Make America Better Again: Emotional Narratives and the Use of Instagram in the Campaigns of Trump and Biden

Abstract

This article examines how Donald Trump and Joe Biden used Instagram as a platform for emotional political storytelling during their campaigns and presidencies. Based on a thematic analysis of a large sample of Instagram posts (approximately 9000 reviewed, with selected posts analyzed in depth), and grounded in affect theory and visual political communication, the study identifies six central emotional patterns—nostalgia, fear, pride, hope, unity, and grievance—through which both leaders constructed emotionally resonant narratives. While often portrayed as ideological opposites, the analysis suggests that Trump and Biden operate within a shared emotional grammar: both mobilize longing for the past, symbolic restoration, and moral clarity to emotionally realign a fragmented electorate. Instagram, with its aesthetics of intimacy and symbolic condensation, enhances these strategies by offering a visual vocabulary attuned to affective public sentiment. The analysis explores how both leaders engage with and reshape prevailing emotional undercurrents in American society, focusing on how emotion functions as a narrative resource in digital political communication. In doing so, the article contributes to research on affective publics, the emotional simplification of politics, and the role of visual storytelling in the performance of democratic legitimacy in the digital age.

Introduction

In the contemporary American political landscape, emotionally resonant narratives have become central to how political meaning is constructed and disseminated. Research indicates that political discourse is increasingly shaped by affective logics, where emotions such as fear, nostalgia, and resentment function not as irrational disruptions but as structuring forces of political communication (Papacharissi, 2015; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019). As traditional ideological boundaries weaken and party affiliation declines, many voters gravitate toward leaders who reflect their affective realities rather than their policy preferences. Feelings of cultural displacement, economic insecurity, and institutional distrust have contributed to a volatile and emotionally charged public sphere, within which political messaging must contend with a narrow but potent affective bandwidth.

Visual platforms such as Instagram intensify these dynamics. Their algorithmic and aesthetic logics prioritize emotionally engaging content, rewarding narratives that are visually striking and symbolically condensed (Highfield & Leaver, 2016). In this environment, presidential candidates operate under structural constraints that make emotional resonance not merely advantageous but necessary. This study explores how Donald Trump and Joe Biden used Instagram during their campaigns and presidencies to communicate affective narratives. While ideologically distinct, both leaders constructed messages that frequently responded to similar emotional demands—drawing on motifs of national restoration, symbolic unity, and personal proximity. Rather than assuming strategic convergence, the analysis explores how shared emotional conditions may give rise to overlapping rhetorical and visual forms. This raises broader questions about the limits of expressive autonomy in affect-driven political communication. To capture these dynamics, the study analyzes how affective and narrative meaning is constructed visually on Instagram, and how emotional themes are symbolically sequenced to create coherence over time.

To understand how emotional legitimacy is visually constructed and politically mobilized in this context, this article offers a comparative analysis of Trump’s and Biden’s Instagram communication. Specifically, it asks how their messages align with, reflect, or strategically engage prevailing emotional sentiments in U.S. society. The following section outlines the purpose of the study and the specific research questions guiding the analysis.

Aim and Research Questions

The purpose of this study is to examine how emotional meaning is constructed and mobilized on Instagram by Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and how these affective narratives intersect with dominant emotional sentiments in American society. In doing so, the article contributes to the growing body of research on affective publics and digital political storytelling.

The analysis is guided by the following research questions:

• Which emotional themes dominate Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s Instagram communication, and how are these emotions visually and narratively constructed?

• How do the emotional narratives embedded in their respective slogans—“Make America Great Again” and “Build Back Better”—correspond to or capitalize on prevailing sentiments in the U.S. public?

• In what ways do their affective strategies converge or diverge, despite ideological differences?

Theoretical Framework

To analyze how presidential communication on Instagram mobilizes emotion, this study draws on affect theory, emotional political communication, and narrative visuality—conceptual tools that highlight how political meaning is constructed, circulated, and emotionally received in the digital era. Emotions shape political identity, structure affective publics, and influence how narratives resonate with particular audiences.

One of the most influential contributions to this debate comes from Wahl-Jorgensen (2019), who argues that mediated politics is “saturated with emotion,” and that digital platforms actively shape how feelings attach to political actors and messages. This view challenges rationalist paradigms in political science and aligns with Marcus’s (2002) theory of “affective intelligence,” which proposes that emotion and reason co-exist and together inform political judgment. Wahl-Jorgensen also underscores how journalism and platform design prioritize emotion as a mode of storytelling, contributing to a media ecology in which affect circulates more rapidly and powerfully than argument.

In contrast to these psychological and media-oriented perspectives, sociocultural theorists have offered complementary frameworks. Wetherell (2012), for example conceptualizes emotion not as discrete psychological states but as patterned social practices—what she calls “affective practices.” This perspective allows us to understand how emotional expression on platforms like Instagram draws on cultural repertoires and performative conventions that are historically shaped and politically consequential.

Building on this affective grounding, recent research has emphasized the centrality of emotionally charged narratives in contemporary political communication. Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” exemplify what Papacharissi’s (2015) describes as affective storytelling—emotionally charged narratives that frame political problems in terms of loss, restoration, and hope. These slogans do not merely convey policy intentions; they function as affective signifiers designed to mobilize sentiment. Their affective power is further illuminated by Esser et al. (2022), who suggest that political communication today unfolds in a hybrid media system where emotional resonance, symbolic compression, and multimodal performance are crucial to visibility and impact. Instagram, as a visual-first platform, intensifies these dynamics by leveraging aesthetic immediacy and algorithmic amplification.

This also brings us to the role of publics and digital alignment. Papacharissi’s (2015) concept of affective publics offers a useful lens to understand how political messages catalyze emotional alignment among loosely connected audiences. These publics are not organized by ideology but by shared intensities—hope, anger, nostalgia—that converge around hashtags, slogans, and emotionally salient images. Instagram’s affordances—short captions, stylized visuals, and symbolic cues—facilitate this kind of affective condensation. Leaders like Trump and Biden operate not just as political figures but as affective anchors, helping to shape and channel public feeling in ways that can reinforce allegiance or spark disaffection.

At the same time, affective communication can contribute to emotional polarization. Wodak’s (2015) cautionary dimension, which highlights how affective communication—through repetition, symbolic framing, and emotional overstatement—can normalize polarizing narratives across the political spectrum. In highly mediatized environments, affect becomes both a mobilizing force and a mechanism of ideological closure, especially when grievance, fear, and symbolic restoration dominate the emotional repertoire.

