ABSTRACT

This article examines the premise that contemporary populist political rhetoric appropriates narratives from celebrities in sports and entertainment as a mass communication strategy. Using the 2024 case study of former German footballer Toni Kroos’ public statements on migration and their discursive echo in a speech by Donald Trump, I argue this synergy constitutes a communication architecture warranting scholarly analysis. The analysis employs a tripartite theoretical framework: Benjamin Moffitt’s cultural populism theory (2016) elucidates the construction of a “people versus elite” dichotomy through celebrity validation; Zizi Papacharissi’s concept of affective publics (2015) reveals the mechanism of capturing and amplifying streams of public sentiment; and Henry Jenkins’ model of transmedia storytelling (2006) explains the dispersal of narrative components across cultural and political platforms to build a coherent worldview. Together, these frameworks demonstrate that populist leaders function as curators and narrators, leveraging celebrity capital to translate geopolitical issues into emotionally resonant narratives. The analysis posits that this process—where cultural populism supplies the framework, affective publics the emotional resonance, and transmedia storytelling the distributive mechanism—enables a form of political persuasion that bypasses traditional gatekeeping institutions, forging allegiance through curated affect and narrative convergence rather than policy debate.

Keywords: Populism; Celebrity Politics; Affective Publics; Transmedia Storytelling; Political Communication; Cultural Populism: Post-Rational Discourse. 

1. CULTURAL POPULISM AND THE APPROPRIATION OF CELEBRITY ETHOS

The analysis of how Trump’s rhetoric channels Kroos’ commentary demonstrates a tactic of cultural populism. To grasp the operation of this maneuver, we must examine how it operationalizes a relationship between populist leaders and cultural icons within what Bourdieu (1993) termed the “field of cultural production.” This relationship involves a form of symbolic alignment that weaponizes celebrity authenticity to fortify the populist “people versus elite” dichotomy.

Moffitt’s (2016) framework of cultural populism shifts focus from material grievances to the performative construction of political conflict. Populists curate a political style that positions them as both representing the “real people” and as protectors of their cultural identity (Moffitt, 2016, pp. 28-43). In this performance, celebrities like Kroos function not as allies but as pre-validated symbolic resources. Kroos occupies a position as a World Cup winner and symbol of national achievement, yet his fame originates in the meritocratic realm of sports, not in politics. When he voices concerns over migration, it carries the perceived authenticity of a concerned citizen-athlete, ostensibly untainted by partisan motives (Marshall, 2014; Street, 2019). Trump’s echoing of this sentiment constitutes an act of transitive authentication, whereby the politician’s alignment with the athlete’s cultural standing seeks to transfer credibility and affective connection to his own political narrative—a process Hendry and Robards (2022) analyze as “platformed affinity” leveraged for political ends.

This alignment performs discursive work within the populist schema. First, it reifies the “corrupt elite.” The “culture” that Trump asserts European elites have “created over the last 10 years” is defined against the values Kroos is perceived to embody: discipline, controlled competition, and national pride. The elite are thus framed not as politically mistaken but as culturally corrosive, undermining the social fabric that icons like Kroos represent (Wodak, 2015; Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017). Second, it collapses the distance between the cultural and the political, rendering a civilizational critique as common sense. As Müller (2016, p. 3) argues, populism involves a claim to exclusive moral representation of the people. By demonstrating that a celebrated national figure shares his concerns, Trump “proves” that his stance represents the authentic will of the people, while pro-migration policies are positioned as the domain of a detached elite (Laclau, 2005).

This analysis reveals that the Trump-Kroos nexus exemplifies cultural populism’s media logic. It involves the curation, amplification, and re-contextualization of celebrity discourse to serve a political antagonism (Moffitt & Tormey, 2014). The populist leader acts as a discursive amplifier, identifying and elevating cultural statements that resonate with his worldview, thereby grafting his project onto reservoirs of national sentiment and identity (Brubaker, 2017). This strategy does not merely borrow an idea; it seeks to capture the affective and symbolic capital of the celebrity to delegitimize opponents and naturalize a politics of cultural preservation as the authentic standpoint.

