How political influencers amplified Trump’s media-bashing rhetoric on Twitter: from synergistic echoing to strategic avoidance, countering, and retooling

Extending existing research on right-wing populism and how the news media handles right-wing populists and their media-bashing rhetoric, this study examines how such rhetoric is amplified by political influencers on social media as a form of identity performance. Using Trump’s media-bashing tweets as a case study – given his role as a prominent right-wing populist known for his persistent attacks on the press, we take a mixed-method approach, which combines time series modeling and content analysis, to analyze how political influencers propagated both Trump’s specific media-bashing rhetoric and the broader media-bashing discourse that he spearheaded. We find that conservative influencers echoed his rhetoric enthusiastically with little linguistic shift, while liberal influencers varied in their amplificatory activity from ignoring to countering and retooling it. Our findings highlight how conservative influencers on social media deepen conservatives’ distrust in media, contributing to the growing bifurcation of trust in media among conservatives and liberals in the U.S.