Finally, narrative theory provides additional tools for analyzing how emotion is not only expressed but sequenced. Recent work in narrative theory (Bamberg, 2011; Polletta, 2006) emphasizes how political communication often relies on recurring symbolic storylines—past decline, present crisis, and future redemption. This framing supports the study’s focus on how emotion is not only expressed but sequenced and structured into narrative forms.

While the terms affect, emotion, and narrative structure overlap conceptually, they are used here with distinct analytic purposes: to signal different levels of political meaning-making, from embodied sentiment to symbolic framing.

Taken together, these perspectives conceptualize Instagram as a political stage where emotions are not merely reflected but actively produced, aestheticized, and disseminated. The framework enables a critical comparison of how Trump and Biden each engage with the emotional undercurrents of their time—not as populists versus moderates, but as affective narrators navigating similar societal tensions through different symbolic vocabularies.

Methodology

Building on the theoretical framework outlined above, this study employs a qualitative, comparative case study approach to examine how affective meaning is constructed and communicated on Instagram by former U.S. presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The empirical material consists of Instagram posts published by Trump between 2015 and January 2021, and by Biden from the launch of his presidential campaign in 2019 until January 2024—amounting to approximately 9000 posts in total.

While the analysis does not aim to quantify the frequency of emotional categories, all posts were reviewed systematically and recurrent affective themes gradually emerged through an inductive process. As the material accumulated, six core emotional registers—nostalgia, pride, grievance, fear, unity, and hope—emerged as recurring patterns across both accounts. This emergent thematic structure guided the analytical focus of the study and enabled a comparative reading of how emotional narratives were constructed and sustained over time. All Instagram posts from Donald Trump (2015–January 2021) and Joe Biden (2019–January 2024) were reviewed for thematic relevance. Content not related to political messaging or affective expression was excluded—such as posts focused solely on event logistics, greetings, or generic visual promotions.

From this broader corpus, a strategic sample was constructed to enable in-depth, comparative analysis (i.e. a purpose-driven, non-random selection of posts that foreground affective themes and narrative structure). This sample was not intended to be exhaustive or statistically representative but designed to capture a range of emotionally salient content that reflects recurring visual and narrative strategies.

Posts were selected based on their explicit expression or visual representation of key emotional themes, such as pride, fear, nostalgia, unity, grievance, and hope. The sample includes a mix of text-heavy graphics, memes, official policy visuals, and portrait-oriented photographs, allowing for variation in style and tone. Selection was iterative and interpretive, guided by thematic emergence rather than predetermined quotas. A balance was sought between the two accounts, and attention was paid to variation over time and platform use. For the more in-depth analysis, a smaller subset of posts was examined in detail, with approximately 20 posts selected to represent each of the six emotional themes. These posts were not treated as mutually exclusive; several examples resonated with more than one theme, reflecting the overlapping nature of emotional expression. The purpose of this selection was not to provide a precise numerical distribution, but to capture representative instances of how the themes were articulated across the broader data set.

While the study does not aim to track temporal shifts, the selection process accounted for consistency and repetition across time. Emotional logics appeared relatively stable throughout the material, with certain themes becoming more prominent as they resonated with unfolding political events.

The analytic strategy rests on an iterative process of thematic content analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), through which the dataset was systematically reviewed and inductively coded into recurrent affective motifs. These include, but are not limited to, nostalgia, pride, grievance, fear, and unity—emotions that align closely with socio-political sentiments documented in U.S. public opinion data. The analysis emphasized how emotional cues were constructed visually and rhetorically across posts, including imagery, slogans, typography, and composition.

To capture the temporal and symbolic layering of political messaging, the thematic analysis was complemented by narrative interpretation, understood as the sequencing and symbolic framing of meaning across time (Bamberg, 2011; Polletta, 2006; Riessman, 2008). Particular attention was paid to how sequences of posts collectively contributed to overarching story arcs associated with each leader’s campaign slogans—“Make America Great Again” (MAGA) and “Build Back Better” (BBB). Rather than treating individual posts as isolated expressions, the analysis considers them as micro-narratives that accrue meaning through repetition, variation, and visual rhythm. The goal was to identify not only what emotional registers were invoked, but how they were sequenced, layered, and symbolically sustained over time.

To strengthen contextual validity, thematic findings were triangulated with public opinion data and sentiment studies from Pew Research Center (2020, 2021) and other sources. This comparative lens made it possible to examine how affective messaging on Instagram mirrored—or strategically responded to—widespread societal sentiments, such as distrust in government, anxiety about national decline, and longing for symbolic unity.

Although no second coder was involved, all material was reviewed in a multi-stage process to ensure internal consistency and reflexive engagement with emergent categories. Thematic consistency was reached through repeated coding and refinement across the selected posts. The analysis is not designed to assess the causal effects of social media messaging on electoral outcomes, but to examine how emotional meaning is constructed through digital visual communication.

Finally, the interpretive orientation of this study has been shaped by previous fieldwork and long-term engagement with American public discourse since 2005. While this prior experience is not formally included as empirical material, it has informed the analytical sensibility and interpretive focus of the study.

Ethically, the study relies exclusively on publicly available content from verified Instagram accounts. No private or user-generated interactions were accessed or reproduced. Interpretations are made with the intent of understanding communicative strategies, rather than reinforcing partisan positions or personalizing political critique.

To clarify the study’s conceptual vocabulary, it is important to briefly distinguish between the terms affect and emotion. While affect is used in reference to specific theoretical constructs—such as “affective publics” (Papacharissi, 2015), “affective intelligence” (Marcus, 2002), and “affective practices” (Wetherell, 2012)—emotion serves as a more general term for thematically coded patterns such as nostalgia, fear, and pride. Rather than enforcing a rigid dichotomy, the analysis emphasizes how emotions are narratively constructed and visually mobilized within broader affective dynamics. This pragmatic usage reflects the study’s aim: to understand how emotion functions as both content and structure in digital political storytelling.

Background: The Emotional Landscape of Contemporary American Politics

The analysis that follows is structured thematically around six key emotional registers identified through iterative coding of Trump’s and Biden’s Instagram posts: nostalgia, pride, grievance, fear, unity, and hope. These themes were selected not only for their frequency and symbolic salience, but for their deeper narrative function in each leader’s communicative strategy. Rather than treating emotions as discrete expressions, the analysis attends to how they operate in sequence, are visually and rhetorically composed, and contribute to affective storytelling over time.

