In search of enemies: Donald Trump’s populist foreign policy rhetoric

Jonny Hall

doi:10.1177/0263395720935377

Abstract

This article asks how Donald Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric during his presidential campaign and presidency has affected US foreign policy in the area of overseas counterterrorism campaigns. Looking at two case studies – the May 2017 Arab Islamic American Summit and the US role in the counter Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) campaign, it is argued that Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric has failed to accurately describe or legitimate his administration’s counterterrorism strategy, as per the conventional wisdom. Instead, Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric has largely been aimed at creating a sense of crisis (as populism requires) to mobilise his domestic base. In making this argument about the purpose of Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric, not only does the article contribute a new perspective to the extant literature on elections, rhetoric, and US foreign policy, but also to the burgeoning scholarship on governing populists and their foreign policies. Although these findings could be unique to Trump, the article’s novel framework – combining International Relations and populism scholarship to elaborate on how the foreign arena can be used to generate a state of perpetual crisis – can hopefully be applied in other contexts.

Highlights

In line with the focus of this special issue (Lacatus and Meibauer, 2021), this article asks how Donald Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric1 on the campaign trail and in the White House has affected US foreign policy
This scholarship is combined with the International Relations work of Campbell, which provides a relevant framework for how a state of perpetual crisis might be rhetorically generated
Trump’s rhetoric has been disconnected from the surprisingly normal counterterrorism strategy employed by his administration, as he has both overstated the difference when speaking to appeal to his domestic supporters, while saying little about where changes have occurred

Summary

Introduction

In line with the focus of this special issue (Lacatus and Meibauer, 2021), this article asks how Donald Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric on the campaign trail and in the White House has affected US foreign policy. This article focuses on the area of overseas counterterrorism campaigns, or what was originally known as the ‘War on Terror’ This area of foreign policy was chosen because of the prominence of the issues of terrorism and counterterrorism during the 2016 election campaign, with 80% of American voters answering that ‘terrorism’ would be ‘very important’ to their vote in said. The second section of the article engages with scholarship on populism, which argues that populists rely on a sense of crisis, even while governing. Using primary sources from Trump’s campaign and during his presidency, the third section of the article looks at Trump’s crisis rhetoric regarding terrorism and counterterrorism On both the campaign and in the White House, Trump has identified Muslim immigrants and the Washington establishment as the drivers of this crisis, while on the campaign trail he promised strategic revolutions to solve the issue of terrorism. The article looks at how the targets of Trump’s exclusionary populist rhetoric have moved away from terrorists and towards immigrants, which provides further evidence of how Trump’s rhetoric primary relies on the notion of crisis to mobilise political support

Objectives

Findings

Conclusion