But intelligence isn't the only trait that politicians can fake by relying on automated scripts. New analysis suggests Trump struggles to express populist ideas unless he’s reading remarks prepared by his scriptwriters.

Donald Trump spent much of his presidential campaign mocking his rivals for relying on teleprompters – until, reluctantly, he was forced to do the same. “If you run for president you shouldn’t be allowed to use teleprompters,” he complained. “Because you don’t even know if the guy’s smart.”

The unscripted televised debates with Hillary Clinton were also not populist. It suggests Trump’s populism is the product of his scriptwriters.

His unscripted speeches – such as this one from Super Tuesday – were not nearly as populist.

They noted that Trump was using a teleprompter at the Florida rally. When we separate his speeches into two types – teleprompter speeches and those which are off-the-cuff – it’s clear that Trump is reading from a script in almost all of his most populist addresses.

Researchers scored this rally in Florida as the most populist speech of Trump's campaign – with many elements coming close to the ideal populist rhetoric.

Kirk Hawkins, an associate professor at Brigham Young University, said there was a “dramatic difference” in the language in Trump’s speeches, depending on whether or not they were scripted. “Trump’s speeches with teleprompters all have longer words, longer sentences, and less frequent use of his pet words. And they have much higher levels of populism,” he said. “This is powerful evidence that Trump’s populism is not entirely his own.”

No other Republican candidate, aside from Ted Cruz, scored as highly as Trump in the populism grade that researchers gave speeches. But what really stood out was the remarkable inconsistency in levels of rightwing populist discourse in Trump’s speeches.

Levente Littvay, an associate professor at Central European University, who also worked on the study, said the president might be best described as a half populist. Others may suggest Trump’s reliance on an automated script for his populism warrants the creation of a new label: telepopulist.

Hawkins and Littvay also identified the specific reason why Trump appeared to stumble when off-script. The president tended to reliably score high on the metric of anti-elitism, lashing out at the so-called Washington swamp or attacking America’s financial heavyweights, even when ad-libbing. But unlike more consistent populists, Trump struggled, whenever he was speaking without a script, to deliver a message that was also people-centric.

“In the extemporaneous speeches he doesn’t really talk a lot about the people; he’ll talk about himself, about people on his team, but he doesn’t say things like, ‘Only you, the people, can rescue our country’. Instead it’s more about him: ‘I’m here, I’m going to do this, my team, we’re awesome’,” Hawkins said. “He is consistently anti-establishment (but) the pro-people part changes depending on whether he’s coached or not.”

The research suggests Trump’s populism should really be credited to the likes of key advisors like Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Vince Haley, who is head of speechwriting at the White House.

Bannon and Miller have strong reputations for populism. Evidence of their influence creeping into Trump’s speeches include the Republican national convention speech in 2016 (“I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people who cannot defend themselves”), and an address in West Palm Beach, Florida, that year (“The corrupt establishment knows that we are a great threat to their criminal enterprise. They know that if we win, their power is gone, and it’s returned to you, the people, will be”).

Bannon, a former executive director of Breitbart News, told the Guardian that Trump’s 2015 speechwriting teams were typically small. “It’s a couple of people and Stephen was clearly speechwriter; I would consider myself the architect of the speeches and Trump really a co-writer. It’s very much in his voice. He will change it up and change the cadence and change the sequencing up until the last second.”

Trump, he said, was often provided a speech outline before a rally and then told: “If you want to take a riff, take a riff, and that’s what he does best, when it’s impromptu”. Referring to the teleprompter – a thin, barely-visible glass lectern – Bannon said: “The audience loves it when he goes off the glass and personalises the speech.”

Benjamin Moffitt, a senior lecturer at the Australian Catholic University, who was not involved in the research, said while analysis of the the content of Trump’s speeches was useful, it was also important to consider the symbolic aspects of his delivery. He argued: “Populism is not just about what political actors say, but also how they act.” He gave the example of the occasions on the campaign trail when Trump theatrically ditched his teleprompter, on one occasion even knocking over his glass lectern to raucous applause.

“Trump making a big deal out of abandoning the teleprompter on several occasions should be read as something of a populist act,” Moffitt said. Such gestures, he said, were intended to convey that Trump – in contrast to his stiff and scripted rivals – was an entertaining and authentic figure who had common with his audience than professional politicians controlled by their aides. “While critics may see Trump’s ‘gaffes’ and ‘off-script’ remarks as mistakes, they miss the point – these kind of stylistic acts are part and parcel of his populism.”

The latest example occurred last week, during Trump’s speech before the Conservative Political Action Committee. “You know I'm totally off script right now,” he told his audience. “And this is how I got elected, by being off script. True. And if we don’t go off script, our country is in big trouble, folks. Because we have to get it back.”

Trump may have a unique brand of performative populism, but he has also betrayed a misunderstanding of what the term actually means. Back in 2010, when Trump was considering a presidential bid, Bannon visited him in New York. According to Bannon, when he encouraged Trump to run as a populist, explaining the virtues of a disruptive candidacy pitting the common people against nefarious elite, Trump replied: “That’s what I am, a popularist.” Bannon tried to correct him but Trump insisted on “popularist”.

And in remarks last year at a rally in Fargo, North Dakota, Trump even toyed with something akin to reverse-populism when he told supporters that they were the country’s real elite.

It was not the first time Trump had wanted to use this conceit, turning populism on its head and actually praising the elite. “One of the arguments we used to have is about the use of ‘elites’,” Bannon conceded. “He hated Miller and I going after elites because he said, ‘What you’re saying is, we’re not elites. We are elites. I’m the elites. My audience is an elite audience.’ And I said that’s not actually technically correct. He wasn’t having it.”