Rather than applying a pre-defined method, emotional patterns were gradually distilled through long-term observation and repeated review of the full visual archive. In this way, themes were not analytically imposed but emerged through sustained engagement with how each leader mobilized emotional meaning over time. Each theme is illustrated with a curated selection of posts that best exemplify its symbolic function and stylistic variation. The aim is not to provide an exhaustive overview of each campaign’s visual archive, but to offer a comparative reading of how emotions are mobilized to frame societal problems, establish political identity, and appeal to public sentiment.

Special attention is paid to the interplay between image and caption, the use of color and composition, and the circulation of emotionally resonant slogans. By mapping these affective patterns, the analysis seeks to understand how Instagram functions not only as a platform for political messaging, but as a stage for emotional performance—where feelings are not just reflected but strategically invoked. This approach allows for a deeper reflection on the democratic implications of aestheticized emotional narratives in digital political communication.

To understand the emotional logic that underpins contemporary political communication in the United States, it is essential to examine the broader affective and sociocultural context in which that communication takes place. This section outlines how declining institutional trust, economic disillusionment, and cultural anxiety have reshaped the emotional terrain of American public life. These shifts do not simply form a backdrop to political rhetoric—they shape the expectations, constraints, and narrative possibilities available to political actors. The themes traced here—such as loss, resentment, pride, grievance, and longing—resonate throughout both Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s Instagram communication, though often in different forms. Mapping this emotional landscape provides the interpretive foundation for understanding how their messaging aligns with, or deviates from, dominant affective patterns in American society.

A Lost Promise: American Identity and the Erosion of the American Dream

For centuries, the United States has constructed its national identity around the ideal of the American Dream: the belief that anyone, through hard work and determination, can achieve personal success. This ethos, tied to the image of the “self-made man” articulated by Frederick Douglass and grounded in Thomas Jefferson’s notion of self-ownership, has long symbolized the exceptionalism of the American model (Stephanson, 1995; Stranne & Parsi, 2023). The American Dream has functioned as a civic religion, promising social mobility, personal dignity, and economic opportunity. Living that dream—or striving toward it—has become synonymous with being a “true American” (Hunt, 1987; Layne, 2006; Rosenberg, 1982; Zinn, 1995).

But in recent decades, this dream has frayed. For the first time in modern history, large segments of the U.S. population no longer believe that their lives—or their children’s lives—will be better than previous generations. A deep emotional rupture has opened between national ideals and lived realities. As inequality has grown and upward mobility declined, many Americans now ask, Who am I as an American if the dream is no longer mine to pursue?

This emotional dissonance is rooted in structural transformations. After a period of relative equality in the mid-20th century, the 1980s ushered in a new era of market deregulation and rising inequality (Davis & Mazumber, 2017; Piketty, 2014). Real wages have stagnated or declined for most workers, while the 2008 financial crisis dealt a crushing blow to middle- and working-class Americans (Eichengreen & O’Rourke, 2010). Many lost homes, jobs, and savings, especially in rural areas where housing values plummeted. Although the economy recovered in macroeconomic terms, the emotional aftershocks linger. In 2019, over 34 million Americans lived in poverty, including 17.3 million in deep poverty, and nearly 30% were near the poverty line (Semega et al., 2020). Food insecurity affected over 15 million individuals. Even prior to the pandemic, public sentiment consistently reflected a sense of national pessimism, with a majority of Americans believing the country was heading in the wrong direction.

Perhaps more revealing is the collapse in belief in fairness and mobility. A 2016 study by Chetty et al. found that the proportion of children earning more than their parents had fallen from 90% for those born in 1940 to just 50% today. In 1998, 68% of Americans believed the economic system was basically fair. In 2019, about half of Americans said they no longer believed the American Dream was attainable. These feelings are more than economic—they are existential. They signal a loss of identity, hope, and orientation. A trend that still holds (Borelli, 2024).

Betrayal and Disconnection: Distrust in Politics and the Crisis of Representation

Alongside economic uncertainty, Americans also express profound distrust toward political institutions. The federal government, once a guarantor of fairness and opportunity, is now widely viewed as out of touch or even adversarial. In 2015, only 19% of Americans said they trusted the government in Washington to do what is right; only 3% said they trusted it “almost always” (Pew Research Center, 2015). Disillusionment with “Washington” has become a central emotional theme in American politics.

This alienation has ideological and affective dimensions. As Hochschild (2016) and Cramer (2016) demonstrate in their ethnographies of disaffected voters, many Americans feel ignored and unseen by political elites, even when their material conditions have not drastically worsened. What matters is the perception of disrespect, of being “left behind.” Such emotions are politically potent and easily mobilized. Pankaj Mishra (2017) describes the global spread of an “age of anger,” fueled by unmet promises and the psychological wounds of globalization. In the United States, Trump’s 2016 campaign channeled this discontent through anti-elite rhetoric and symbolic rebellion against the establishment. Economist Ann Pettifor (2017) argues that Trump was seen as the protector of those betrayed by free trade and global capitalism. Similarly, Norris and Inglehart (2019) interpret his success as a cultural backlash against liberal cosmopolitanism.

Importantly, this sense of betrayal is not limited to the economically disenfranchised. Many Trump supporters are not poor, but they sense that national decline, cultural marginalization, and economic favoritism threaten their status. Biden, while positioning himself as a restorer of dignity and decency, also had to respond to these emotional fractures—not through radical vision, but through empathic recognition and symbolic repair.

Polarization, Cultural Displacement, and Affective Identity

Finally, American political discourse is increasingly shaped by affective polarization—intense emotional identification with one’s own group and hostility toward others (Iyengar et al., 2012). These divisions are not merely ideological; they reflect deeper cultural anxieties. For many White, rural, or religious Americans, the country’s growing diversity, progressive social movements, and shifting moral codes evoke feelings of cultural displacement. Scholars like Wuthnow (2018) and Mouffe (2005) emphasize that political belonging is ultimately about identity and recognition—not just interests.

Race plays a key role in these dynamics. Although Trump’s Instagram rarely addresses race overtly, broader analyses show that racism and White anxiety were strong motivators among his supporters (Abramowitz, 2018; Edsall, 2017; Wood, 2017). Reports by PRRI (Cox et al., 2017) reveal that cultural fears—not just economic ones—drive opposition to immigration and social change. The historian Timothy Snyder (2017) has shown how Trump’s discourse aligned with White supremacist narratives, normalizing exclusionary nationalism.