2. AMPLIFYING AFFECT: THE CIRCUIT BETWEEN CELEBRITY SENTIMENT AND POPULIST MOBILIZATION

Papacharissi’ (2015) theory of affective publics provides a lens for understanding the mechanism of populist communication. To expand this analysis, we must interrogate the affective architecture and the techno-social amplification that transforms a celebrity’s sentiment into a political current. Papacharissi (2015, p. 126) defines affective publics as “networked publics that are mobilized and connected or disconnected through expressions of sentiment.” In this framework, Kroos’ podcast commentary functions not as a statement but as an affective trigger, releasing waves of pre-existing feelings among his transnational fan base and a wider European public (Kligler-Vilenchik & Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2022). The power of his utterance lies in its origin outside formal politics, granting it perceived authenticity and insulating it from dismissal as partisan rhetoric.

Trump’s echo at Davos functions as affective capture and redirection. He identifies the resonant frequency of Kroos’ sentiment—a compound of nostalgic pride and present anxiety over perceived loss of control—and amplifies it through his media apparatus (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019). This creates a feedback loop of validation: the celebrity’s affect lends credibility to the politician’s narrative, while the politician’s platform elevates the celebrity’s concern to the status of geopolitical truth. This process exemplifies what Papacharissi (2015, p. 20) describes as the blending of “the personal and the public, and the political with the everyday” within digital networks. The issue of migration policy is thus distilled into a shared feeling of civilizational anxiety, short-circuiting deliberation (Mouffe, 2005; Norris & Inglehart, 2019).

This exchange operates within a media ecology designed for affective virality (Klinger & Svensson, 2015). The commentary migrates from a long-form podcast to clipped quotes on social media and to the declarative stage of a global economic forum. At each step, the rational context is stripped away, leaving the emotional core: unease. Platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and partisan news outlets, which thrive on emotion-driven engagement, act as force multipliers (Papacharissi, 2015; Chadwick, 2017), ensuring this affective alignment reaches a public beyond the original audience. This constructs what Moffitt (2016) terms a globalized populist style, where the affective connection transcends national specifics, binding together audiences through shared sentiments about strength, decay, and elite betrayal.

This analysis reveals that the borrowing is not of ideas but of affective legitimacy. Trump’s rhetoric does not engage with Kroos’ policy prescriptions—because none are offered—but with the emotional substrate of his words (Ahmed, 2004; Massumi, 2015). By stating, “It’s horrible what they’re doing to themselves. They’re destroying themselves,” Trump translates Kroos’ concern into a civilizational lament. He positions himself not as a politician proposing solutions, but as a diagnostician and amplifier of a public mood, a leader who voices the “true” feelings he detects within affective networks (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). In doing so, he forges a bond with his audience, where political allegiance is reaffirmed not through policy agreement, but through a shared, emotionally charged perception of reality, curated and validated across the realms of sports celebrity and populist performance.

3. WEAVING THE POLITICAL MYTH: TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING AND THE POPULIST NARRATIVE ECOSYSTEM

Jenkins’ (2006) concept of transmedia storytelling, developed to analyze franchise narratives, provides a framework for deconstructing the orchestration of populist rhetoric. When applied to the dialogue between Kroos and Trump, it reveals a narrative engineering process that constructs a political myth across cultural platforms. This constitutes not amplification alone, but a form of political world-building, where each media channel contributes a component to a coherent ideological story (Bolin, 2014; Freeman, 2017).

Jenkins (2006, pp. 95-96) defines transmedia storytelling as a process where “integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.” In the populist adaptation, the “fiction” is the narrative of civilizational decline under liberal governance. The “delivery channels” are the array of media platforms, each with its own audience and conventions of authenticity (Deuze, 2012). Kroos’ appearance on Lanz und Precht, a German talk show blending discourse with popular culture, provides the seed narrative. Here, the story fragment is delivered not as political theory but as personal testimony—a national hero’s observation from within the community (Gamson, 1994). This platform grants the fragment its aura of authenticity and emotional legitimacy, insulating it from charges of partisan bias.

