“ISIS Has Infiltrated Countries All Over Europe by Posing as Refugees”. A Comparative Study of Donald Trump’s and Matteo Salvini’s Employment of Fake News and Conspiracy Theories in Their Populist Discourses

This paper focuses on the way Donald Trump and Matteo Salvini employ fake news and conspiracy theories (CTs) in their discourses and investigates the existence of possible similarities or differences in the way these far-right populist leaders exploit fake news and CTs at their own advantage. The data involve both tweets and traditional speeches – delivered during Trump’s and Salvini’s last three months of electoral campaign and the following seven months in government – and they are analysed with a combined methodology using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Corpus Linguistics (CL). Specifically, the comparative analysis combines qualitative and quantitative tools to highlight and compare how these politicians strategically mix fake news and CTs with their populist narratives in order to legitimise themselves and their policies.