Describing Trump's Influence on Political Communication in Denmark and Greenland
Political communication dynamics are increasingly shaped by external interventions from state actors, yet rarely has it happened and rarely has it been researched how such interventions affect discourses in post-colonial relationships within a commonwealth. This study investigates how Trump's 2024 reiterated proposition to purchase Greenland reconfigured the discursive relationship between Danish and Greenlandic political elites leading up to Greenland's election.
Employing embedding regression techniques, we will analyze Facebook communications from all elected officials in both parliaments to quantify changes in frame adoption and propagation patterns. We will describe how Trump's intervention intensified independence-oriented discourse among Greenlandic politicians and how it affected the commonwealth framing among Danish counterparts. Our results will advance the theoretical understanding of how external interventions affect post-colonial communication dynamics.
We apply cascading activation framework (Entman, 2003; Entman & Usher, 2018) adapted for cross-national contexts. Trump functions as an exogenous "rogue actor" who utilizes the digital environment to inject novel frames into established discourse patterns. The analysis draws on McLuhan's media ecology theory and Deutsch's cybernetic model of political systems to understand how the medium and form of Trump's communication created immediate diplomatic disruption.
We conceptualize discursive power following Jungherr et al. (2019) as actors' ability to introduce, amplify and maintain topics and frames. This framework allows examination of how power asymmetries between post-colonial actors condition their differential capacity to contest or reinforce externally introduced frames.