However, these emotions do not exist in isolation. Economic stress and cultural anxiety are often mutually reinforcing. As Mishra (2017) and others note, feelings of loss—whether material or symbolic—can easily be redirected toward scapegoats. In such an environment, emotional narratives of restoration, strength, and national unity become politically indispensable. Both Trump and Biden construct these narratives visually and symbolically on platforms like Instagram. Whether through flags, factories, families, or crowds, their posts tap into this affective landscape—less to present new political visions than to respond to and reflect a national mood of longing, fear, and survival.

Together, these emotional structures form what could be described as the affective grammar of contemporary American politics. Politicians are not merely free agents articulating ideology; they are actors navigating an emotionally charged field where certain feelings are more communicatively available—and more politically effective—than others. Trump and Biden, despite their differing political orientations and rhetorical styles, both operate within this limited affective bandwidth. Yet while their Instagram messaging frequently reflects the sentiments described here, it also reveals nuances, tensions, and occasional departures from the dominant narratives. The following analysis explores how these emotional patterns are visually and narratively mobilized, and how their articulation sometimes blurs conventional ideological lines or produces unexpected affective convergences.

Analysis

The emotional landscape outlined in the previous section—marked by widespread distrust, nostalgic longing, and socio-political dislocation—serves as the interpretive backdrop for the following analysis. These sentiments are not treated as abstract context, but as active conditions shaping how political leaders construct emotionally resonant narratives. The aim is to explore how Trump and Biden, through their Instagram posts, visually and rhetorically respond to these affective realities. Each of the themes below—nostalgia, fear, pride, hope, unity, and grievance—reflects how their messages intersect with the most prominent emotional undercurrents in American society. In this sense, the analysis builds directly on the emotional tensions and public sentiments identified earlier, translating them into communicative patterns and narrative strategies.

Nostalgia and the Emotional Politics of Restoration

Nostalgia plays a central role in the affective storytelling of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden on Instagram. Although often framed as politically opposite, both leaders draw on a shared emotional reservoir: the longing for a past that felt more ordered, prosperous, and morally coherent. Through images, slogans, and symbolic associations, nostalgia is used to emotionally stabilize the present by reactivating idealized versions of American history.

For Trump, nostalgia is not a background sentiment—it is the driving affect of his narrative. His slogan “Make America Great Again” is a direct invocation of temporal loss and promised recovery. Posts from both his campaigns and presidency frequently juxtapose imagery of decline with idealized scenes of American greatness: factory workers, soldiers, traditional families, and small-town parades. As Bonikowski (2016, 2017) argues, such affective structures align with symbolic nationalism, in which the nation’s imagined past becomes a moral reference point to judge and reshape the present. On Instagram, these cues are often condensed through bold colors, vintage aesthetics, and patriotic backdrops—transforming memory into a political asset.

This dynamic resonates with Papacharissi’s (2015) notion of affective storytelling, in which narratives can connect past, present, and future through emotionally charged symbols. The repetition of “again” not only signals nostalgic yearning but also constructs a moral arc in which emotional restoration becomes synonymous with national strength. In this sense, the visual and rhetorical elements operate as affective practices (Wetherell, 2012)—ritualized performances that invite alignment, recognition, and belonging.

The emotional appeal of Trump’s nostalgia is intensified by its simplicity and moral clarity. As Pankaj Mishra (2017) notes, nostalgia often arises in moments of dislocation, offering reassurance through imagined coherence. In Trump’s messaging, this logic is deployed with precision: the past was better, the present is broken, and restoration requires strength and defiance. This sequence may be read as a moral imperative. By staging the past not as complex history but as emotional truth, nostalgia becomes a tool of political urgency.

Biden’s version of nostalgia is less overt but still central. His messaging often emphasizes restoration—phrases like “Let’s restore the soul of America” or “Build Back Better” implicitly frame the present as a deviation from national ideals. Instagram posts commonly feature stylized illustrations that evoke 1950s aesthetics, along with emotionally resonant depictions of frontline workers, interracial families, and rural communities. These elements do not project backward in the same aggressive mode as Trump’s, but they do rely on an emotional memory of American decency and unity. As Enli and Rosenberg (2018) note, such visuals are central to the politics of authenticity in the digital age: they perform care, empathy, and civic virtue.

However, Biden’s nostalgic storytelling is not without its own blind spots. By avoiding explicit confrontation with historical exclusions—racism, inequality, imperialism—his version of the past risks becoming too symbolic, too sanitized. It suggests that America merely lost its way, not that it was built on contradictions. As Papacharissi (2015) argues, digital political narratives often bypass critique in favor of emotional cohesion, reinforcing what she terms affective publics—networks bound by feeling rather than ideological clarity.

Ultimately, both Trump and Biden construct nostalgia not as regression, but as emotional orientation. It is the grammar through which their campaigns and presidencies seek to reattach disoriented publics to a sense of continuity, identity, and meaning. Instagram’s algorithmic structure, which rewards affective intensity and visual clarity, reinforces this logic. The past becomes a visual archive of belonging—mobilized not to educate, but to feel.

In both campaigns, nostalgia serves not only as a retrospective longing but as a legitimizing emotional logic through which political actors promise national renewal. As such, nostalgia functions not simply as memory, but as political affect—transforming historical ambiguity into emotionally charged myth and symbolic certainty. In doing so, it offers a form of emotional legitimacy that stabilizes identity and mobilizes belonging in times of political disorientation.

Fear and the Politics of Threat

Fear emerges as a recurrent theme in both Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s Instagram communication, but it is framed and mobilized through different rhetorical and emotional strategies. In Trump’s narrative, fear is dramatized and externalized. The United States is repeatedly portrayed as under existential threat—by immigrants, leftist agitators, corrupt elites, or ineffectual politicians. The tone is urgent and the imagery intense: burning cities, violent protests, and phrases like “LAW & ORDER” or “The radical left will destroy our country” dominate his visual repertoire. A typical example can be found in a post from June 1, 2020, where Trump writes, “These are not protests. These are acts of domestic terror.”

