The populist connotation. Rhetorical similarities in Thomas Paine and Donald Trumps' propagandist modes of communication

In the past two years, the election of Donald J. Trump determined the publication of considerable scholarship on the genealogy of American populism, and oftentimes, the 45th president has been compared to other political trends throughout US history (such as the Know-Nothing movement), even chronologically distant ones. The purpose of this essay is to establish a comparison between Donald Trump and Thomas Paine’s rhetorical proclivities despite the considerable divergences that characterize the two epochs they belong to. The element that enables this comparison is what I define as populist connotation, a notion whose end is to avoid the recourse to a whole unproductive catalog of content-oriented labels which try to define what is populist in spite of the incompatibilities that distinguish both forms of populism. Instead, I mean to focus on the similarities that characterize Paine and Trump’s modes of communication rather than the content of their discourses.