Let the Trump Era Commence, America is Ours: Investigating the Alt-Right’s Framing of Donald J. Trump

• In Event: 1284 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 18. Race, Ethnicity and Politics

Abstract

One of the puzzles about the 2016 presidential elections is why did Donald J. Trump win the elections despite breaking most norms of the U.S. electoral politics. We use theory from the literature on race and U.S. politics and on framing of people on social media to explain this puzzle. Building on extant literature which has shown that racial resentment played an important role in the support for Donald Trump, we ask how was he largely framed within a white supremacist discourse. Using the technique of topic modelling on the data from the Reddit Alt-Right channel, one of the largest social media communities used by white supremacists supporting Trump, we show that both, the idea of keeping U.S. white by stopping the perceived decline in white socio-political, demographic and economic status as well as a perceived moral superiority of whites were used to interpret Donald Trump as a candidate who needs to be supported. We provide evidence that the more often used framing for the support of Donald Trump was his moral superiority over other candidates. Further, for this group, his appeal as a candidate was not just based on his perceived support of the white cause but also his framing as a person as wronged and discriminated against as the white supremacists perceive themselves to be. Additionally, he was framed as a gateway to the spread of white supremacist sentiment in the wider white population.

Authors

• Syeda Quratulain Masood, Brown University

• Thien Vuong Nguyen, Brown University