These communications construct a dichotomous moral order in which danger is omnipresent, and Trump himself is cast as the singular protector of national survival. Posts of this kind often rely on stark contrasts, national symbols, and imperative language to emotionally dramatize the threat landscape. This dynamic resonates with Wahl-Jorgensen’s (2019) discussion of the emotionalization of political communication and emotional storytelling, where fear becomes a tool for emotional alignment and political legitimation. A frequent use of dark backdrops, aggressive red typography, and iconic figures such as the Statue of Liberty visually encodes a siege mentality. As Wodak (2015) has argued in relation to right-wing discourse, such strategies can be understood as contributing to a sense of cultural emergency that positions strong leadership as necessary. Such communications can be understood as affective performances that dramatize threat and symbolically position Trump as the nation’s emotional safeguard.

This narrative resonates particularly with audiences who perceive the country as changing too fast or moving in the wrong direction. As Hochschild (2016) argues, such affective framings tap into a “deep story” of decline, betrayal, and loss of control. Trump’s messaging both reflects and reinforces these sentiments, turning generalized anxiety into political certainty: there are enemies, and he is the one to confront them.

Biden’s communication also engages fear, but in a more moralizing and individualizing manner. His campaign and presidency began in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which shaped the visual tone of his early messaging. However, the dominant affective narrative in Biden’s communication is not fear of a virus, but fear of a continued Trump presidency and its consequences for democracy, decency, and national identity. In a post from October 2020, Biden declared, “This is our opportunity to restore the soul of America.” The accompanying image juxtaposed the slogan “Battle for the Soul of the Nation” with the words “Unity over division” and “Truth over lies”. Here, fear is not expressed through visual violence, but through a symbolic contrast between moral futures: either Trump remains in power, or the country reclaims its integrity.

This rhetorical mode positions Biden as rational, empathetic, and morally grounded, in contrast to Trump’s alleged chaos and danger. His repeated framing of the moment as one of existential national choice allows fear to function not through spectacle, but through what Papacharissi (2015) terms affective publics: emotionally attuned audiences bound by shared moral urgency.

Yet this approach also risks moral distancing. While Biden’s appeals are framed as inclusive and unifying, they simultaneously mark out a political and cultural other: not through dramatic imagery, but through the soft exclusion of those whose emotions are deemed irrational or dangerous. The absence of self-critique in his messaging, particularly regarding his own party’s role in producing institutional distrust or economic insecurity, stands in contrast to the affective directness of Trump’s communication. What Biden presents as healing may, for many, appear as evasion.

Despite these differences, both figures use fear as an organizing force. For Trump, it justifies forceful restoration. For Biden, it necessitates moral clarity and responsible leadership. In both cases, fear structures political narratives and emotionally mobilizes audiences. On Instagram, where political identity is communicated visually and symbolically, fear is intensified through repetition, contrast, and emotionally coded visual language. Whether aggressive or composed, the politics of fear remains central—not only to what is said but also to how political legitimacy is emotionally enacted (Highfield & Leaver, 2016; Russmann & Svensson, 2017).

Whether channeled through spectacle or moral responsibility, fear functions as a foundational emotion that structures political meaning and frames leadership as protection. As an affective strategy, fear condenses complexity into urgency—justifying authority, sharpening moral binaries, and reducing political alternatives to emotional necessity. In doing so, it becomes not only a communicative mode, but a tool for affective governance

Pride and the Politics of National Identity

National pride is one of the most visually and emotionally potent themes in the Instagram messaging of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It functions not only as an affirmation of belonging but as an affective anchor that legitimizes political authority and claims over national identity. Ahmed’s (2004) analysis is useful for considering how emotions like pride “stick” to certain signs and bodies—here, images of flags, veterans, or workers—creating a felt sense of “we” that undergirds political community. Yet the way pride is articulated differs markedly between the two figures—while both tap into collective sentiments, their emotional vocabularies and visual strategies produce divergent imaginaries of who the nation is and what it stands for.

For Donald Trump, pride is dramatized as restoration. His Instagram feed frequently features flags, military parades, and crowds of supporters, often accompanied by slogans like “We are respected again” or “Putting America first again.” One typical post reads, “We are going to put AMERICA back to WORK. We are going to put PEOPLE before GOVERNMENT” (November 16, 2016). This affective register casts Trump as the restorer of a lost greatness, appealing to what Hochschild (2016) calls the “deep story” of resentment among those who feel bypassed by social and economic change. These visuals perform more than celebration—they stage the recovery of lost honor. Trump’s representation of pride is rooted in an affective logic of redemption: the nation was humiliated, but under his leadership, it stands tall again. In another post from December 2016, he declared: “We will make America STRONG AGAIN. We will make America PROUD AGAIN. We will make America SAFE AGAIN—and we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.” The messaging frames pride as a reward for strength and loyalty, tightly linked to narratives of national struggle and moral polarity. Visual backdrops of soldiers, factories, and vast crowds act as symbolic proof of this regained dominance. This visual grammar, as Bonikowski (2016, 2017) argues, can activate “symbolic nationalism,” where cultural traditionalism is fused with anti-elitist emotional energies. The implied audience is not the diverse or aspirational America, but the “real America” that must be defended and restored.

Biden, by contrast, performs pride through gestures of moral decency and inclusive citizenship. His Instagram posts highlight individuals—teachers, health care workers, parents, veterans—who symbolize service, sacrifice, and quiet resilience. Slogans like “This is America” and “Build Back Better” accompany images that emphasize diversity, empathy, and collaborative strength. In a post from October 2019, the text reads, “WE THE PEOPLE. NOT WE THE DONORS,” a populist-tinged appeal to restore pride in democratic participation and decency. Here, national pride is not confrontational, but civic; it signals decency rather than dominance. However, this mode of representation risks becoming overly aestheticized. As Wahl-Jorgensen (2019) warns, emotional narratives in political communication can obscure conflict as easily as they reveal it—creating a “feel-good politics” that may pacify rather than mobilize. Similarly, Papacharissi (2015) argues that affective publics are held together less by ideology than by sentiment, and that sentiment can sustain cohesion without necessarily confronting power or inequality. Biden’s affective appeal, in this light, offers a “healing narrative” that may resonate emotionally but risks flattening complex social tensions.

What is striking is that both leaders rely on pride as a strategy for emotional coherence. For Trump, pride is oppositional and muscular—a signal of regained greatness through rejection of weakness. For Biden, it is moral and managerial—an aspirational projection of who Americans are or should be. In both cases, pride works as an emotional claim to legitimacy: Trump offers restoration, Biden reassurance. Neither fully escapes the symbolic function of pride: to unify, mobilize, and make leadership feel emotionally legitimate. Even as Biden gestures toward pluralism, the affective register remains cautious, evoking emotional warmth rather than transformative critique.

