Donald Trump Research Articles

UKRAINE’S CHANCES OF VICTORY UNDER TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY

This article explores the potential consequences of Donald Trump’s return to the presi-dency on the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, with particular emphasis on the resulting geopolitical shifts and implications for global security. The analysis examines Trump’s stated positions, proposed peace plans, and their reception in both Kyiv and Moscow, shedding light on how his rhetoric and strategy may reshape the trajectory of the conflict. It further contextualizes his approach within broader trans-atlantic dynamics, including NATO’s cohesion, European defense initiatives, and the global response to a reoriented U.S. foreign policy. By highlighting Trump’s preference for transactional diplomacy, skepticism toward multilateralism, and emphasis on bilateral negotiations, the article considers how these tendencies may accelerate a reordering of the international system and challenge the existing liberal order. The discussion also assesses the potential ramifications for U.S. alliances and regional stability in Eastern Europe. The article concludes that while Trump’s promises of a swift peace may have rhetorical appeal, their implementation could intensify volatility and long-term insecurity in the region and beyond.

Bluntness in Popular Culture: The Trump Era’s Ascent

This research examines the mainstream media to illustrate their substantial influence in elevating Donald Trump as a presidential candidate during the 2016 US election. His confrontations with rival parties, distinctive rhetoric, and choice of language garnered significant attention. His language, reactions, and remarks regarding Hillary Clinton, media representatives, and women reflect fundamentalist ideologies that are pertinent to critical discourse analysis, emphasizing the role of discourse as a form of social interaction. Halliday’s Language as Social Semiotics, Michel Foucault’s concept of the Technology of Self, Karl Marx’s Dialectical Materialism as analytical frameworks to justify the argument. This study employs these critical discourses as a theoretical framework to analyze Donald Trump’s auditory, visual, printed, and multimodal communication. The main media purposively sampled for analysis are the BBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Fox News. Consequently, he emerged victorious in the election, serving as the President of the United States from 2017 to 2021. To analyze the argument that these selected media outlets framed Trump as a central figure during the 2016 election in America. The findings indicate that blunt media discourse contributed to maintaining his image as a national business magnate, amplified by prominent media outlets. Ultimately, the paper highlights how Trump's statements and media responses generated compelling news coverage, significantly contributing to his global recognition.

Supporting Science as a Global Good in Crisis

Science is under attack. The attack is not new, but it has been escalated significantly by a recent policy implemented by an Executive Order of the President of the United States. Since taking office on January 20th, 2025, President Trump has implemented divestments from (a) the domestic funding of empirical and theoretical research 1, (b) diversity, equity, and inclusion in research and academia 2, and (c) international collaborative science, including public health and climate surveillance 3. Beyond these divestments, the President has also produced a chaotic international trade war, initiated first upon the United States' closest neighbors and partners in trade: Mexico and Canada. The impact of this trade war, now expanded to the United States' other trade partners internationally, further jeopardizes science as a collaborative global endeavor that depends upon relationships between scientists around the world.

Class Dealignment, Multiracial Workers, and Labor's Future After Trump's Reelection

One reason explaining Kamala Harris' loss to Donald Trump in the 2024 US presidential election is the swing of multi-cultural (non-white) voters to Trump. Joseph Biden possessed a lead of 46% among these voters over Trump in the 2020 US presidential election which declined to 30% for Harris in 2024. Moreover, this multicultural worker voting shift in the 2024 US presidential election is indicative of a longer-term trend labeled class dealignment, in which fewer workers vote for the Democratic Party, the major party best representing their economic interests, in favor of the Republican Party. To combat class dealignment, Democratic Party candidates must emphasize a robust economic populist message. When used, such an approach resulted in Democratic US congressional candidate victories in the 2022 and 2024 elections. Finally, the Democratic Party must also advance a twenty-first century economic agenda that appeals to white and multi-racial working class voters as a class as the New Deal and Great Society programs did in past decades.

Understanding the heterogeneous roles of China's sectors under the shock of second Trump administration's new tariffs: A novel method of shock-based input-output data envelopment analysis

Understanding the heterogeneous roles of China's sectors under the shock of second Trump administration's new tariffs: A novel method of shock-based input-output data envelopment analysis

The effect of energy risk on political stability in Europe.

