Abstract
Before 2020, President Trump repeatedly violated the unspoken norms of political decorum. By saying, tweeting, and reveling in crude, cruel, racist, and misogynistic comments and behaviors, he reset expectations on what could be said in a democratic public sphere. When faced with a worldwide pandemic in February 2020, President Trump did little to mitigate his tone and behavior (Lacatus and Meibauer, Crisis, Rhetoric and right-wing populist incumbency: an analysis of Donald Trump’s Tweets and press briefings. In: Government and opposition, pp 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2021.34, 2021). In fact, the pandemic response in the United States became characterized by President Trump’s populist style creating a chaotic, divisive, and incoherent public health response leading to one of the highest death rates from Covid-19 in the developed world. In this chapter, we examine Trump’s ‘chauvinistic populism’ as a populist narrative that quickly infected the public discourse of other world leaders such as Bolsonaro in Brazil and Modi in India by lending credibility and respect for harsh, unsympathetic and cruel responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Our chapter compares the three leaders’ response to the initial pandemic to examine how Trump’s ‘chauvinistic populism’ normalized a particular type of populist response to the pandemic that reset liberal political norms of public debate, appropriate behavior, and democratic values.
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Skonieczny, A., Boggio, G.D. (2023). Saying the Unspeakable: Populism, Performance and the Politics of Covid-19. In: Lacatus, C., Meibauer, G., Löfflmann, G. (eds) Political Communication and Performative Leadership. The Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41640-8_10
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