Abstract
During his campaign for president in 2016, Donald Trump repeatedly instructed his supporters and event security to remove protesters from his rallies, most often, by issuing a directive to “get them out”. These occasions, far from being a distraction from the political process, emerged as potent rituals of participation and the activity of removing protestors became a tool of interactional messaging. Specifically, activities of ejecting protestors were semiotically and discursively elaborated so as to cast them as the virtual realizations of a larger political project of “making America great again.” Various aspects of this include the way these events came to signify about Trump’s persona and the brand of leadership he promised, about immigration reform and border control, about the possibilities for political participation and about a more diffuse struggle against the supposed tyranny of political correctness. Moreover, supporters who responded to the the instruction by attempting to remove protestors were interpellated by it as agents in the local scene of action and were thereby written into the larger populist narrative that Trump articulated.
Acknowledgement
For help with data collection for this paper I thank Melody Devries. For comments on various early written and presented versions I would like to thank Firat Bozcali, Michael Lambek, Michael Lempert, Hy van Luong, Janet MacIntosh, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Chip Zuckerman as well as Marcel Danesi and two anonymous reviewers for the journal. I am alone responsible for any remaining insufficiencies.
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