’s (1993) theory about the socio-cognitive formation model is used to describe the ‘us-them’ distinction on the basis of the dominant group’s (re)elaboration of fixed ideologies about ‘the others’, Cap’s (2013) proximization theory will be used to investigate the dichotomy from the more dynamic distance-crossing perspective. In other words, the first approach will provide information about how existing shared models or negatives attitudes about the out-group are perpetuated by Trump and Salvini (the dominant groups) - through discourse; the second approach will be focused on how the dominant groups justify their anti-immigration rhetoric by representing ‘the others’ as a threat approaching the in-group spatially, temporally and axiologically.

4.2.2. Analysis of Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric Even though Trump’s tweets under analysis cover a one-year-period, his arguments remain almost unchanged throughout the whole period. Small variations can be observed in the fact that, while during his political campaign his anti-immigration rhetoric was focused on blaming Hillary Clinton for favoring the ‘flow of Muslim people in America’, after the elections he has been blaming the Democrats in general. Central to his anti-immigration rhetoric is the construction of a ‘desperately needed wall’ on the southern border, whose building plan is justified by two main arguments: first, Trump makes a generalization about the fact that Mexico lets a lot of criminals and drug dealers enter the U.S., and secondly, he states that the immigration policies of the United States are too weak. The majority of Trump’s arguments about immigration are indeed more focused on the wrong-doing of his political opponents (his predecessors, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats) and of foreign administrations, rather than being directly addressed to the immigrants themselves. This means that, Trump’s ‘us-them’ distinction - in spite of the presence of several tweets where immigrants are directly labelled as criminals, illegal aliens, and murderers - relies to a large extent on generalizations that blame Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, Mexico, ecc. for ‘letting terrorism, crime, and drugs enter our country’. In some cases, Trump has also defined the

53 immigration laws of America ‘an Obama joke’ that have caused a lot of problems to the American people. Trump’s ‘us-them’ representation usually involves collective names rather than relying on ‘individualization strategies’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996), as can be seen in the following example:

Example 1.

Honduras, Mexico and many other countries that the U.S. is very generous to, sends many of their people to our country through our WEAK IMMIGRATION POLICIES. Caravans are heading here. Must pass tough laws and build the WALL. Democrats allow open borders, drugs and crime. @realdonaldtrump, 2 Apr 2018

When referring to ‘them’, Trump relies on ‘Collectivization’ - Honduras, Mexico and many other countries -, ‘objectivation’ - caravans - and ‘abstraction’ - Democrats (Van Leeuwen, 1996). The immigrants are not directly blamed for entering the American country: Trump affirms that the fault should be attributed to these people’s home administrations Honduras, Mexico and many other countries, i.e. an hyperbolic expression (Van Dijk, 1993) that puts emphasis on the size of the problem. Another ‘them’ (‘the elite’) to blame for these people entering the country is represented by the Democrats who allow open borders, drugs, and crime. He constructs a discursive connection that relates the generalization about the Democrats allowing open borders, drug and crime to the fact that Caravans are heading here. In particular the fact that the Caravans are heading here functions as an ‘argumentation’ (Van Dijk, 1993) justifying his following claim Must pass tough laws and build the WALL, in which the modal verb must represent an ‘intensify marker’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) that stresses the importance of building the wall. In this sense, Trump seems to indicate the immigration issue as primary being a matter of bad administrations. Trump also affirms that Mexico and Honduras are countries that U.S. is very generous to, and that the people of these countries can enter the U.S through our WEAK IMMIGRATION POLICIES. He thus works on people’s LTM (Van Dijk, 2006) to describe the ‘in-group’ as being derided as ‘too charitable’ and weak. In particular, he foregrounds this last point through the use of capitalization, thus working on people’s STM (Van Dijk, 2006) as well. Furthermore, the strategy of the ‘storytelling’ (Van Dijk, 1993) is also visible in some of his tweets where Trump accounts for concrete episodes to negatively represent ‘the other’, such as the terroristic attack in Brussels:

Example 2 Incompetent Hillary, despite the horrible attack in Brussels today, wants borders to be weak and open - and let the Muslims flow in. No way! @realdonaldtrump, 22 Mar 2016

In example 2, Trump refers again to ‘the elite’ (Hillary Clinton) in relation to the immigration issue. In particular, Trump makes use of ‘predication strategies’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) when he defines her political opponent Incompetent. Trump defines her incompetent because she wants border to be weak and open in spite of the horrible attack in Brussels today. He thus works on people’s LTM (Van Dijk, 2006) in order to construct a cause- and-effect relationship between the border being open, the Muslim flow in and thus the possibility of attacks like that in Brussels to happen in the United States as well. The emerging ‘us-them’ distinction used by Trump to justify his anti-immigration rhetoric is based on an ‘us’ that is exposed to danger because ‘the elite’ wants the borders to be weak and open, thus letting ‘them’ (the Muslims) to flow into the United States to commit terroristic attacks like that in Brussels. Now, the following part of the analysis is going to implement ‘proximization theory’ (Cap, 2013) in order to determine how Trump constructs his anti-immigration rhetoric on the basis of the proximization model ‘We – inner entities, occupying the inside-deictic-center – are being threatened by Them – peripheral entities, occupying the outside-deictic-center - who are approaching Us (our deictic center) spatially, temporally and axiologically’ (Cap, 2013) Cap’s (2013) approach seems to be particularly relevant for the analysis of Trump’s discourse, as one of the main points of his anti-immigration rhetoric is characterized by the construction of a wall at the Southern border: the wall might ideally be considered the physical element that divides the inner space from the outside space:

The wall Democrats Trump, Rep.

Inside Outside deictic deictic center center

Image 3. Threat, danger

The inside-deictic-center is geographically represented by the United States of America, and the American people are the inner entities occupying this space. Even though Trump and the Republicans are also included in this space, the author has preferred to place them in a sort of super-level (the circle which is shaded with indents in image 3) that indicates Trump and the Republicans acting as the protectors and saviors of the deictic-center (namely the narrative emerging from Trump’s populist discourse). The wall should protect the home country (i.e. the inside-deictic space), as Trump claims in his rhetoric. In the same way, while Mexico and the Islamic countries geographically represent the outside-deictic-center; and while Mexican authorities, illegals, terrorists, or criminals are the entities occupying this space, the Democrats are placed in a super-level (the circle which is shaded with waves in image 3) that, according to Trump’s discourse, operates on the behalf of the out-group. To follow, the Spatial-Temporal-Axiological model (STA model) is going to be used in order to describe how Trump elaborates the distance-crossing construal, i.e. the peripheral entities (‘them’) are encroaching the deictic space spatially, temporally and axiologically (Cap, 2013). Spatial proximization: involves the representation of entities outside the deictic center physically approaching the inner space. According to Cap, “spatial construals are forced when there is a tangible, concrete, threat” (Cicin-Sain, 2013). Examples of these concrete and tangible threats have been found throughout his tweets, for example: “Mexico must stop people from going through Mexico and into the US”, “massive flow of drugs and people”, “these killers come back in like water”, “with drugs and enemy

