The recent upsurge of electoral success from the Brexit Leave campaign and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign 2016, confirm that populist politics has taken a greater role in Europe and in the U.S. The purpose of this research is to see to what extent each of the two campaigns are populist, and whether their statements are similar to each other. This will increase further knowledge about the populist phenomenon and its complexity. Hence, comparative analyses of six speeches from Brexit’s Leave campaign and Trump’s presidential campaign have been conducted through the framework of Mudde’s minimal definition of populism. The results show that both campaigns have populist features and that they have some commonalities, but still vary in the details, due to the countries’ historical, social and economic backgrounds. The two campaigns’ representatives are using similar populist strategies in order to reach their audiences. It is further recommended to expand this research and examine Trump’s presidency and its impacts with the UK’s process of leaving and its outcomes, which will provide a further understanding of the populist upsurge as well as its consequences.

This article proceeds from the observation that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin—two politicians frequently correlated and compared since Trump’s bid for the Presidency—have been remarkably successful in mobilizing support for their politics and in seemingly immunizing their rhetorics against vernacular critique. To work toward an understanding of this phenomenon, we propose to look at how political communication by and around the two politicians draws on forms and venues of popular culture. Both contexts, we will argue, have developed new strategies for the instrumentalization of popular culture, strategies that, while actualized differently in the two settings, revolve around an ‘invective turn’ in political communication—a radicalization of the familiar nationalist rhetoric of ‘us versus them’ that seems specifically fueled by pop-cultural forms. To explore this traffic between pop and politics, this article puts into conversation two case studies: On the one hand, of Trump’s campaign speeches which, we contend, symbolically organize around the logic of agôn—of the competitive game—as it has coagulated in the reality-tv genre of the gamedoc. On the other hand, we look at (state-controlled) pop music in the Russian genre of Ėstrada which, thus our argument, advertises a distinct form of patriotism through the principle of ‘glamour.’ Glamour, in Putin’s Russia, operates simultaneously as a style and as an ideology of self-glorification. The article will outline how reality tv’s logic of agôn and patriotic pop music’s aesthetics of glamour each fuel a qualitatively new orientation of political discourse toward the aesthetically charged, affect-saturated denigration of others and valorization of self.

Immigration is a topic that plays an important role in American society, it manages to capture both the general public as well as the political world. Especially in the United States of America, it is a very complex issue that affects a large number of sectors which is why a specific area has been selected for this thesis in order to narrow the researched field and provide detailed information. The thesis seeks to analyze the situation in immigration detention facilities throughout the U.S. with regard to basic human rights violations. For this reason, the thesis focuses on international humanitarian law and the Constitution of the United States, which should protect both legal and illegal immigrants, however, their non-compliance is one of the main points interconnecting all chapters of this paper. Due to the availability of resources and greater relevance this paper focuses on the situation of the last 15 years (namely from 2008 onwards) and attaches great importance to the final 3-4 years and the administration of Donald Trump. The thesis finds repeated and long-term violations of domestic and international law concerning human rights as well as the rights of asylum seekers and shows wrongful criminalization and dehumanization of immigrants (documented and undocumented). Furthermore, the thesis...