Skip to navigation – Site map

HomeIssues20-2Emotional Governance Through Soun...

Emotional Governance Through Sound: Populism and Music in the Trump Era

Antonio Francisco Alaminos Fernández

Abstract

This study examines the emotional architecture of Donald Trump’s campaign playlists as tools of populist political communication. By combining computational analysis of Spotify audio features with interpretive frameworks from musicology, political theory, and affect studies, it reveals how sound is strategically employed to orchestrate collective sentiment, reinforce ideological boundaries, and cultivate emotional identification among supporters. The analysis of 221 songs used in rallies from 2015 to 2024 shows a systematic dominance of high-energy emotional categories—particularly ‘Excited’ and ‘Angry’—which mirror Trump’s populist performance style and rhetorical polarisation. The playlists are not merely musical accompaniments but affective scripts, guiding emotional response through genre-coded symbols, temporal nostalgia, and performative participation. Music operates here as a modality of soft power: shaping moods, staging grievance, and embedding political identity in sound. The findings contribute to understanding how affective governance and emotional mobilisation are amplified through sonic infrastructures in contemporary populist movements.

Top of page

Full text

1. Introduction

1Donald Trump’s political rallies evolve into orchestrated performances where sound, spectacle, and sentiment converge into a powerful political communication strategy. Far from being incidental, the music plays at these events functions as a central component of affective mobilization and ideological reinforcement. This article argues that Trump’s campaign playlists—often are published on platforms like Spotify—serve as curated emotional infrastructures that operate as tools of strategic soft power (Nye, 2004, 2011). Through a calculated combination of musical genres, emotional cues, and temporal sequencing, these playlists shape the mood, cognitive framing, and identity formation of supporters, reinforcing the populist narrative enacted on stage.

2Music at Trump’s rallies exemplifies what Suzanne Cusick (2006) describes as the weaponization of sound: the use of musical structures to manage audience affect and intensify group allegiance. Here, music functions as an emotional amplifier and semiotic anchor that embeds political messaging in shared sonic experience. Scholars such as Corina Lacatus (2020) and Yotam Ophir et al. (2021) have emphasized the multisensory nature of these events, highlighting how political communication merges with cultural expression to generate immersive ideological environments. These dynamics align with Benjamin Moffitt’s (2016) theory that populism operates through political style and performance, rather than policy alone. The strategic integration of music into these events reflects the logic of soft power, which Joseph Nye (2004, 2011) defines as the capacity to influence through attraction and cultural appeal rather than coercion. By embedding values and emotions into soundscapes—whether through triumphant rock anthems, nostalgic country ballads, or operatic overtures—Trump’s campaign deploys music as a subtle yet effective form of persuasion. The playlist functions not just as a background track but as a multimodal text that reinforces messages of grievance, national pride, and cultural identity.

3This phenomenon also resonates with Ernesto Laclau’s (2005) conception of populism as a political logic grounded in emotional antagonism and symbolic construction. At Trump’s rallies, the emotional choreography of music mirrors the discursive opposition between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite.’ Songs like We’re Not Gonna Take It (Twisted Sister) or Fortunate Son (Creedence Clearwater Revival) serve as sonic expressions of rebellion and exclusion, while patriotic tracks like God Bless the U.S.A. (Lee Greenwood) evoke nostalgia and moral belonging. As John Street (2012) notes, music in politics works not by conveying unambiguous meanings, but by producing emotional atmospheres open to diverse but ideologically aligned interpretations. Advancements in computational music analysis now enable a more systematic exploration of these emotional strategies. Audio features such as valence, energy, danceability, loudness, and tempo—available through platforms like Spotify—allow for the classification of songs into emotional clusters. This article combines such computational tools with qualitative frameworks from music psychology, political theory, and cultural semiotics, aiming to reveal how Trump’s playlists function as affective scaffolds that sustain populist spectacle.

4This approach builds on Thomas Turino’s (2008) view of music as a participatory and socially embedded practice. Trump’s playlists, repeatedly deployed across events and media, construct a sonic brand that fosters collective identity through emotional repetition. The strategic recurrence of certain tracks turns political rallies into ritualized performances, where emotions such as pride, anger, and grievance are not just expressed, but choreographed and shared. The result is a highly stylized form of populist communication, where music mediates belonging, dramatizes antagonism, and amplifies ideological affect. In sum, this article seeks to analyze Trump’s campaign playlists as curated ecosystems of emotional and symbolic meaning. Through a mixed-methods approach that integrates computational emotion modeling and critical interpretation, we argue that music in this context acts as a sonic form of soft power—mobilizing affect, reinforcing populist identity, and transforming political communication into a multisensory experience of collective performance.

2. Methodology and Dataset

5This study employs a mixed-methods approach to investigate how Donald Trump’s campaign playlists function as curated emotional infrastructures within the performative space of populist rallies. Combining computational analysis with interpretive political-cultural theory, the methodology allows us to trace how music is strategically selected to elicit specific affective responses, reinforcing ideological alignment and group identity.