56 combatants pouring into our country, is all about national defense!”. Spatial construals are also formulated by Trump in terms of how the inner super-level-entities and the outside super-level entities deal with the threat: while Trump affirms in his tweets that the wall on the southern border is desperately needed in order to stop illegal immigration (i.e. “If we don’t have a wall system, we’re not going to have a country”), he accuses the political opposition (Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in particular) to be favorable to the arrival of more immigrants. Trump affirms that they want the borders to be weak and open, and blames Hillary Clinton for having called “for 550% more Syrian immigrants, radical Islamic terrorists.” Temporal proximization relies on “forced construals of now as a momentous point in time which, if not seized immediately for preventive action, it is bound to have detrimental consequences in the future” (Cicin-Sain, 2013). This type of distance-crossing construal is highly used by Trump within his anti-immigration rhetoric. Several examples show Trump affirming that “Congress must change these Obama era laws now!”, “Congress must immediately pass border legislation to stop the massive flow of drugs and people”, “California wants border NOW!”, “We must get the Dems to get though on border, and with illegal immigration fast!”. The axiological proximization involves representing the in-group and the out-group as ideologically and culturally distant. However, the author has only encountered two examples that might be considered an example of ‘axiological construals’, and yet they do not directly refer to existing cultural differences, but rather appeal to the general necessity to only admit people who share and respect the American values: “Plain & Simple: We should only admit into this country those who share our VALUES and RESPECT our people” (from the account of @realdonaldtrump, 19 Oct 2016) and “We only want to admit those who love our people and support our values. #AmericaFirst” (from the account of @realdonaldtrump, 25 Jun 2016). An explanation for the absence of an actual axiological construal in his discourse might be the fact that Trump, in his tweets, only occasionally addresses the immigrants directly. What has emerged from Trump tweets is that he presents the immigration issue as a matter of bad administrations which ‘let these people flow in’ rather than an ideological issue involving cultural differences.

4.2.3 Analysis of Matteo Salvini’s anti-immigration rhetoric Salvini’s anti-immigration rhetoric relies on an extensive use of arguments involving legitimization and denial of racism (Van Dijk, 1993), in the form of ‘It’s us being abused, not them’, as well as the elaboration of arguments that depict the Italian people as victims, i.e. ‘We need to send them back home because they steal our job, our houses, they are criminals, they rape our women.’ The tweets under analysis have shown that social-actors belonging to the out- group are referred to as ‘Clandestini’ (Illegals), ‘Immigrants’, ‘Murderers’, ‘Criminals’, ‘Foreigners’; ‘collectivization strategy’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996) is also visible when Salvini refers to ‘Islamic terrorism’, ‘Illegal immigration’, or ‘Africa’. The presence of ‘the others’ in the Italian territory is represented by Salvini as being supported by ‘the elite’ i.e. the ‘do-gooders’, Renzi, his allies and the left-wing. Salvini, his party and his supporters are positively indicated as the in-group, the ‘us’ which is referred to as ‘a sea of good people’. In order to legitimize his anti-immigration rhetoric, Salvini constructs an ‘us-them’ distinction that relies on expressions that are frequently reiterated throughout his discourse and whose evocative power make them function as slogans: they are not escaping from war, they are bringing the war to our place, or the whole of Africa doesn’t fit into Italy, among others. He repeatedly associates the hashtag #stopinvasion or #stopillegals (#stopclandestini) to his anti- immigration tweets.

Example 3 ROBA DA MATTI… Vogliono reddito e accoglienza per tutti al grido di STOP SALVINI. Io dico STOP CLANDESTINI, tutta l’Africa in Italia non ci sta. Spero di potermi mettere presto al lavoro per cominciare a rimediare ai disastri del PD. #andiamoagovernare

THIS IS INSANE…They claim salary and reception for everybody by screaming STOP SALVINI. I say STOP ILLEGALS, the whole of Africa doesn’t fit into Italy. I hope to get to work soon to start fixing PD’s disasters. #letsgtogovern

@matteosalvinimi, 19 May 2018

The ‘structural emphasis of their negative action’ (Van Dijk, 1993) is visible in the capitalization of the expression THIS IS INSANE. Salvini indicates to his readers that what he is about to say represents a scandal. He relies on the use of ‘storytelling’ (Van Dijk, 1993) in order to emphasize the negative behavior of ‘the others’: they claim salary and reception for everybody, thus representing immigrant people as a ‘burden’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009). The phrase for

