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Donald Trump’s style is often described as provocative and his administration as catastrophic. Despite this, his popularity remained high throughout his term in office, and in the 2020 US elections, he received 10 million votes more than in 2016. This paper investigates the paradox of political identification through a discursive, performative and stylistic framework. It argues that policy outcomes and rhetorical consistency do not suffice in understanding identification. Rather, transgression – which is typical of populist performativity – plays a pivotal role in interpellating affective collective subjectivities. This article investigates the case of Donald Trump, from his emergence in 2015 until the 2021 Capitol insurgence. It employs discourse and visual analysis to study Trump’s rhetoric and performativity, integrating this with in-depth interviews and ethnographic research to examine the ways his style resonated with his supporters. It concludes that charismatic performativity and transgression play a crucial role in political identification regardless of the quality of institutional performance.

This article investigates the curious non-emergence of populism in contemporary Cyprus despite the deep financial crisis and profound political disillusionment – conditions that are treated as necessary and sufficient. Putting emphasis on Cyprus’ key historical particularities, the article inquires into the ways Cyprus’ political past, and the subsequent salient ‘national question’, produce ambiguous notions of ‘the people’ on the one hand, and impede the potentials for a ‘populist moment’ on the other hand. By assessing the performative dynamics of oppositional parties in Cyprus, the empirical analysis suggests that the absence of populism is rooted in the following factors: First, nationalist discourse prevails over, and significantly weakens, populist discourse. Second, self-proclaimed challenger parties served ‘old wine in new bottles’ further undermining their position and claims. The failure of populism to take root in Cyprus, brings to the fore important theoretical insights relevant to the non-emergence of populism even under favourable conditions.