6The dataset comprises 221 songs featured during Donald Trump’s campaign rallies, inaugural events, and promotional videos between 2015 and 2024. Tracks are compiled through triangulation of sources, including Spotify playlists officially associated with the campaign, media coverage, and audiovisual recordings of political events. Each track is verified for its public use in at least one rally or campaign-related event, ensuring the dataset’s empirical reliability. To evaluate the emotional and sonic characteristics of each song, we retrieve six core audio features from Spotify’s public API: valence, energy, danceability, acousticness, loudness, and tempo. These variables, derive from machine learning and music information retrieval algorithms, are widely recognized in the field of music emotion recognition (Panda et al., 2023; Tzanetakis & Cook, n.d.) and serve as proxies for affective perception. Valence measures the emotional positivity of a song, while energy indicates its level of intensity. Danceability reflects rhythmic regularity and beat strength; acousticness identifies the degree of organic instrumentation; loudness quantifies amplitude; and tempo captures speed in beats per minute. Together, these six features provide a multidimensional profile of each track’s emotional capacity.

7In addition to audio features, we manually annotate each track with several categorical variables to enrich the dataset’s interpretive depth. These include genre (e.g., rock, country, pop, disco, metal, classical), artist gender (male, female, mixed), performer type (soloist or band), and release decade. These variables enable analysis of emotional trends across cultural styles, gendered voices, and historical periods, providing insight into how nostalgia and symbolic identity are musically constructed. Moreover, the linguistic variable (all songs are in English, with few exceptions) ensures cultural-linguistic consistency in audience reception. A key innovation in our methodology is the development of a seven-category emotional typology, constructed by intersecting valence and energy levels. Drawing from frameworks in affective computing and music psychology, we assign each track to one of the following emotional categories: Excited, Angry, Happy, Relaxed, Sad, Tense, and Bittersweet. For instance, high valence and high energy songs are coded as Excited, while low valence and high energy tracks are classified as Angry. This typology offers a more expressive and granular account of emotional function than conventional four-quadrant models, capturing the diversity and nuance of affective engineering in political playlists.

8All data processing and visualization are conducted using Python. We employ pandas for data handling, matplotlib and seaborn for visual output, and scikit-learn for K-means clustering and t-SNE projection to visualize emotional similarity. These tools allow us to generate scatterplots of valence versus energy, frequency histograms of audio features, and cross-tabulations of emotional categories by genre and decade. The resulting visualizations reveal patterns of emotional saturation, genre-emotion correlation, and temporal aesthetic preference, supporting both quantitative description and interpretive insight. By integrating computational analysis with manually coded cultural data, the methodology bridges the gap between objective audio metrics and the symbolic structures of populist communication. While Spotify’s API does not account for lyrical content or cultural connotation, the fusion of acoustic data with metadata on genre, artist, and historical era permits a multidimensional reading of affective intent. In this way, the study operationalizes music not merely as sound but as a form of soft power—a strategic vehicle for ideological transmission, collective mobilization, and emotional synchronization. This methodology allows us to assess Trump’s campaign playlists not as random compilations of crowd-pleasers, but as carefully curated soundscapes that modulate political feeling. It offers a replicable and scalable framework for future research into the intersection of digital culture, emotional governance, and strategic communication in populist politics.

3. Emotional Typology of Trump’s Playlist

9Figure 1. Distribution of Audio Features. Source: Author.

10As shown in Figure 1, Trump’s playlist is characterized by high energy and medium-to-high valence, suggesting a predominance of emotionally intense and positively framed music. Danceability skews toward moderate values, indicating a preference for rhythmically stable tracks suitable for collective participation. Loudness values hover close to 0 dB, confirming that most songs are mastered for high volume—contributing to the amplified, immersive sound environment typical of campaign rallies. Acousticness values are generally low, reflecting a dominance of electronically produced or heavily amplified rock and pop music. Tempo clusters around 110-130 BPM, a range associated with motivational pacing and physical arousal. These features provide the empirical foundation for mapping each song onto an emotional grid. Based on conventions in affective computing (Russell, 1980) and recent refinements in music psychology (Panda et al., 2023), we assign each song to one of seven emotional categories using valence and energy thresholds.

11Table 1. Definitions of Emotional Categories. Source: Author.

12This expanded classification provides a more expressive typology than standard four-quadrant models, capturing not only positive or negative mood but also the intensity and ambiguity of musical affect. Each track in the dataset is then mapped onto a two-dimensional space defined by valence and energy and color-coded by emotional category.

13Figure 2. Emotional Landscape of Trump’s Playlist. Source: Author.

14Figure 2 reveals a notable concentration of songs in the Excited and Angry quadrants. These high-arousal emotional categories dominate the playlist, reflecting the mood-stimulating intent of the soundtrack. Clusters of Bittersweet and Tense songs are also present, providing emotional contrast. In contrast, categories such as Sad and Relaxed are sparsely represented, indicating a strategic avoidance of emotional vulnerability.

15To visualize the proportional representation of each category, we present a frequency bar chart of the emotional types.

16Figure 3. Expanded Emotional Categories Bar Chart. Source: Author.