58 everybody constitutes an hyperbolic expression (Van Dijk, 1993) that supports his following metaphoric construction the whole of Africa doesn’t fit into Italy. He relies on a ‘generalization’ (Van Dijk, 2006) that triggers people’s mental model about all the African people going to Italy. More specifically, by relying on ‘collectivization strategy’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996) - i.e. the whole of Africa - Salvini is dehumanizing the people who is referring to (the immigrants) and is metaphorically converting the African continent into an indicator of the huge amount of people that migrate to Italy. Furthermore, his ‘generalization’ excludes other parts of the world from where immigrants come from, like Syria, Iraq and Iran, namely those countries from where the highest number of refugees come from: if Salvini referred to those countries he would trigger people’s mental model about people escaping from situations of war, thus making less plausible his slogan STOP ILLEGALS. Even though refugees escaping from situations of war come from several parts of Africa as well, Salvini refers to the African continent in order to indicate those people that leave their country for economic reasons: Salvini works on this people’s LTM (Van Dijk, 2006) to justify his own indignation about immigrants claiming for salary and reception for everybody. Salvini then concludes his tweet by affirming that he is going to repair all the PD’s disaster, referring to the immigration policies established during the government of Matteo Renzi and Paolo Gentiloni.

Example 4 Il colore della pelle non c’entra nulla e #primagliitaliani è un principio che vale anche per gli immigrati regolari, integrati e per bene. Ma per chi ci porta in casa la guerra #stopinvasione

The color of the skin has nothing to do with this and #italiansfirst is a principle that work also for those regular and integrated immigrants. But for those who bring the war to our place #stopinvasion

@matteosalvinimi, 10 May 2018

This tweet provides a clear example of ‘denial of racism’ (Van Dijk, 1993), as Salvini affirms that his claim ‘stop invasion’ is not a matter of skin color. He stresses the fact that the ‘Italian First’ principle include those regular and integrated immigrants. Then he justifies his anti-immigration slogan ‘stop invasion’ through the use of a ‘generalization’ (Van Dijk, 2006) that, together with the whole of Africa doesn’t fit into Italy, defines and re-shapes people’s mental model about the immigrants going to Italy: for those who bring the war to our place #stopinvasion. Salvini implicitly alludes to the argument often provided by people who are pro- immigration, i.e. ‘refugees must be helped because they escape from the war’. Salvini tries to

59 discredit this argument by addressing the readers’ attention to those immigrants who do not escape from war but rather bring the war to our place. Usually Salvini accompanies this expression - as can be seen in several tweets - with videos showing immigrant people protesting, screaming, or fighting. This is ‘the war’ Salvini refers to, and this is the people’s mental model he appeals to in order to justify his claim ‘stop invasion’. Now, the following part of the analysis is going to implement ‘proximization theory’ (Cap, 2013) in order to determine how Salvini constructs the ‘us-them’ distinction on the basis of the proximization model ‘We – inner entities, occupying the inside-deictic-center – are being threatened by Them – peripheral entities, occupying the outside-deictic-center - who are approaching Us (our deictic center) spatially, temporally and axiologically’ (Cap, 2013).

Salvini, League Left-wing

Inside Inside deictic deictic center center

Threat, danger

Image 4.

The inside deictic center is geographically represented by the Italian country, and the Italian people are the inner entities occupying this space. Even though Salvini and the League are also included in this space, because of the nature of Matteo Salvini’s populist discourse, the author has decided to place them in a sort of super-level (the circle which is shaded with indents, in image 4) that indicates Salvini and his party acting as the protectors and saviors of the deictic- center. In the same way, while Africa, Tunisia or other ‘far away’ countries geographically represent the outside-deictic-center; and while illegals, immigrants, or criminals are the entities occupying this space, the left-wing parties are placed in a super-level (the circle with waves as shading, in image 4) that, according to Salvini’s discourse, operates on the behalf of the out- group.

