‘Laughing at us’:
‘Laughing at us’:

humour, tweets, and Trump’s public

Summary/Abstract: That Donald J. Trump won the US Presidential Election of 2016 defied the expectations ofalmost all seasoned observers of the US political system. Scholarly explanations stressstructural factors that produced a substantial cohort of identity-vulnerable voters in tandemwith Trump’s personal populist appeal. Trump benefitted from his political outsider status,celebrity familiarity, heteronormative masculinity, and unconventional rhetorical styleincluding humour, all of which were amplified (and also mocked) by extensive mainstream newsmedia coverage. Trump’s distinctive political use of the social media micro-blogging platformTwitter (now known as X) in engaging those cohorts has also been emphasized. The researchpresented here sits at the confluence of prior scholarly work on structural causes of identityvulnerability, on contestation involving humour, and on the enhanced political usage of Twitter.It examines the historical record of Trump’s tweets and re-tweets to see if and how thedemarcation of his ‘humour brand’ affectively engaged his substantial Twitter followers andmay thereby have contributed to his electoral success in 2016.

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