Populism, Twitter, and COVID-19: Narrative, Fantasies, and Desires

During a global pandemic, the great impact of populist discourse on construction social reality is undeniable. This study analyzes fantasmatic dimension political from Donald Trump’s and Jair Bolsonaro’s Twitter accounts between 1 March 31 May. To do so, it applies Clause-Based Semantic Text Analysis (CBSTA) methodology that categorizes speech in Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) triplets. The findings show spite Coronavirus main beatific horrific subjects remain core signifiers: people elite. While narrative was predominantly beatific, centered government, mostly horrific, Trump signified pandemic as subject an enemy to be defeated, whereas Bolsonaro portrayed circumstance. Finally, both leaders defined working people, therefore their concerns about were focused people’s ability work.