To follow, the Spatial-Temporal-Axiological model (STA model) is going to be used in order to describe how Trump elaborates the distance-crossing construal, i.e. the peripheral entities (‘them’) are encroaching the deictic space spatially, temporally and axiologically (Cap, 2013). Spatial proximization: in Salvini’s tweets the spatial proximization of the outside entities is illustrated as a physical threat harming the inside-deictic center. Salvini uses several arguments that evidence the detrimental effect generated by the presence of the peripheral entities in the inside-deictic-center: “night of blood in Milan, dead and injured people, stabbings and robberies”, “nightly immigrants’ riot in Trapani, they burnt everything down”. People are also alerted about the arrival of more immigrants into the inside-deictic-center (Italy), i.e. “invasion of millions of potential immigrants”. In this regard, Salvini affirms that the outside super-level entities are favorable to the arrival of more immigrants (which consists in the ‘invasion of the inside-deictic center’): Emma Bonino (from the ‘Partito Radicale’ – Radical Party) is presented as willing to give residence permission to 500.000 illegals: “Bonino (Renzi’s ally) wants to give the RESIDENCE PERMIT to 500.000 illegals! Is this a joke??? SPREAD THROUGH THE WEB! On 4th of March we stop them! #stopinvasion” 11 . Salvini and his party are instead represented as a strong and coherent government that will control the border and expel immigrants, thus protecting the inside-deictic center: “If Italian people will vote for the League, we are going to turn words into actions: expulsions of illegal immigrants and STOP INVASION! #4marchIvoteforleague”12. Temporal proximization: within Salvini’s discourse this construal appears in these forms: “stop invasion before it’s too late”, “1400 people have landed over the last 48 hours”, “every day a rape by an immigrant”. In this regard, while the entities of the inner-super-level are represented as willing to act immediately – e.g. “with my government these criminals need to get out IMMEDIATELY”, “I can’t wait to reset order, safety and justice” - the entities of the outside-super-level are ascribed attitudes like “for the left-wing, Italian victims can wait”.

11“La Bonino (alleata di Renzi) vuole regalare IL PERMESSO DI SOGGIORNO a 500.000 clandestini! Ma questi ci sono o ci fanno??? FAI GIRARE! Il 4 marzo li fermiamo! #stopinvasione” @matteosalvinimi, 16 Jan 2018

12 “Se gli Italiani daranno la vittoria alla Lega, si passa dalle parole ai fatti: espulsione degli immigrati clandestine e STOP INVASIONE!” @matteosalvinimi, 14 Jan 2018

Temporal proximization also accounts for past events or negative experience “to make a possible future threat more plausible” (Cicin-Sain, 2013), as in this case: “I need to tell the people how to avoid episodes like those in Macerata”. The tweet refers to a young girl brutally murdered in February 2018 in the city of Macerata by a group of immigrants. The use of the plural “Episodes of Macerata” is a marker of indefiniteness as leaves an open possibility for a similar event to happen in the future. The axiological proximization: the negative values of the peripheral entities – i.e. the immigrants - are represented as contrasting and threatening the values of the Italian country and people. Salvini, in particular often emphasizes the cultural differences between his home country and the immigrants: “Someone thinking that women are less important than men doesn’t enter my place”; and also “the immigration I believe in welcomes those people who bring culture, wealth and respect”. In the first tweet he refers to the huge percentage of Muslim immigrants that enter Italy and, in particular, to their societal and cultural consideration of women. Salvini considers this ideological difference a factor to be worried about (probably because he is scared about Italian women being harmed by Muslims). With the second tweet he implies that the majority of immigrants entering Italy are uneducated, poor and disrespectful, thus indicating them as detrimental factors for the Italian country. While the inner super-level-entities are indicated as protecting the home values, the outside super-level-entities are described as ignoring them: “left-wing manifests against ‘racism’, Pamela and the Italian victims of the illegals’ brutality can wait”. In this case Salvini foregrounds the ideological difference between the inner super-level-entities and the outside super-level-entities: while Salvini and his party are concerned about Pamela (a girl brutally killed by a group of immigrants in February 2018) and ‘the other victims of the illegals’ brutality’, left-wing parties fight against ‘racism’. Salvini inserts the word ‘racism’ in between quotes to deride its semantic meaning: the ‘true’ racism for Salvini and his supporters is represented by the left-wing parties ignoring episodes like that of Pamela’s murder.