17Figure 3 confirms that Bittersweet (30%) and Excited (24%) are the most prominent emotional categories in Trump’s campaign playlist. Bittersweet tracks—such as God Bless the U.S.A. by Lee Greenwood or My Way by Frank Sinatra—combine moderate valence and energy, producing a tone of nostalgic reflection. These tracks often serve to energize the crowd before Trump’s entrance or after applause moments, amplifying affective engagement (Turino, 2008). Angry songs, including Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival or We’re Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister, channel defiance and rebellion. They tap into anti-establishment sentiments and align with the rhetorical polarization characteristic of Trump’s political style (Laclau, 2005; Moffitt, 2016).

18Bittersweet and Sad songs play a different role. Tracks like God Bless the U.S.A. by Lee Greenwood or My Way by Frank Sinatra evoke nostalgia and patriotic grief—central to the “Make America Great Again” narrative. These emotions support a restorative populist frame that links current grievance with imagined national decline and the promise of renewal (Wilson, 2017; Redondo et al., 2023). Relaxed and Happy songs appear less frequently but contribute transitional moments. Disco-era hits like Y.M.C.A. and Celebration are typically deployed after the main speech or as ironic closures. These tracks offer crowd bonding without diluting the event’s militant tone. Their use reflects the paradoxical nature of Trump’s soundscape: emotionally saturated but punctuated with levity that enhances memorability and media virality (Street, 2012).

19Tense tracks—those combining low valence and medium-high energy—serve a dramaturgical function. Songs such as In the Air Tonight (Phil Collins) or cinematic orchestrations like The Phantom of the Opera build suspense and dramatize the stakes of political struggle. These songs often accompany Trump’s entrance or key speech transitions, establishing emotional gravity and a heightened sense of spectacle (Bianchi, 2018).

20This emotional sequencing contributes to what Suzanne Cusick (2006) describes as “emotional capture”—where sound functions not only to express, but to regulate feeling. Trump’s playlist is choreographed for tension and release, anger and affirmation, nostalgia and triumph. Each category contributes to the emotional arc of the rally, reinforcing the ideological message through sensory experience. From a political communication perspective, this curated asymmetry is telling. The dominance of Excited and Angry tracks parallels Trump’s communication style, which oscillates between triumphalism and antagonism. It also reflects Benjamin Moffitt’s (2016) theory of populism as performance: rallies are staged events where leaders channel collective sentiment into politically legible scripts. Music is the emotional grammar of that script, directing audience response and emotional resonance. The near absence of low-arousal negative emotions—such as sadness, regret, or reflection—highlights the strategic nature of this curation. Vulnerability is permitted only when reframed as patriotic sacrifice. Even melancholy is made militant. The playlist thus supports a binary affective structure: it amplifies ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dynamics, avoids ambivalence, and privileges emotionally charged clarity over subtlety (Schrock et al., 2017; Schwarz, 2023).

21Crucially, this emotional typology also confirms the participatory nature of musical politics. The playlist is not only heard but enacted. Rally-goers chant along, sway, clap, and even dance. Music in this context fosters affective synchrony and collective effervescence (Turino, 2008). Songs become rituals of belonging—performed, remembered, and relived through digital platforms like Spotify, further extending their affective reach (Otuokere et al., 2021; Alaminos-Fernández, 2023). In summary, the emotional typology of Trump’s playlist reveals a deliberate architecture of affect. Each track is selected not simply for lyrical content or popularity, but for its emotional resonance and functional role within the rally’s dramaturgy. Computational modeling of musical features enables us to map and quantify these affective strategies. Far from accidental, this curated soundscape is a sonic manifestation of populist power—emotionally immersive, ideologically charged, and performatively synchronized with the leader’s political persona.

4. Emotion by Genre, Decade, and Artist

22The emotional profile of Donald Trump’s campaign playlist becomes even more revealing when we analyze how emotional categories intersect with musical genres, historical eras, and recurring artists. These three dimensions—genre, time, and performer—do not simply organize sound; they structure feeling. In Trump’s rallies, each of these layers contributes to shaping a politically functional emotional arc, carefully designed to mobilize, identify, and consolidate his support base through sound. Figure 4 presents a heatmap of genre-by-emotion proportions, offering a visual overview of how different musical styles in the playlist are emotionally coded.

23Figure 4. Emotional Profile by Genre. Source: Author

24This figure reveals strategic emotional clustering across genres. Rock and pop emerge as the most emotionally versatile genres, spreading across categories like Bittersweet, Excited, and Sad. Rather than concentrating solely in high-arousal emotions, rock contributes to a broad emotional palette that sustains both the energy and the emotional complexity of the rally space. Tracks like We’re Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister or Sympathy for the Devil by The Rolling Stones activate confrontation and theatrical defiance, while others modulate toward nostalgic or melancholic undertones. Disco appears almost exclusively in the Excited category, as seen in tracks like Y.M.C.A. or Celebration. These high-energy songs inject moments of ironic exuberance and crowd bonding, typically deployed as upbeat interludes that contrast with the surrounding militancy. Pop music, meanwhile, spans from Happy to Bittersweet and Relaxed, offering tonal variation that facilitates emotional pacing and audience engagement. Songs such as We Are the Champions balance celebration and reflection, softening the sharper emotional edges of the event.

