After his second election as president, Donald Trump’s emergence on the world stage has led to serious changes in US domestic and foreign policy. Trump has shaken the global landscape with his erratic, incongruous and impulsive attitudes. His peculiar approach to politics has perplexed and alarmed much of the world. His way of communicating presents characteristics worthy of study, as it represents a profound break with that of his predecessors. He is not only subverting political conventions but also communicative ones, creating an unprecedented challenge to democracy.
Communication is an essential aspect of politics—an almost axiomatic principle established since the time of the Greek and Roman rhetoric scholars (e.g., Aristotle and Tacitus). The success or failure of political leaders depends not only on the decisions they make, but also —or mainly— on how they explain those decisions and how the public perceives them. The main objective of political communication is to gain the audience’s approval and support. The media play a fundamental role in this process, although they have also traditionally been considered the watchdog of power.
The scientific community has studied the relationship between politics and communication since the first newspapers appeared. Research in this field has evolved alongside advances in technology and methods of disseminating and distributing information. We are now in an era in which algorithms affect audiences and media consumption. Internet, social media and artificial intelligence are now the latest major players in political communication. These advances have led to the emergence of echo chambers (Terren and Borge, 2021), increased polarization (Törnberg, 2022), and fake news and disinformation (Krafft and Donovan, 2020; Casero-Ripollés et al., 2025). They have also led to a loss of credibility and trust in mainstream media (Newman et al., 2022).
Trump made unbridled use of Twitter during his first term in office and in the previous campaign that led him to power (Enli 2017; Kreiss 2017). He was expelled from the platform after inciting the assault on the Capitol in January 2021. The subsequent purchase of this social network site by his former close collaborator, Elon Musk, allowed Trump to return to X in August 2024. In the meantime, he focused on his own network, Truth Social, a platform on which he has far fewer followers than on X, where he has more than 100 million (Mortensen 2025; Sherman and Newlands, 2024). Having his own network to inform his community undoubtedly contributed to his success at the polls in November 2024 and his return to the White House. This allowed him to circumvent the mainstream media, which he ignores and considers fake news (Polleta and Callahan 2017; Ross and Rivers 2018).
In this context, we find Trump’s communication policies, uses, and strategies during the 2024 election campaign worthy of study, as well as his communication procedures since becoming president. Noteworthy aspects of his strategy include his use of social media, particularly Truth Social and X, as well as his public appearances, interviews, and spontaneous comments to the press. His public appearances during the signing of decrees and his events with collaborators and foreign leaders at the White House are also notable. In some cases, these events have turned into show-like performances. Just look, for example, at how he publicly humiliated the presidents of Ukraine and South Africa in the Oval Office.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has consolidated the normalization of far-right political leaders and their populist practices and discourses (Mudde, 2019; Wodak, 2021). Trump has indeed broken with many deeply rooted consensus in the U.S. democratic tradition. He challenges the balance of powers by confronting institutions that limit his decisions. He rejects the media’s role of checking political leaders, questions freedom of expression—a principle established in the First Amendment of the Constitution and embedded in American popular culture—and insults or vetoes journalists in public when confronted with uncomfortable questions. Trump also resorts to manipulation and disinformation to justify his decisions, labeling media outlets that do not propagate his biased discourse as “fake news.” These practices deny journalism its traditional role as a watchdog of power, a role attributed to journalism since the time of Tocqueville and other thinkers in the liberal tradition.
The communication generated by President Trump and his entourage presents many aspects worthy of investigation. These include his strategy, his rhetoric, his vocabulary, how he uses or treats the media, his use of social media, how his message is received, his relationship with disinformation and polarization, and how public opinion values it, among others. For this special issue of Tripodos, contributions related to communication before and during Trump’s second term are welcome, including, but not limited to, the following topics from the point of view of political communication:
- Communication style and strategy
- Use of social media
- The use of rudeness in political communication and its effectiveness
- Hate speech
- Communication toward war (Gaza, Ukraine, and Iran)
- Communication toward political opponents
- Populism
- Polarization
- The challenge to the principle of checks and balances
- The effects of social media strategy on electoral results
- The use of fake news and disinformation
- The offensive against the woke movement
- The effects of his communication strategies on public opinion