5. Discussion and Conclusions The first part of the analysis, i.e. the analysis of ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Italians first’ tweets, has been divided into two sections in order to answer to RQ1: section one - the Categorization part - has subdivided the ‘Make America Great Again’ and the ‘Italians first’ tweets according to the populist category they refer to; this part of the analysis has confirmed that the two slogans include the iconic populist categories of ‘the elite’, ‘the people’, ‘the heartland’ and ‘the others’: the two political slogans can thus be considered two right-wing- populist expressions. Section two - The Critical Discourse Analysis of ‘Make America Great Again ‘ and ‘Italians First’ tweets - has revealed some differences about how Trump and Salvini develop their right-wing-populist rhetoric. More specifically, the Categorization part has shown some differences in terms of the importance that each category plays in their discourses (see percentages in table 1a on page 30), and in terms of which part of the population each category refers to. The category of ‘the elite’ has registered the highest number of tweets within both sets of tweets. Similarities are also visible in terms of ‘who is the elite’ according to the two RWP discourses: the opposition, the establishment, and the media. Salvini also usually refers to the banks and bankers as ‘elitist’ figures, together with the European Union and Brussels. A striking difference between the ‘Make America Great Again’ and the ‘Italians first’ discourses concerns the category of ‘the people’. It is interesting to note that, while Trump in his tweets repeatedly refers to the “amazing hardworking Americans” and the “wonderful American business people” - thus the wealthy population - Salvini’s ‘people’ are usually represented as victims. He refers to ‘people living in poverty’, ‘old people scavenging’, ‘divorced people eating at caritas’. Differences can also be observed in terms of the ‘heartland’: while the analysis has demonstrated that Salvini often refers to the Italian cultural attractions and products, such references have not been encountered within the ‘heartland’ category when observing Trump’s tweets. ‘The others’ within both discourses are usually immigrants, illegal aliens and terrorists. However, while ‘the others’ that Salvini most often refers to are i clandestini, Trump repeatedly indicates Mexicans and immigrants. Then, the second section of the first part of the analysis i.e. the Critical Discourse Analysis of ‘Make America Great Again ‘ and ‘Italians First’ tweets has provided some insights into how

63 the two politicians develop their discourses about each category. Within the category of ‘the elite’, Trump in his tweets tends to emphasize his image as a powerful man, an outsider who is able to fight and defeat the system by himself. Even though the attempt of depicting himself as a savior emerges from Salvini’s tweets as well, he does not describe his political action against the establishment as individual. Salvini’s discourse mostly relies on the narrative of a collective mission that affects and includes himself, his party and ‘the people’. However, both politicians appeal to a perceived conspiracy between ‘the elite’ and the media, whose main objective is that of hiding from ‘the people’ their success and credibility. It has been observed that the ‘heartland’ constitutes a very important feature within Trump’s discourse, constituting the main theme of his political slogan. The tweets relating to this category generally refer to the need of re-building the U.S; more specifically, to the need of restoring its majesty in terms of economic development and national security. National pride is the most prominent feeling behind these claims, evidently expressed by Trump through his concern about other countries mocking the U.S. because of its weakness. In this regard he suggests several solutions, mainly including the necessity to show the world that ‘America is stronger than ever before’: he emphasizes the need to elaborate tough laws on immigration and security, as well as that of abandoning the role of the United States as international mediator. Salvini’s discourse both appeals to the need of restoring the Italian pride, and to the necessity of preserving the Italian cultural attractions. However, while Trump is more concerned about the American reputation in the world, Salvini wants his country to play a more prominent role in the EU. Thus, while Trump blames ‘the elite’ (the opposition and the previous administrations) for not preserving the ‘global greatness’ of the United States, Salvini blames ‘the elite’ for not promoting both the Italian cultural attractions as well as the Italian reputation in the EU. The category of ‘the people’, represents the main theme of Salvini’s political slogan. The topos of victimization is central to the elaboration of the discourse about this category: it refers to all the oppressed Italians, living in poverty and obliged to scavenge. Salvini describes Italians as being victims of ‘racism’, alluding to the fact that ‘the elite’ has more interests in both favoring the EU the bankers, and in supporting the presence of alien entities who steal jobs and homes to the Italian people. For Trump, instead, his people are always ‘amazing’, even when they are defined as living in poverty and unsafely because of the bad policies of the government. The topos of victimization, that is always foregrounded within Salvini’s tweets, is thus softened by