25Country music, by comparison, reflects a more contemplative emotional register. It appears across Bittersweet, Relaxed, and Happy categories, emphasizing nostalgia, reverence, and patriotic memory. Tracks like God Bless the U.S.A. by Lee Greenwood or Ragged Old Flag by Johnny Cash evoke themes of national loss and moral dignity. Often placed after high-arousal moments, they act as affective cooldowns that reinforce the populist narrative of grievance and promised renewal. Genres like soundtrack and opera serve more dramaturgical purposes. Soundtrack is almost exclusively associated with Angry emotion, contributing intense and cinematic pieces like The Phantom of the Opera, which heighten the stakes of the political spectacle.

26Opera, on the other hand, is tightly linked to Sad emotion, introducing solemn and elegiac tonalities that add gravitas to key transitions in the rally. Metal and march genres deviate from expected associations. Rather than channeling anger or excitement, metal shows strong presence in Bittersweet and Sad categories, suggesting introspection over rage. Marches appear across Bittersweet, Sad, and Relaxed emotions, contributing to the ceremonial atmosphere while avoiding extreme affective poles. These findings confirm that Trump’s playlist is not just musically diverse, but also emotionally engineered. Genres are deployed not merely for stylistic appeal but to map specific emotional effects across the arc of the rally. This echoes Street’s (2012) argument that political music occupies a hybrid space—simultaneously emotional and symbolic, performative and ideological.

27The emotional distribution across genres illustrates a broader principle: Trump’s playlist is not about musical diversity, but emotional efficiency. Each genre is curated to serve an affective purpose—rock for energy, country for nostalgia, pop/disco for bonding, classical for grandeur. These genres are not mixed randomly; they are deployed tactically, shaping how supporters feel, interpret, and perform their political belonging. The temporal dimension of Trump’s playlist further supports this logic. Songs are not evenly distributed across decades. Instead, they are concentrated in specific historical periods that carry particular emotional and ideological meanings. As shown in Figure 5, the majority of tracks come from the 1970s and 1980s, with only marginal representation from the 1990s and 2000s.

28Figure 5. Emotional Profile by Decade. Source: Author

29The 1970s—marked by post-Vietnam disillusionment and domestic unrest—feature tracks like Fortunate Son and Born to Run. These songs reflect Angry and Tense emotional categories, resonating with political themes of alienation, resistance, and national decline. Even when originally oppositional, these tracks are recontextualized in Trump’s rallies as anthems of populist grievance. The 1980s, by contrast, dominate the Excited and Happy registers, with anthems of personal triumph and patriotic euphoria such as Eye of the Tiger, We Are the Champions, and Born in the U.S.A. (frequently misinterpreted). These songs tap into Reagan-era aesthetics of strength and resurgence, reinforcing the central MAGA narrative: America was once great—and can be again. What is notably absent is a strong emotional presence from the 1990s and 2000s. Songs from these decades appear infrequently, and when they do, they tend to cluster in Bittersweet and Tense emotions, reflecting the ambivalence of a more globalized, ideologically diffuse era. This absence underscores Trump’s backward-facing emotional imagination. His musical world, like his politics, is rooted in a selectively remembered past, emotionally coded to valorize restoration over innovation (Redondo et al., 2023).

30Finally, Figure 6 explores how individual artists serve as emotional symbols within the playlist. Each artist appears multiple times and occupies specific emotional roles—some reinforcing high-arousal states, others anchoring nostalgic or patriotic sentiment.

31Figure 6. Emotional Profile by Top Artists. Source: Author

32Queen, for example, spans Excited, Happy, and Bittersweet categories, making the band one of the most emotionally versatile. Their songs—We Will Rock You, We Are the Champions, Another One Bites the Dust—appear at different stages of the rally to signal momentum, celebration, or confrontation. They perform a dramaturgical role, structuring the flow of emotional energy throughout the event. In contrast, Lee Greenwood is entirely located in the Bittersweet register. His song God Bless the U.S.A. acts as a sonic monument—invoked in moments of reflection, tribute, or solemn affirmation. Greenwood functions as an emotional anchor for the nationalist message, reinforcing themes of pride, loss, and revival. The Village People provide an ironic counterpoint. Y.M.C.A. is almost entirely associated with Happy affect, yet its inclusion at Trump rallies has often been noted for its cultural irony, given the song’s queer subtext and its original context. Nevertheless, it functions as a moment of crowd bonding—appropriated into a broader narrative of populist inclusivity that celebrates spectacle over coherence (Cusick, 2006; Moffitt, 2016).

33Other artists like Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Rolling Stones cluster around Angry and Tense categories, reinforcing Trump’s political style of confrontation and grievance. Their recurring presence emphasizes how protest music, even when ideologically opposed to Trump’s agenda, can be reframed through affective performance. Taken together, this tripartite analysis—by genre, decade, and artist—confirms that Trump’s playlist is not a collage of cultural references but an emotionally calibrated system. It mobilizes sonic memory, genre symbolism, and artist identity to craft an emotional atmosphere aligned with populist dramaturgy. By combining high-energy anthems, nostalgic ballads, dramatic overtures, and ironic dance tracks, the playlist mirrors the populist affective spectrum: triumphant, aggrieved, nostalgic, defiant, and at times absurd. Far from being a peripheral element of campaign strategy, the playlist functions as a tool of affective governance—a musical infrastructure designed to align emotions with ideology and reinforce the emotional choreography of Trump’s rallies. Through genre, time, and artist, the playlist becomes a performative extension of populist identity.

