Date of Award

8-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design

Committee Chair/Advisor

Darren Linvill

Committee Member

Camille Saucier

Committee Member

Steven B. Katz

Committee Member

Michelle Smith

Abstract

Political social media influencers played an important role in the 2024 Presidential election. Their support for Donald Trump has been credited with helping swing young male voters toward the Republican party and set new standards for online campaigning and political discourse. After the election, the Trump administration’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt invited a hand selected cohort of influencers to a special three-day New Media Press Briefing where these influencers were given unprecedented access to direct lines of political communication at the White House. At the same time, this press conference legitimized political influencers as credible, sanctioned sources of political communication. Responding to this new institutional endorsement of influencers as legitimate political communicators, this project focuses on the Instagram accounts of those influencers present at the New Media Press Briefing.

First, the project addresses the characteristics of those invited to the press briefing, working to characterize the cohort in terms of their number of followers, posting behavior, and the age of their social media account, as well as thee race, gender, and religious affiliation of the influencers. This analysis finds that influencers were carefully selected based not on their perceived reach, but on their ideological congruence with the Trump administration’s policy positions.

Next, this project investigates the posting behaviors of the influencer cohort during the month leading up to the 2024 Presidential Election. First, the study uses the rhetorical method of fantasy theme analysis to study the symbolic narratives that influencers created and amplified during October of 2024. This analysis yielded 19 fantasy themes that cultivated populist narratives of an immigration crisis, a persecuted conservative ‘people’, the heroism of transgression. These fantasy themes figure the mainstream media and democrats to be part of a corrupt and conspiratorial ruling class that unfairly persecutes conservatives and seeks to disenfranchise them from political power. Overall, this study finds that the Instagram content of the influencers in the New Media cohort is characterized by narratives of victimhood and injury, casting conservatives as an oppressed group who must transgress the social order to save the nation from a crisis.

In addition to fantasy theme analysis of video content, this project also uses the constant comparative method to study the formats of the Instagram videos posted by the New Media cohort. This analysis demonstrates that text-dependent and influencer-dependent formats are the most common, suggesting that text-dependent formats supply audiences with issue frames while influencer-dependent formats provide a means for the influencer to model the prototypical MAGA conservative who possesses ideological expertise. The formats of Instagram videos work with Instagram’s recommendation algorithms to amplify conservative narratives of victimhood and to increase influencer’s credibility as authentic political opinion leaders.

The study concludes by offering mediated populism as an augmentation to existing theoretical structures that explain the ways that a populist movement is rhetorically constituted. While previous theories of populism focus primarily on the words and deeds of the populist politician, this study suggests that political social media influencers should be read as populist prototypes who mediate between the politician and their followers, offering concrete and embodied particularities for audiences to relate to and framing new information for their audiences in ways that render it consonant with their existing political identities. Mediated populism better reflects the flow of influence in an increasingly fractured media environment and helps future scholars account for the ways that populist movements sustain themselves beyond the populist politician.

Additional Files
Supplementary_Material_Coded_Dataset.pdf (1437 kB)
This file contains the coded dataset of all Instagram videos analyzed for this dissertation, including video links, engagement metrics, and qualitative coding.

Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6240-5834

Download

Available for download on Tuesday, August 31, 2027

Share

COinS