Instagram, with its stylized intimacy and visual shorthand, enhances these dynamics. Trump’s emotional script is direct and evocative, reducing complexity through spectacle. Biden’s, while more subdued, channels affect through polished professionalism. Trump appeals to visceral patriotism; Biden to civic sentiment. Both appeal to the desire for national wholeness—one through strength, the other through decency. But in a society marked by fragmentation and loss, the politics of pride becomes a delicate balancing act between resonance and reduction, between emotional connection and symbolic containment (Russmann & Svensson, 2017; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019).

While stylistically distinct, both Trump and Biden mobilize national pride to reinforce emotional legitimacy and construct an idealized vision of American identity. Yet this pride is rarely self-sufficient; it is almost always coupled with a sense of loss, crisis, or need for renewal. Pride in this sense becomes a temporal emotion—it celebrates a future imagined as redemptive, even as it mourns a past thought to be lost. In American political discourse, pride is not a stable affirmation, but a paradoxical affect—used to celebrate national greatness while simultaneously insisting that the nation remains unfinished and in need of repair. This contradiction allows political leaders to invoke unity and urgency in the same breath, framing leadership as both affirmation and restoration.

Hope and the Affective Politics of the Future

In the emotional repertoire of contemporary political messaging, hope occupies a paradoxical space: it gestures toward the future, but often through the lens of the past. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden mobilize hope not primarily as a call to radical transformation, but as a promise of return—to a “real” or “better” America that once was. Their affective appeals to hope are structured through nostalgia, visual idealism, and national restoration, revealing striking similarities in how each constructs a future rooted in emotionally charged visions of American identity. As Papacharissi (2015) suggests, affective storytelling functions not just to communicate policy visions, but to produce emotional orientations that bind audiences to particular temporal imaginaries. In this case, hope becomes an affective bridge between loss and belonging—offering coherence in a disoriented present.

For Trump, hope is explicitly tied to restoration. The phrase “Make America Great Again” suggests that greatness is not to be achieved but reclaimed. Instagram posts framed by slogans such as “The Best Is Yet to Come” or “Promises Made, Promises Kept” depict Trump as the guarantor of this return—an agent who will confront enemies, restore order, and deliver national rebirth. In one such post, Trump appears smiling against a waving American flag, with bold white-and-red text declaring, “THE BEST IS YET TO COME.” Visually, the narrative is dramatized through symbols of strength: rally crowds, patriotic iconography, and retro-styled images that evoke an idealized 1950s America. The future is not imagined as different, but as a repaired version of a lost past (Bonikowski, 2016; Highfield & Leaver, 2016). Here, hope functions as what Sara Ahmed (2004) calls a “directional” affect—it orients the subject toward a future that feels familiar, morally charged, and emotionally safe.

Biden, while rhetorically more conciliatory and civic-minded, draws from the same emotional architecture. His slogan “Build Back Better” similarly implies that something has been lost or broken—and that restoration is necessary. The visual language on his Instagram account frequently echoes postwar aesthetics: illustrations of American workers, stylized animations in muted patriotic tones, and imagery that subtly invokes the emotional cadence of mid-century optimism. One particularly illustrative post from early 2021 features a soft blue background and the slogan “The Future Will Be Made in America,” paired with clean, serif typography and the emblem “Made in America” stamped across the image. In another, Biden presents the “American Rescue Plan” against an illustration of a masked woman and child in a grocery store—signaling hope not as abstraction, but as material relief and moral duty. These posts construct a future that does not depart from the past but rather redeems it. In this sense, Biden’s version of hope is no less nostalgic than Trump’s—it just dresses its appeal in the language of unity and compassion rather than confrontation (Papacharissi, 2015; Russmann & Svensson, 2017). As Wetherell (2012) notes, affective practices like hope are not spontaneous emotions but structured performances—repeated gestures that produce belonging, orientation, and consent.

This convergence becomes particularly visible in how both candidates frame “the people” as the moral core of the nation. Biden’s affective storytelling emphasizes community, dignity, and jobs, but these themes echo Trump’s portrayal of the forgotten American worker and the heartland’s moral centrality. Both seek to emotionally rehabilitate the nation by reaffirming a particular American identity—rooted in industriousness, decency, and national pride. This dynamic reflects what Wahl-Jorgensen (2019) describes as “emotional scripts”—narrative templates that guide political engagement by appealing to widely shared feelings of loss and hope. The symbolic register of hope thus becomes a shared terrain, shaped less by ideological difference than by the structural demands of affective politics in an age of perceived decline.

Instagram as a platform reinforces this affective logic. It condenses emotion into imagery, repetition, and symbolic gestures that bypass complex policy and instead offer visceral reassurance. Whether through Biden’s softly lit videos of workers “rebuilding the nation” or Trump’s hyper-patriotic crowd scenes, hope becomes a curated aesthetic—an emotional product designed to stabilize identity in a time of anxiety and disorientation (Highfield & Leaver, 2016; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019). What emerges is less a politics of futurity than what Ahmed (2004) might call “the promise of happiness”—a politics that invites alignment not by proposing radical alternatives but by returning us to what we are already told to value.

The key difference lies not in the emotional structure of their messaging, but in its tone and rhetorical framing. Trump’s hope is conditional and combative—“we will win again” if we fight the right enemies. Biden’s is restorative and moralistic—“we can be better” if we come together. Yet both constructs are anchored in a longing for emotional coherence, and both rely on affective narratives that privilege a selective national memory. In this sense, “Build Back Better” is less an ideological alternative to MAGA than its tonal mirror: a softer, more inclusive rearticulation of the same emotional grammar.

In both cases, hope is less about transformation than restoration—an emotional investment in a future that redeems rather than reinvents the past. This restorative vision of hope draws its power not from projecting radical alternatives, but from emotionally reassembling what has been lost. Rather than signaling political innovation, hope here becomes a form of affective containment—an invitation to feel better without fundamentally reimagining what “America” could mean. By anchoring the future in familiar symbols and sentiments, both leaders offer a forward-looking affect that reassures more than it disrupts—reproducing a politics of comfort rather than confrontation.