5. The Emotional Architecture of Populism

34Donald Trump’s campaign playlists are not incidental or ornamental elements of his rallies—they are central to the affective choreography of populist spectacle. These curated soundscapes serve as strategic tools for managing collective sentiment, building identity, and reinforcing political messaging. Rather than simply offering entertainment or background music, the playlist operates as an emotional infrastructure: a system designed to generate, regulate, and amplify sentiments aligned with the leader’s narrative and performance. Trump’s rallies are political rituals where emotion, spectacle, and identity converge. Within this environment, music becomes an essential communicative device that aligns with Trump’s combative and celebratory rhetorical style. The emotional structure of the playlist mirrors his discursive strategy—alternating between triumphalism and antagonism, exuberance and grievance. Songs such as We Will Rock You by Queen or Eye of the Tiger by Survivor exemplify this high-energy dynamic. These tracks are not just motivational; they are affective signals that invite audiences to share in a sense of power, victory, and resistance. In this way, music acts as a sonic extension of the leader’s persona, reinforcing his image as a dominant, energetic figure (Turino, 2008; Schrock et al., 2017).

35At the core of this architecture lies what Benjamin Moffitt (2016) identifies as the performative nature of populism—where political leadership relies on a constant dramatization of crises, enemies, and redemption. Music plays a central role in this performance. The dominance of Excited and Angry songs, as revealed through computational analysis of Spotify audio features such as energy and valence (Panda et al., 2023), shows a clear affective intent. These songs create a climate of emotional arousal, preparing listeners for both celebration and confrontation. They facilitate what Ernesto Laclau (2005) describes as the construction of ‘the people’ through antagonism—an emotional process by which supporters are united through shared opposition to a common ‘other.’ This emotional architecture is not just about energizing the base; it is about directing emotion toward political goals. Music becomes a vehicle for affective governance—a way to align individual feelings with collective identity and ideological commitment. Songs like We’re Not Gonna Take It or Fortunate Son are recontextualized within a populist frame, far removed from their original progressive intent. This affective repurposing transforms them into expressions of anti-elitist defiance and cultural grievance, emotionally anchoring the populist message.

36Equally important is the strategic absence of other emotional categories. Sadness, relaxation, or ambiguity are minimized or excluded from the playlist unless they can be redirected into patriotic nostalgia or wounded pride. For example, God Bless the U.S.A. by Lee Greenwood conveys melancholic reverence for a nation perceived as under threat, converting vulnerability into nationalist sentiment. This form of emotional re-signification illustrates what Suzanne Cusick (2006) calls the weaponization of sound—using music not merely to elicit emotion, but to frame it within ideological narratives. The emotional asymmetry of the playlist—its prioritization of high-energy, high-valence songs—reflects the binary worldview of populist politics. There is little space for introspection, nuance, or ambivalence. Instead, emotional clarity is paramount. As Graham Wilson (2017) argues, populist campaigns often depend on simplified moral dichotomies: us versus them; strength versus weakness; restoration versus decline. The playlist reproduces this affective structure, guiding listeners through carefully choreographed emotional trajectories that mirror the moral logic of the movement.

37This structure is not abstract—it is encoded into the sequence and pacing of the rally itself. High-energy songs open the event, setting an atmosphere of anticipation and group cohesion. Cinematic or operatic pieces like Nessun Dorma often precede Trump’s entrance, adding grandeur and theatricality. After key moments in the speech, emotionally evocative tracks may close the rally with a sense of catharsis or unity. This sequencing follows what Rinaldo Kuhne (2011) describes as ‘emotional pacing’—a dramaturgical logic that turns political communication into a sensory experience. Music shapes not only what the audience hears, but how they feel across time, reinforcing the message at every affective beat. These findings are confirmed by computational analysis. Using tools from music emotion recognition (MER) and Spotify’s audio feature set (Tzanetakis & Cook, n.d.; Panda et al., 2023), a clear clustering of songs in the Excited and Angry quadrants of the valence-energy space emerges from the analysis. Visualizations of the playlist’s affective structure reveal its emotional density: high intensity, low ambiguity, and a systematic avoidance of emotional flatness. This aligns with Corina Lacatus’s (2020) observation that Trump’s political communication relies heavily on emotional repetition and amplification across media formats. The playlist, then, extends this logic into the sonic domain—making sound a mode of ideological reinforcement.

38Another important aspect of this architecture is its participatory nature. Trump’s rallies are not designed for passive consumption. Music invites action—clapping, singing, chanting. Songs like Y.M.C.A. or You Can’t Always Get What You Want become collective rituals, performed and echoed by the crowd. This echoes Thomas Turino’s (2008) concept of participatory music, where engagement itself becomes a form of identity affirmation.