The effect of energy risk on political stability in Europe.

“No Angel”: Sun Tzu on the Russia-Ukraine War and Zelensky’s Quagmire

Ukraine’s path to peace remains uncertain as the Russia-Ukraine War enters its fourth year. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky faces a four-pronged crisis—military, political, economic, and diplomatic—that has significantly weakened his country’s strategic position. Despite continued resistance, prolonged conflict has placed Ukraine in an increasingly precarious situation. Further, President Trump criticized the Ukrainian leader for being “no angel” in the war and pulled a diplomatic Kabul stunt on Ukraine. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a three-no’s outline in Brussels, stating that Ukraine’s NATO membership is not realistic, that its border with Russia cannot go back to the pre-2014 line, and that the U.S. is not sending boots on the ground. From a blameless national hero to today’s abandoned pawn, Zelensky and his country have experienced a dramatic roller coaster in global politics in the last three years. Where did things go wrong for Zelensky and Ukraine? What led to this four-pronged crisis? Does Trump’s criticism hold merit? This article examines Zelensky’s strategic decisions through the lens of Sun Tzu’s Art of War, alongside alliance theory, particularly the risks associated with the patron’s dilemma. The first section explores alliance theory, particularly the dangers of the patron’s dilemma. The analysis applies two key principles from The Art of War: “Know your enemy and know yourself” and “Don’t Enter into Alliances Unless You Know the Designs of Your Potential Allies”—labeled P1 and P2 respectively—to assess Ukraine’s strategic miscalculations. This case study provides valuable insights for smaller states navigating great-power politics, highlighting the risks of overreliance on external allies. The paper concludes by emphasizing the importance of strategic prudence for weaker powers caught in great-power competition.

Resurgence of Malthusianism Through Billionaire Bullies: Population and Sustainable Development in an Emergent Era of a Global Multi-polar Leadership 1

As the world surges ahead toward an era of an apparent different situation of world politics under Donald Trump, there appear to be juxtaposing hopes and fears about what to expect as Trump 2.0 unfolds. The latest American presidential election of 2024 was fought on the basis of “politics, morality, ethics and righteousness,” with both Republicans and Democrats claiming to be the custodians of this fervor. Although the former won convincingly, the election stands out as a battle of the “Billionaire Bullies.” While “Billionaires Bullies” Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Vivek Ramaswamy waxed lyrical about having to fight the USA’s “deep state” to change the course of American and world politics, their opponents in the Democratic Party claimed to be fighting against “ultra-conservatism” and lost. As politicians, they were the fronts for the “leftist Billionaire Bullies” that touted restrictive ideas about population and development that had hidden within them the Malthusian notion of population control and development. Malthus wrote extensively about how and when war and violence arise as tools for (re)stabilization. His ideas are resurfacing without mention of his name, albeit in the context of game theory. In a sense, the Republican victory constitutes an undeclared American acknowledgment of the “deep state” and their tiredness of war and a leadership style that survived under the rhetoric as saviors of democratic freedoms but thwarted by Republicans as a guise toward authoritarian rule. The next American presidential election in 2028 could reverse this war of perceptions.

A Time to Keep, A Time to Throw Away: Preaching and White Christian Nationalism

As white Christian nationalism takes center stage in American politics and the second Trump administration, preachers and church leaders find themselves disoriented and concerned about what this means for the church and the nation. Through sociological, historical, theological, and homiletical perspectives on white Christian nationalism and its antecedents in U.S. history and culture, this article offers a starting point for interpreting the present moment of uncertainty and volatility. The article considers related themes such as American exceptionalism, the American rhetorical “jeremiad,” and civil religion that reflect cultural and social myths that can hamper prophetic and authentic preaching and even Christian discipleship, and suggests what preachers might “keep” and “throw-away” in their preaching and leadership.