Trump through the use of positive adjectives enhancing the ‘great qualities’ of the American people. The discourse about ‘the others’, has shown that both Trump and Salvini rely on the topoi of threaten and danger in their arguments about the others. Nevertheless, only in 5 tweets Trump directly labels immigrant people: Trump most of the times addresses his disapproval to the Mexican government, to his democratic and to the previous American administrations rather than to the people entering his country. Salvini, instead, combines tweets in which he scapegoats ‘the elite’ for the presence of i clandestini with a wider number of posts in which the immigrants are the direct target of his criticism. This first part of the analysis (the analysis of ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Italians First’ tweets) has thus positively answered to the first point of RQ2: both their discourses include anti-immigration rhetoric. Then, in order to answer to the point 1a of RQ2 (i.e. how do the politicians legitimize their anti-immigration discourses in their tweets? How do they construct their rhetoric about the ‘us-them’ distinction?) Van Dijk’s (1993) theory and Cap’s (2013) proximization theory - together with the approach that have been applied in the other sections - have been used to analyze Trump and Salvini’s tweets (published before, during and after their election periods) including an anti-immigration rhetoric. The insights deriving from this part of the investigation have partly reconfirmed some of the results obtained through the analysis of the category of ‘the others’ in part one. For instance, Trump’s tendency not to directly address the immigrants nor directly blaming them for entering the country is reconfirmed: the analysis of Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric has shown that Trump’s ‘us-them’ distinction widely relies on the use of ‘collectivization’ (Van Leeuwen, 1996) and ‘generalizations’ (Van Dijk, 2006) in which he prefers to scapegoat foreign administrations like Mexico or the Democrats’ foreign policies rather than blaming the immigrants themselves. Even when Trump provides arguments against the reception of immigrants in the United States (like the terroristic attack in Brussels), he takes advantage of the episode to discredit Hillary Clinton’s view about the immigration issue. As opposed, Salvini widely relies on arguments that are focused on explicitly depicting the immigrants themselves as enemies. Salvini works on ‘generalizations’ (Van Dijk, 2006) that re- shape people’s mental-model about the negative attitude of ‘the others’ (such as they bring the war to our place, they protest for better food). This ‘generalizations’ about ‘the others’ are contrasted and supported by ‘generalizations’ about the in-group (the Italian people) who is

65 always described as living in poverty and unemployed. Salvini’s forced comparison between the ‘good living conditions’ of ‘the other’ and the ‘bad living conditions’ of ‘us’ triggers people’s shared belief that ‘we live in poverty because of them’. Salvini emphasizes this mental model by widely relying on denial of racism, in the form of It’s us being abused, not them. The application of ‘the proximization theory’ (Cap, 2013) to the study of Trump and Salvini’s anti-immigration tweets has provided significant insights into the way the two politicians legitimize their anti-immigration rhetoric. More specifically, it has shown how they present the ‘us-them’ distinction on the basis of a distance-crossing construal, i.e. ‘peripheral entities are invading our space spatially, temporally and axiologically’ (Cap, 2013). Central to both ideologies is the belief that ‘our country’ needs to be protected and preserved from alien entities that are ‘invading our space’ (spatial proximization) ‘now’ (temporal proximization). While Trump constructs the ‘spatial proximization’ by affirming that they come back in like water, or by referring to massive flow of people, or to millions of people pouring into our country, Salvini denounces an uncontrolled invasion of immigrant people who are bringing the war into our place and claims that the whole of Africa doesn’t fit into Italy: metaphors of large quantities are implied in both sets of tweets to make ‘the invasion’ sound extremely dangerous. Trump and Salvini also widely relies on ‘temporal proximization’ to construct the threat as imminent. Finally, the analysis has indicated the limited and irrelevant presence of an ‘axiological proximization’ within Trump’s discourse: as the previous sections of the analysis have shown, Trump’s immigration discourse on Twitter is focused on the wrong-doing of foreign and home administrations, rather than on personal attacks towards the immigrants. For this reason, his legitimization strategies do not include ideological and cultural differences between the peripheral entities and the inner entities: it is a matter of national pride, in the sense that the United States need to ‘accept only those people who share and love American people and American values’. As opposed, Salvini relies on ‘axiological proximization’ when he emphasizes the cultural difference concerning Muslim and Italian people’s consideration about women (that put Italian women in danger), as well as the need to receive only educated and respectful people who will not harm Italian people. All in all, the comparative Critical Discourse Analysis of Donald J. Trump and Matteo Salvini’s right-wing populist discourses has illustrated a wide range of similarities. Starting from the extensive use of Social Media to communicate with the people, following with the use of a

