How White Supremacists Framed the Elections of Obama and Trump

We investigate how users on a prominent forum for white supremacists interpreted and framed two seminal events for the far-right in the United States, the elections of Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016. These cases precipitated dramatic shifts in the far-right alliance and conflict structure. We combine computational methods and qualitative analysis on a corpus of over ten million posts on https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781003613930/c2e0b39f-d95a-42e0-a152-b4bd9b3cdba0/content/www.Stormfront.org">Stormfront.org to show how movement actors framed institutional changes and constructed them as opportunities for action. We highlight grassroots framing, the collective and contested bottom-up processes through which external events are framed and reframed by online activists and thus shaped into opportunities for action. Our research demonstrates how users shifted from framing Obama's election as a threat to framing it as a “victory in disguise,” creating new opportunities for political action through extraparliamentary methods. Similarly, users framed Trump's election as creating possibilities for radical change through the established political system.