Beyond puzzlement: rethinking Latino conservatives’ politics of race, ethnicity, and immigration in the Trump era

ABSTRACT Although former Republican President Donald Trump has been criticized for being xenophobic and racist, surveys and election results show that Latinos are increasingly shifting politically rightward. Such shifts contradict assumptions about race, ethnicity, and immigration politics, puzzling analysts and laypeople alike as to why non-White immigrant voters would support Trump. In this article, I draw upon 66 original interviews with US Latinos to break through scholarly and popular “puzzlement” about US Latino politics. To learn how Latinos navigate the cultural dynamics of political projects, we must talk to Latino voters and reconsider deep-seated, common, and flawed assumptions about this ethnoracial group. I find the following: (1) Latinos have come to directly and negatively associate Latino conservatism with Trumpism, (2) Latino Republican voters actively work to reconcile the perceived contradiction between being Latino and voting Republican, and (3) ethnoracial and political identities are contested within Latino families.

Canada and the Trump Presidency: Existential Threats and Political Turmoil

El periodo que abarca desde las elecciones estadounidenses en noviembre de 2024 hasta la toma de posesión de Donald Trump para un segundo mandato en enero de 2025 ha dado lugar a una agitación política casi sin precedentes en Canadá. El inicio de una guerra comercial por parte de Trump contra Canadá y México, y las amenazas de anexar Canadá, creando así un estado número 51, han generado un profundo cuestionamiento del papel de Canadá en Norteamérica y sus relaciones con Estados Unidos, tradicionalmente considerado su mejor amigo y aliado. El artículo analiza la naturaleza de la crisis política en Canadá ocasionada por las amenazas de Trump. La historia canadiense se ha caracterizado por la oscilación entre dos tendencias opuestas: quienes están a favor de la integración económica con Estados Unidos y quienes desean limitarla. El artículo argumenta que las amenazas de Trump han provocado un resurgimiento de la tendencia nacionalista y podrían ocasionar profundos cambios políticos y económicos en Canadá.

Cutting the NIH—The $8 Trillion Health Care Catastrophe

This JAMA Forum discusses the recent budget cuts to National Institutes of Health (NIH), the effects of these cuts on scientific research and health of individuals in the US, and the prospects for changes to Trump administration policies.

Voters’ attributions of psychopathic traits to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton after the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the 2020 Trump impeachment trial

We sought to determine if voters’ personological characteristics influence perceptions of psychopathic traits in political candidates and predict vote choice. Our first dataset was collected soon after the 2016 U.S. presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The sample, 159 Trump voters and 154 Clinton voters, rated their own authoritarian beliefs and their perceptions of psychopathic tendencies in both candidates, and reported their vote. As predicted, Clinton voters perceived low levels of psychopathic tendencies in Clinton and high levels of psychopathic tendencies in Trump, and Trump voters displayed the opposite pattern. A concurrent mediation analysis found that highly authoritarian voters perceived Trump to be low on psychopathic tendencies, and they tended to vote for Trump. These results were replicated from a different sample of 300 voters about three years later, soon after Trump’s first impeachment. The results suggest that authoritarian beliefs profoundly color perceptions of psychopathy in political candidates.

Federal Government’s Growing Banned Words List Is Chilling Act of Censorship

A growing list of words and materials are being scrubbed from government websites and documents in an attempt by the Trump administration to remove all references not only to diversity, equity and inclusion, but also to climate change, vaccines, and a host of other topics.PEN America initially compiled a list of more than 250 words and phrases reportedly no longer considered acceptable by the Trump administration, from “abortion,” to “women,” and including “disability,” “elderly,” “Native American” and, unsurprisingly, the “Gulf of Mexico.” The list has now expanded to 350+ words, encompassing even desirable goals like “safe drinking water,” the mention of which can result in research grants or other agreements with the federal government getting nixed.

Decoupling or resilience? Technological GVCs in the face of Trump’s policies

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the “Trump effect,” defined as technological disconnection, by analyzing changes in export specialization patterns in the EU, China, and the US following 2017. Focusing on domestic value-added exports in technology sectors, the study covers the period from 1995 to 2020 and applies a fluctuating difference-in-differences approach. The findings reveal that global value chains (GVCs) in technology sectors remained largely resilient to the protectionist measures introduced during the Trump administration, with minimal evidence of significant decoupling. However, the US experienced a relatively stronger impact compared to other economies. The results emphasize the adaptability and continuity of technological GVCs in the face of geopolitical pressures, contributing to the broader debate on deglobalization by illustrating that, rather than collapsing, these trade networks have adjusted to shifting global dynamics.