39This participatory dynamic also includes the bodily imitation of Trump himself. At various rallies, supporters reproduce his signature gestures—particularly his exaggerated arm movements and rhythmic swaying to songs like Y.M.C.A.—transforming musical segments into choreographed performances of political alignment. These acts of mimicry are not spontaneous imitations but socially situated behaviors that function as affective signals within the rally context (Bourgeois & Hess, 2008). As Kira Hall, Donna Meryl Goldstein, and Matthew Bruce Ingram (2016) have shown, Trump’s gestures operate as stylized performances of authority and spectacle, blurring the boundary between political leadership and entertainment. When rally-goers mirror these gestures, they enact a form of embodied solidarity that fuses affective identification with performative allegiance. Such mimicry becomes especially potent in moments of political drama: during the 2024 Republican National Convention, for instance, attendees visually mimicked Trump’s bandaged ear following the assassination attempt, turning bodily reproduction into symbolic affirmation. As Goldstein, Hall, and Ingram (2020) argue, Trump’s physical gestures are not merely expressive but strategic—comedic weapons repurposed as cues for mass affective synchronization.

40In Trump’s case, the playlist transforms the rally into an emotional habitat—an immersive environment where sentiment is not only expressed but shared and rehearsed. This performative function is strengthened by the symbolic power of genre and artist. As previously shown, musical genres are emotionally coded. Rock and metal express rebellion and confrontation; country evokes nostalgia and patriotism; disco and pop inject levity and irony. These associations are not accidental—they are curated for emotional efficiency. Likewise, artists become emotional avatars. Queen is emotionally versatile; Lee Greenwood embodies wounded patriotism; the Village People provide ironic festivity. Each contributes to the playlist’s emotional arc, which moves listeners through celebration, grievance, memory, and mobilization. These genre-emotion mappings serve a dual purpose: they resonate with the emotional histories of the audience and encode ideological meaning through cultural symbols. This is consistent with Antonio Alaminos-Fernández’s (2023) argument that music functions as cultural soft power. By embedding political affect in familiar musical codes, the playlist creates emotional continuity between the leader’s discourse and the cultural memory of the supporters. It is not simply that Trump uses music—it is that his campaign uses it to produce and sustain ideological feeling.

41The avoidance of emotional ambiguity is also a political choice. Emotions such as bittersweetness or melancholia are rarely useful in populist campaigns, which seek to polarize and activate rather than reflect. Instead, the playlist serves as an emotional script, prescribing how the audience should feel at each stage of the event. This script parallels populist rhetoric, which uses stylistic cues—repetition, exaggeration, personalization—to direct affective response (Moffitt, 2016; Ophir et al., 2021). Music, in this sense, is both a trigger and a guide, shaping not just mood but political orientation. What makes this sonic strategy particularly effective is its integration with digital platforms. Many of Trump’s playlists are publicly accessible on Spotify, allowing supporters to relive the rally atmosphere beyond the event. This extends the emotional reach of the campaign, embedding political sentiment in everyday routines. As Otuokere et al. (2021) note, digital music platforms are not just entertainment tools—they are cultural infrastructures of soft power.

42Trump’s use of music on these platforms demonstrates how political emotion can be sustained, shared, and scaled algorithmically. The emotional architecture of Trump’s playlist illustrates how sound operates not merely as accompaniment but as a core modality of populist persuasion. By orchestrating affective states—mobilizing enthusiasm, consolidating collective identity, and amplifying antagonism—music becomes a strategic resource in the performance of political style. Its deliberate emotional asymmetry, genre-coded symbolism, participatory form, and digital circulation coalesce into a highly effective mechanism of affective governance.

43Given the increasing entanglement of contemporary politics with spectacle and affect, it becomes necessary to examine how music contributes to the emotional infrastructure of political engagement. The sonic environment of Trump’s rallies illustrates how populism operates not only through discourse, but also through performative and sensory means—sung, embodied, and transmitted via rhythm, repetition, and collective resonance.

6. Conclusion

44Far from serving as mere background music for political rallies, Trump’s campaign playlists function as affective infrastructures designed to reinforce a populist narrative, shape collective sentiment, and mobilize emotional energy. Through a combination of computational analysis of audio features—such as valence, energy, danceability, acousticness, tempo, and loudness—and symbolic interpretation of genre, performer, and historical context, this study reveals that music operates in Trump’s rallies as a sophisticated mechanism of affective governance. In this sense, the playlist functions as a form of soft power (Nye, 2004; Cusick, 2006; Alaminos-Fernández, 2023), shaping political behavior not through coercion but, rather, through emotional persuasion and symbolic resonance. One of the central findings is the dominance of high-energy, high-valence songs—particularly those classified as Excited and Angry. These affective categories align with Trump’s rhetorical style, oscillating between triumphalism and confrontation (Laclau, 2005; Moffitt, 2016). Songs such as We Will Rock You or Fortunate Son are not neutral cultural products; they are emotionally charged artefacts strategically deployed to cue feelings of power, defiance, and urgency. This convergence of musical intensity and political messaging transforms rallies into orchestrated emotional performances of ‘the people’ against ‘the elites.’