Trump’s speech at Davos performs the act of narrative extraction and transmedia escalation. He lifts the affective core of Kroos’ testimony from the cultural sphere and re-contextualizes it within the geopolitical sphere (Wodak, 2015). The 2026 World Economic Forum platform lends a veneer of macroeconomic and civilizational gravity, transforming a comment on migration control into a diagnosis of a continent’s self-destruction. This is not repetition; it is narrative synthesis (Jenkins, 2006). The celebrity provides the relatable “proof point”; the politician provides the mythic frame (Bottici, 2007). As Jenkins (2006, p. 98) notes, in a transmedia model, each medium does what it does best. The podcast offers intimacy and perceived sincerity; the political speech offers scale and declarative power.

This cross-platform migration creates an illusion of convergent validation. For a receptive audience, the core narrative appears to emerge from the trusted world of sports and from the political stage (Enli & Rosenberg, 2018). This convergence blurs the lines between cultural commentary and political analysis, making the populist worldview feel organically confirmed by diverse sources (Couldry & Hepp, 2017). It constructs what could be termed a populist storyworld, where fragments from talk shows, social media memes, and political speeches cohere into a single, emotionally resonant “truth” about elite failure and national peril (Benkler et al., 2018).

This transmedia strategy constitutes an end-run around traditional gatekeepers and fact-based discourse. The narrative bypasses journalistic scrutiny in its cultural form, only to be weaponized in its political form as validated common sense (Waisbord, 2018). Jenkins’ framework thus illuminates the dimension of the Trump-Kroos echo: it is a dispersal of narrative capital, whether coordinated or emergent. The populist leader acts as curator and unifier of these story fragments, assembling them into a myth of decay and strength, which gains persuasive power from its multifaceted, transmedia origins (Tufekci, 2017).

CONCLUSION: THE SYNERGISTIC ARCHITECTURE OF CELEBRITY-POPULIST COMMUNICATION

The integrated analysis through the lenses of cultural populism, affective publics, and transmedia storytelling reveals that the rhetorical echo between Trump and Kroos is not a coincidence but a symptom of a communication architecture central to contemporary populism. Together, these frameworks demonstrate how populist narratives are constructed, validated, and disseminated in a fragmented media age, leveraging celebrity capital to forge alliances with audiences (Marwick & boyd, 2011; van Zoonen, 2005).

Moffitt’s (2016) cultural populism explains the purpose: the appropriation of Kroos’ symbolic capital executes a “people versus elite” maneuver. It weaponizes the athlete’s authenticity to frame political opponents as culturally corrosive elites, transforming policy into a struggle for civilizational preservation (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017). Papacharissi’ (2015) affective publics uncover the psychological mechanism, detailing how Trump’s echo functions as affective capture. By tapping into the reservoir of anxiety and nostalgia channeled by Kroos, populism bonds with supporters through shared sentiment, creating political allegiance based on emotional resonance rather than programmatic agreement (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019; Marcus et al., 2019). Jenkins’ (2006) transmedia storytelling elucidates the process, showing how the narrative of “European decay” is seeded in the cultural sphere for authenticity and escalated in the political arena for mythic scale (Benkler et al., 2018). This cross-platform curation creates an illusion of convergent validation, blurring lines between personal observation and geopolitical truth.

In concert, these approaches reveal a formula. Cultural populism provides the antagonistic framework, affective publics supply the emotional resonance, and transmedia storytelling executes the distributive mechanism. This triad allows figures like Trump to perform a dual role: they are curators of cultural grievances and narrators who assemble these fragments into a politically mobilizing myth (Brubaker, 2017; Wodak, 2015). The result is a form of communication that bypasses traditional institutions of fact-checking and policy debate, building conviction through a curated ecosystem of feeling, celebrity endorsement, and narrative dispersal (Waisbord, 2018; Tufekci, 2017). Understanding this architecture is necessary for diagnosing not a singular rhetorical event, but the operational logic of populist power itself.

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