Unity and the Politics of Emotional Simplification

Among the most recurring affective tropes in the Instagram messaging of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden is the invocation of unity. At first glance, this may seem like a point of divergence: Biden’s rhetoric consistently emphasizes national healing and togetherness, while Trump is more often associated with divisiveness. Yet, a closer examination of their Instagram posts reveals that emotional appeals to unity are central to both leaders’ communication strategies—albeit expressed through different affective registers. In both cases, unity becomes an emotionally charged simplification: a narrative device that reduces political complexity into a moral drama of belonging versus exclusion, authenticity versus betrayal. As Wetherell (2012) notes, such affective formations operate not just at the level of expression but as social practices—rituals of emotional coherence that invite identification and alignment.

For Trump, unity is expressed in populist terms: not the unity of all Americans, but of “real Americans” against a corrupt elite. His frequent use of phrases such as “We the people,” “I’m with you,” or “Our movement” is accompanied by images of large, cheering crowds and visual symbolism that evokes collective strength and loyalty. In one post from 2016, Trump declares: “This is a movement. Not about me. It’s about you.” Set against an image of a massive rally crowd, the message fuses personal humility with collective empowerment, reframing political unity as loyalty to a shared cause rather than institutional consensus. These are not gestures toward pluralism, but affective affirmations of a purified political community. As scholars such as Wodak (2015) and Bonikowski (2016) have shown, populist unity functions by constructing a homogeneous “us” in opposition to a threatening “them.” Instagram’s visual logic, with its capacity to collapse time, context, and nuance into emotionally resonant imagery, amplifies this binary logic. Unity here is less a bridge than a boundary—an emotionally simplified field in which complexity is reduced to moral clarity. Following Ahmed (2004), such affective boundaries “stick” to certain bodies and images, creating a sense of solidarity by defining who belongs—and who does not.

Biden’s version of unity differs in tone, but not necessarily in function. His Instagram posts frequently feature diverse citizens, workers, and families accompanied by slogans such as “We’re all in this together,” “This is America,” or “There’s nothing we can’t do if we do it together.” A prominent example is a visually dense collage from October 2020 combining messages like “Unite Us,” “Battle for the Soul of the Nation,” and “Truth over Lies” in red, white, and blue typographic design. In another striking post, Biden is shown surrounded by a multiracial group of citizens with the phrase “ALL OF US UNITED” in bold text. The aesthetic is softer, the message more conciliatory, yet the effect is similar: emotional resonance is achieved through reduction. Complex political problems—inequality, climate change, systemic racism—are framed as challenges that can be overcome through unity and decency. Rather than confronting conflict, such messaging frames discomfort as something to be emotionally transcended—a mode of “feel-good politics,” as Wahl-Jorgensen (2019) puts it, which risks aestheticizing or bypassing structural tensions. The affective simplicity of “togetherness” provides comfort, but it may also foreclose critical engagement with political conflict and contradiction.

In both Trump’s and Biden’s messaging, unity is a strategic response to emotional fragmentation. Americans’ distrust in institutions, disillusionment with elites, and fear of decline have fractured the symbolic cohesion of the nation (Cramer, 2016; Hochschild, 2016). The politics of emotional simplification responds to this crisis not by confronting fragmentation, but by offering emotionally legible narratives that restore coherence. Instagram, with its capacity for aesthetic intimacy and symbolic condensation, becomes an ideal platform for these affective performances (Highfield & Leaver, 2016; Russmann & Svensson, 2017). As Papacharissi (2015) argues, digital storytelling often relies on affective resonance rather than deliberation—inviting publics into “moods of belonging” rather than ideological positions.

Importantly, emotional unity is not the same as social unity. Rather than reflecting actual consensus or shared experience, these posts create the feeling of unity—what Papacharissi (2015) terms “affective publics.” These are publics held together not by rational agreement or ideological alignment, but by shared affective intensities. Unity, then, becomes an affective shortcut: a way to navigate political complexity by invoking emotional commonality. While the slogans and styles differ, the affective function is the same. Trump and Biden both craft emotionally simplified visions of togetherness that resonate with a citizenry longing for stability, belonging, and meaning. This resonates with Wetherell’s (2012) observation that affective practices often operate as emotional infrastructures—socially patterned ways of organizing political life through feeling.

These affective performances of unity can be understood as what Wetherell (2012) calls “emotional regimes”—socially patterned modes of feeling that regulate not only what can be said, but how political leaders are expected to make people feel. Both Trump and Biden operate within such regimes, albeit with different affective tones. The visual shorthand of Instagram helps encode these regimes through repetition, visual familiarity, and narrative coherence. As Papacharissi (2015) argues, affective publics are not necessarily reflective or deliberative; they are held together by shared mood, style, and affective alignment. Unity in this sense becomes an emotional script that simplifies the political landscape into affective familiarity—comforting, but often conceptually thin.

In a political environment where affect often outpaces policy, unity emerges as a powerful, if ambivalent, emotional tool. It stabilizes, reassures, and mobilizes—but also risks flattening the very pluralism that democratic discourse depends on. On Instagram, unity becomes not just a message, but a mood—a way of feeling politics that privileges cohesion over critique, and emotional comfort over structural clarity.

By turning unity into a symbolic shorthand, both leaders transform political fragmentation into emotionally coherent narratives of belonging and common cause. In this sense, unity becomes a way of managing division emotionally, rather than addressing it politically. It offers comfort and coherence, but risks masking the very inequalities and exclusions it claims to overcome. Ultimately, the emotional grammar of unity invites identification rather than interrogation—making us feel better, rather than see more clearly.

Grievance and the Politics of Betrayal

Few emotions are as politically mobilizing as grievance—a deeply felt sense of having been excluded, disrespected, or betrayed by those in power. On Instagram, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden engage with this emotional current, though in distinct styles. Their posts reflect different modes of affective alignment with public discontent, offering emotionally legible responses to widespread distrust in institutions, the erosion of economic security, and the perceived moral failure of the political elite (Cooper, 2015; Cramer, 2016; Hochschild, 2016).