45The emotional asymmetry of the playlist—its marginalization of Sad, Relaxed, or Tense songs—reinforces this affective clarity. Tracks that express vulnerability or introspection are rare and only included when they can be reframed as patriotic grievance or nostalgic loss. For instance, God Bless the U.S.A. reframes melancholy as patriotic pride rooted in sacrifice. This selective coding of emotion reflects a populist logic that thrives on binary oppositions—victory versus victimhood, pride versus betrayal (Lacatus, 2020; Street, 2012). The curated emotional palette thus enhances the moral clarity and ideological coherence essential to populist communication. Crucially, these playlists are not passive accompaniments to the rallies—they are active emotional scripts. Drawing on Thomas Turino’s (2008) concept of participatory music, the audience is transformed from spectators to emotional co-performers. Songs are chanted, danced to, and experienced as rituals of identification and belonging. Music becomes the medium through which collective affect is not just expressed, but enacted. This participatory dynamic adds physicality to ideology, allowing emotion to be embodied and synchronized across large crowds.

46Temporal aesthetics also play a key role. The playlist is dominated by music from the 1970s and 1980s—decades often idealized in conservative imaginaries as eras of national strength and cultural cohesion (Wilson, 2017; Redondo et al., 2023). By invoking these periods, Trump’s musical strategy enacts what Schwarz (2023) and Moffitt (2016) term temporal populism: the emotional conviction that the past was better, and that the nation can and must return to that former purported greatness. Figure 5 also reveals subtle affective shifts across decades. While Bittersweet remains consistently dominant, Excited tracks decline in the 2020s, giving way to a rise in Sad and Bittersweet songs. This evolution mirrors Trump’s transition from candidate to embattled former president, as the playlist increasingly channels grievance, nostalgia, and wounded pride. Rather than altering its emotional structure, the soundtrack adjusts its tonal emphasis—reframing past triumphalism through a lens of loss and perseverance.

47Music in this context acts as a sonic time machine, channeling collective memory into present-day mobilization. Equally important is the role of digital platforms such as Spotify in the dissemination and normalization of this affective content. By publishing campaign playlists on mainstream music services, the emotional arc of rallies is extended into everyday life. Audiences can relive the experience, rehearse their emotional allegiances, and strengthen their identification with the political movement beyond the temporal and spatial boundaries of the event. As Tochukwu Otuokere et al. (2021) and Antonio Alaminos-Fernández (2023) observe, these soundscapes function as vectors of cultural soft power—embedding ideology within algorithmically optimized, emotionally resonant formats. Computational tools also offer empirical insights into these affective mechanisms. The use of Spotify’s audio features and clustering techniques allows us to visualize and quantify emotional tendencies across the playlist. Variables such as energy and valence function as affective proxies, enabling a scientific reading of emotional curation (Panda et al., 2023; Tzanetakis & Cook, n.d.). Through emotion classification models, we can trace patterns across genre, performer, and historical period, revealing that this is not a random assortment of popular tracks, but an emotionally strategic configuration tailored to populist performance.

48The implications of this analysis extend beyond the case of Trump. Similar uses of curated political soundscapes are evident in other populist contexts—from Bolsonaro in Brazil to Modi in India—where music serves to dramatize national identity and mediate emotional experience. These global parallels point to the growing centrality of musical affect in contemporary political life. As Joseph Nye (2011) suggests, the most influential forms of power are often those that shape desires and beliefs through culture, rather than through policy or enforcement. This intersection of music, politics, and data invites a broader interdisciplinary approach. Understanding how music functions in populist campaigns requires insights from political communication, musicology, media studies, and computational analysis. Trump’s playlist provides a case study of how emotional engineering is performed through sound, and how digital technologies amplify its reach and impact.

49Political identity, in this framework, is not merely argued—it is felt, repeated, and sung into being. The findings underscore how musical soundscapes operate as emotional infrastructures. They are designed to sustain group cohesion, energize supporters, and rehearse narratives of national struggle and redemption. In doing so, they blur the lines between entertainment and ideology, leisure and loyalty. The playlist becomes a strategic apparatus that fuses spectacle with substance, crafting a sense of authenticity, urgency, and belonging.

50Trump’s musical strategy also reveals the affective rhythms of populist dramaturgy. Each track is a scene in a larger performance—punctuating the speech, preparing the crowd, or marking a climactic moment. The emotional pacing of the event is scaffolded by music, turning the rally into a theatrical production of political sentiment. As campaigns become increasingly performative, sound becomes as crucial as speech in shaping the mood and meaning of political life. Ultimately, this study affirms that populist communication today operates through more than words. It relies on emotional atmospheres engineered through culture, media, and sound. Trump’s campaign playlists demonstrate how curated music can operate as a soft weapon—arming rallies with rhythm, amplifying ideological force, and orchestrating shared feeling. Through a combination of affective calibration, symbolic resonance, and digital reproducibility, music becomes a tool not only for persuasion, but also for political participation and belonging.