66 provocative language and their nationalistic, anti-immigrant and anti-establishment rhetoric, their right-wing populist expressions rely on the same principles. Overall, while in the United States the postwar ideology of the ‘Open Door’ (Williams, 1959) approach has been replaced by the ‘wall-building’ and ‘America First’ rhetoric, Matteo Salvini and his party - among others in Europe - have promoted the politics of ‘no more immigrants’ and ‘Italians First’. Hence, it seems that the Western postwar belief claiming that safeness coincides with openness is being gradually replaced by ‘protect the borders’ and ‘my country first’ ideologies, as the current research has shown. Nevertheless, in line with the consideration that any right-wing populist discourse is context-dependent (Wodak and Krzyżanowski, 2017), Trump and Salvini’s right-wing populist expressions show some singularities that distinguish them. In general, it could be argued that, while Trump’s discourse (i.e. ‘the Trumpist model) is mostly designed to emphasize his own image as a powerful, rich and influential man, Salvini’s discourse appeals to a feeling of empathy between himself and his people. This means that Salvini in his discourse never portrays himself as standing above the people, he is one of the people. While Trump represents himself as the outsider, the extraordinary man that will restore the American pride and will ‘Make America Great Again’, Salvini is the common man who stands next to the oppressed people and whose main principle is to put the needs of the ‘Italians First’. Secondly, the analysis of their anti- immigration rhetoric has shown that, even if they both appeal to the need of protecting their country from alien entities, also in this case the main feature of Trump’s discourse on Twitter is national pride, i.e. the necessity for the United States ‘not to be considered weak’ by foreign countries. Salvini’s anti-immigration discourse, instead, relies on an extensive use of labels and attributes that depict the presence of immigrants as a detrimental factor harming Italian people on many fronts. For these reasons, even though the current analysis does not take into account the tweets published by Salvini during his electorate mandate (as it has started on 31st of May), meaning that the current results may undergo some changes during the following months, it is possible to conclude that Salvini’s right-wing populist expression can be considered the European and partisan (collective) variant of the ‘Trumpism’. Now, after the election of Giuseppe Conte as the Italian Prime Minister on 31st of May 2018, it would be interesting for further research to investigate the discursive implications (i.e. dynamics of power) of the Italian ‘governo del

67 cambiamento’ (‘government of change’) in which the populist discourse of Matteo Salvini (and his League), and that of Luigi di Maio (and his Five Star Movement) have merged. To conclude, the current research has demonstrated that Matteo Salvini’s propaganda is the overseas response to the dynamics of the politics of fear (Wodak, 2015) belonging to the ‘Trumpist’ model; and it has also shown that the ‘othering’ feature - present in both right-wing populist rhetoric - is more prominent within Matteo Salvini’s tweets, whose language - rich in terms of negative labels addressed to immigrant people - is characterized by prejudices and incitement to hatred.

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