Trump’s use of grievance is overt and visceral. From the outset, his Instagram messaging reinforced a narrative of betrayal by a distant and corrupt establishment. His slogans—“drain the swamp,” “I’m with you,” “the forgotten men and women”—frame grievance not merely as critique, but as a shared emotional truth. This framing was powerfully activated when Trump turned Hillary Clinton’s slogan “I’m with her” against her by proclaiming “I’m with you.” The affective reversal was symbolically potent: it positioned Clinton as emblematic of elite detachment, and Trump as the vessel of popular recognition. In a widely circulated Instagram post from October 2016, Clinton appears in red hues next to her slogan, while Trump’s counter-message is superimposed below: “I have a different pledge. My pledge reads: I AM WITH YOU, THE AMERICAN PEOPLE”. The juxtaposition is visually stark—Clinton bathed in shadow, Trump lit by the flag—reinforcing the binary between elite self-regard and popular loyalty. His visual communication further staged this contrast—images of Trump standing with coal miners, factory workers, and veterans served as affective proof of his alignment with the marginalized. These are not simply campaign aesthetics; they can be understood as what Wetherell (2012) might call affective practices—ritualized emotional formations that produce belonging and sharpen the boundaries of “us” versus “them.” As Wahl-Jorgensen (2019) and Lilleker et al. (2016) observe, such messaging transforms grievance into performative loyalty.

Biden, too, addresses the emotional wounds of exclusion, though in a more measured register. His Instagram posts frequently evoke themes of repair and reassurance: “Help is on the way,” “We hear you,” or “No one should be left behind.” The imagery often features working-class individuals, health care workers, or multi-generational families—icons of endurance and dignity. Unlike Trump, Biden avoids naming enemies. His narrative of grievance remains impersonal, system-oriented, and forward-looking. Yet his slogan “Build Back Better” also implies that something was broken—that betrayal has occurred—and that his leadership offers a moral and institutional correction. Here, grievance becomes a call for stability rather than rebellion.

While the emotional tone differs, the structure of political meaning is strikingly similar. Both MAGA and BBB tap into a feeling of abandonment. Both build legitimacy on the promise to restore what has been lost—whether it is jobs, dignity, or trust in government. Instagram reinforces this by aestheticizing recognition: photos of “real people,” symbolic gestures of care, and emotionally loaded typography (“FOR YOU,” “WE WILL DELIVER”) communicate allegiance more powerfully than abstract policy.

Importantly, the emotional politics of grievance on Instagram is not grounded in rational critique, but in affective recognition. It is about being seen, heard, and symbolically reintegrated into the national story. Whether cast as the righteous avenger or the empathetic repairman, both Trump and Biden construct themselves as agents of emotional redress. This shared performative grammar of grievance suggests that what is politically effective today is not ideological distinction, but the ability to emotionally align with publics who feel misrepresented and forgotten.

As Papacharissi (2015) notes, affective publics cohere around shared intensities rather than ideological consistency—and in the case of grievance, this intensity is rooted in the demand for emotional recognition rather than policy outcomes. Grievance emerges as a powerful affective register that enables both figures to position themselves as emotional proxies for publics who feel abandoned by power. Yet grievance does more than mirror discontent—it converts diffuse frustration into focused loyalty. By channeling betrayal into emotionally charged narratives of recognition and repair, both Trump and Biden construct themselves as affective representatives of a wounded public. In doing so, grievance becomes not only an emotion, but a structure of political belonging.

Concluding Discussion: Emotional Logics, Visual Narratives, and the Affective Limits of Political Difference

This study has examined how Donald Trump and Joe Biden construct emotionally resonant political narratives through Instagram, drawing on a full dataset of posts spanning their campaigns and presidencies. By identifying six dominant emotional themes—nostalgia, fear, pride, hope, unity, and grievance—the analysis has shown how both leaders, despite ideological differences, engage with a shared affective repertoire that reflects deep undercurrents in American public life.

The findings reinforce a central insight in contemporary media and communication research: that emotions are not epiphenomenal but foundational to political storytelling (Papacharissi, 2015; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019). While much existing work has focused on how individual posts or moments go viral, this study instead illustrates how emotional meaning is sustained over time through visually coherent narratives. Instagram emerges not merely as a platform for self-branding or mobilization, but as a structured environment for affective world-making—where national identity, crisis, and redemption are staged through carefully curated aesthetics.

Building on affect theory and narrative analysis, the study suggests that affective publics are assembled through emotional intensities rather than ideological alignment (Papacharissi, 2015). Both Trump’s MAGA and Biden’s BBB function as affective frameworks that resonate with prevailing feelings of loss, distrust, and longing—identified both in empirical opinion data and in years of field-based exposure to American public discourse. These slogans, far from being rhetorical flourishes, are affective infrastructures that make political meaning intelligible in times of social fragmentation.

One of the study’s key contributions lies in challenging the assumption that emotional messaging on the political right and left operates on fundamentally different terms. While the tone, moral inflection, and symbolic codes differ, both leaders draw on the same emotional architecture: a nostalgic past, a fractured present, and a redemptive promise. These finding nuances earlier research that treats right-wing populist messaging as uniquely affective or irrational (Wodak, 2015), and highlights the need for more symmetrical analyses of how emotion operates across ideological boundaries. Moreover, it invites a reconsideration of affective difference not as a binary between reason and emotion, but as a spectrum of mediated feeling shaped by platform dynamics, narrative form, and social expectation.

The study also contributes methodologically by combining a large-scale, visual qualitative analysis with a contextually grounded understanding of public sentiment. Rather than analyzing social media posts in isolation, the affective logics examined here are understood in relation to broader societal emotions—such as fear of decline, cultural displacement, and perceived political betrayal. This approach draws on earlier ethnographic fieldwork not as empirical material, but as a form of interpretive grounding, offering a rare integration between long-term exposure and platform-based analysis. This combination strengthens the interpretive validity of the findings, situating the emotional performances not just within political branding strategies but within shared experiential structures of American life.

Finally, the study invites further reflection on the narrowing emotional bandwidth of contemporary political communication. Both leaders communicate within a restricted emotional grammar—where the most “available” public feelings are those of anxiety, longing, and moral polarization Even when aiming for unity or hope, the narratives remain anchored in trauma and loss—suggesting a limited emotional palette that reflects what Wetherell (2012) describes as “socially patterned affective practices.” These are not merely expressive, but regulatory: they define what kinds of emotions are intelligible in public, and whose emotions count. The politics of affect is thus not only about what is said, but about what can be felt—and by whom. Future research might explore how alternative emotional registers—such as joy, irony, or care—could disrupt this affective closure and open new possibilities for democratic engagement.

In an era where emotion increasingly outpaces ideology, this study indicates how visual social media platforms help configure the emotional contours of democratic life. The findings underscore the need for continued scholarly attention to the symbolic and affective infrastructures of political messaging—not only to better understand political polarization but also to reimagine the emotional terms on which collective belonging is built.