Top of page

Bibliography

Alaminos-Fernández, Antonio F. “La música popular como poder blando cultural.” OBETS: Revista de Ciencias Sociales 18, no. 1 (2023): 17-36. https://doi.org/10.14198/obets.23907.

Bourgeois, P., & Hess, U. “The impact of social context on mimicry.” Biological Psychology 77, no. 3 (2008): 343-352. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2007.11.008.

Cusick, Suzanne G. “Music as Torture / Music as Weapon.” Transcultural Music Review 10 (2006): 1-18.

Franklin, Michael. “Music Making Politics: Beyond Lyrics.” Politik 23, no. 1 (2020): 51-69. https://doi.org/10.7146/politik.v23i1.120309.

Goldstein, Donna M., Kira Hall, and Matthew Bruce Ingram. “Trump’s Comedic Gestures as Political Weapon.” In Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by J. McIntosh and N. Mendoza-Denton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108887410.007.

Hall, Kira, Donna M. Goldstein, and Matthew Bruce Ingram. “The Hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, Gesture, Spectacle.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 2 (2016): 71-100. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau6.2.009.

Hofstede, Geert. Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations across Nations. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001.

Kellner, Douglas. “Preface: Guy Debord, Donald Trump, and the Politics of the Spectacle.” In The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism, edited by Marco Briziarelli and Emiliana Armano, 1-14. London: University of Westminster Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.16997/book11.a.

Kühne, Rinaldo, Christian Schemer, Jörg Matthes and Werner Wirth. “Affective priming in political campaigns: How campaign-induced emotions prime political opinions.” International Journal of Public Opinion Research 23, no. 4 (2011): 485-507.

Lacatus, Corina. “Populism and President Trump’s Approach to Foreign Policy: An Analysis of Tweets and Rally Speeches.” Politics 41, no. 1 (2020): 31-47. https://doi.org/10.25384/sage.c.5076386.

Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. London: Verso Press, 2005.

Moffitt, Benjamin. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.11126/stanford/9780804796132.001.0001.

Nye, Joseph S. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: PublicAffairs, 2004.

Nye, Joseph S. “The future of soft power in US foreign policy.” In Soft Power and US Foreign Policy: Theoretical, historical and contemporary perspectives, edited by Inderjeet Parmar and Michael Cox, 4-11. New York and London: Routledge, 2010.

Ophir, Yotam, Devin K. Forde, Madison Neurohr, Dror Walter and Virginia Massignan. “News Media Framing of Social Protests around Racial Tensions during the Donald Trump Presidency.” Journalism 24, no. 3 (2021): 475-493. https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849211036622.

Otuokere, Tobechukwu Okechukwu, Agbotiname Lucky Imoize, and Aderemi Aaron-Anthony Atayero. “Analysis of Sonic Effects of Music from a Comprehensive Dataset on Audio Features.” Elektrika 20, no. 1 (2021): 43-53. https://doi.org/10.11113/elektrika.v20n1.233.

Panda, Renato, Ricardo Malheiro, and Rui Pedro Paiva. “Audio Features for Music Emotion Recognition: A Survey.” IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing 14, no. 1 (2023): 68-88. https://doi.org/10.1109/taffc.2020.3032373.

Schrock, Douglas, Benjamin Dowd-Arrow, Kristen Erichsen, Haley Gentile, and Pierce Dignam. “The Emotional Politics of Making America Great Again.” Journal of Working-Class Studies 2, no. 1 (2017): 5-22. https://doi.org/10.13001/jwcs.v2i1.6039.

Street, John. Music and Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.

Turino, Thomas. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Tzanetakis, George, and Perry Cook. “Sound Analysis Using MPEG Compressed Audio.” ICASSP 2000 2 (2000): 761-764. https://doi.org/10.1109/icassp.2000.859071.

Way, Laura. “Discourse, Music and Political Communication.” Journal of Language and Politics 18, no. 4 (2019): 475-490. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.18065.way.

Wilson, Graham. “Brexit, Trump and the Special Relationship.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19, no. 3 (2017): 543-557. https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148117713719.

Top of page

References

Electronic reference

Antonio Francisco Alaminos Fernández, Emotional Governance Through Sound: Populism and Music in the Trump EraEuropean journal of American studies [Online], 20-2 | 2025, Online since 01 June 2025, connection on 14 June 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/24304; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/14eir

Top of page

About the author

Antonio Francisco Alaminos Fernández

Researcher at the Spanish Centre for Sociological Research (CIS). Holds a cum laude PhD with international distinction and extraordinary award in the Peace, Conflict and Development programme (Universitat Jaume I), as well as a cum laude PhD with international distinction and extraordinary award in the Business, Economics and Society programme (University of Alicante). Master’s degree in Communication for Development (Malmö University, Sweden) and International Master’s in Peace, Conflict and Development Studies (Universitat Jaume I). Bachelor’s degree in Advertising and Public Relations (University of Alicante) and Bachelor’s in Circumpolar Studies (Nordland University, Norway).
Specialist in computational social science and its applications to empirical social research. One of his main research areas explores the performative effects of popular music on emotions, social relationships, political communication, and everyday life, as well as its role as a form of cultural soft power.

Top of page

Copyright

CC-BY-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

Top of page
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search