Dpto. Ciencias Políticas, Ética y Sociología

Nationalist and nativist movements throughout the world have capitalized on the wide impact of social media, especially Twitter. In the case of the United States, first as candidate and then as president, Donald Trump actively used Twitter to disseminate his views on immigration and migrants. This paper analyzes the themes and political implications of his tweets from Trump’s electoral win to the end of the second year of his presidency. The authors’ assumptions are that Trump’s rhetoric unleashed a collective sentiment against migrants and its supporters. The findings show that some topics were retweeted massively, fueling perceptions that most Amer-icans were against immigrant communities and their protectors. We conducted content analysis of the tweets sent by Mr. Trump as president during the first half of his presidency. We used Trump’s personal Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, for this analysis. Once president, Trump continued using his personal account as a policy and political media instrument instead of the existing @POTUS account. Since Trump ran on a nativist platform, we examined his tweets with strong negative sentiments against migrants and immigration in general.