“They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats”: xenophobia and group threat as a path to the White House

ABSTRACT This paper uses Blumer’s model of “race prejudice” (racism) to explain how concerns about immigration and threats to whites’ social status were deployed by President Trump to secure his path to the presidency. Herbert Blumer explained that discriminatory and racist actions by the dominant group occur when the subordinate group is perceived as encroaching on the social and economic resources the dominant group believe is their property. The perception among many whites that immigrants are taking resources they believe whites were entitlement to, the demonization of immigrants by Trump that made immigrants a collective threat, and the promise that resources could be returned to whites led whites to vote for Trump en masse and set in motion what promises to be the enactment of numerous anti-immigrant initiatives and policies.

Soft money, hard power: Mapping the material contingencies of change in global health academic structures

In the proliferating conversations about decolonizing Global Health, a basic assumption has been that global South actors should be the conceptualizers, leaders, and makers of change with global North counterparts thought of as allies or accomplices. This article complicates assumptions about whose responsibility it is to “decolonize” Global Health and how different actors should go about it. We do this through a qualitative anthropological investigation on resource structures and material flows and the ways that global North actors relate to and make sense of them. By outlining the financial structuring at a major American school of public health and faculty experiences within this system, we show how the “soft money” structure reproduces colonial relations, elite dominance, and capture of popularized words connoting change. While acknowledging the necessity of promoting knowledge and discourses from the South, we demonstrate how Global Health academics in this powerful institution hide or overlook their structurally advantageous positions to create change by deploying discourses such as “following the South” or “centering Southern voices.” Grappling with how needed material changes fundamentally go against institutional and personal interests of powerful global North institutions and actors, we introduce “ruinous solidarity” as a paradigm of praxis. Ruinous Solidarity is elite actors thinking and acting in ways that embraces the possibilities that emerge in loss of resources and prestige. Ruinous solidarity seeks to move elite actors subjected to funding structures such as those described in this article away from passivity and obscuring the material bases of the imbalance of power in Global Health. Pushing for long term, ethical transfers of wealth and responsibility, ruinous solidarity explicitly reorients the political commitments of those who affiliate with Global Health in imperial cores, and thus offers important considerations in the wake of Trump Administration attacks on the field.

Trade Risk Society—Understanding Trade Policymaking in the 2020s

Profound changes in trade policymaking are taking place in the 2020s in response to a complex set of increasingly salient risks shaping the international trade system. Drawing upon the influential theory of risk society, this study develops a new trade risk society framework providing original insights and new conceptual thinking on the subject. This analytical approach extends beyond merely a topical evaluation of current risks to one embedding trade in deeper underlying developments in our contemporary world and challenges facing it. Key elements of risk society theory are deployed to this end across four risk domains: 1. Economic security. 2. Geopolitical volatility. 3. Climate–environmental. 4. Technology control. Close interconnections exist between these domains, as shown in the framework’s applied analysis of the 30 or so most significant trade policymaking initiatives introduced thus far this decade up to and including US President Trump’s aggressive tariff protectionism. It is argued this pattern of initiatives are indicative of a paradigm shift in trade policy norms emerging in an increasingly volatile and contested world that can be best understood in a trade risk society context.

USAID's Locally‐Led Development Agenda: Open Government and Independent Monitoring

ABSTRACTUSAID's ambitious localization agenda between 2021–2024—suspended in early 2025—aimed to provide more funding for local organizations, strengthen local systems, and co‐create with local communities. This study uses pre‐2025 open government data to identify continuity and change during USAID’s localization push. While USAID's localization agenda primarily focused on funding to local prime implementing partners, our research shows that, in the countries studied, more USAID funding went to local subaward recipients than to local prime implementers. We also find that USAID contributed to debates about how to conceptualize and measure locally‐led development. Though the US sharply curtailed foreign assistance and USAID data transparency at the start of the second Trump administration, if a localization agenda were ever to be revived in the future, then prioritizing user‐centered access to project data would enable informed participation integral to locally‐led development.

Competing and complementary regions in US foreign policy

Abstract Discussions of US foreign policy are heavily influenced by what we term competing regions discourse-the idea that there is a competition for resources between different global regions. While this discourse makes some valid points, it underemphasizes how complementarities between different regions can further the foreign policy goals of the United States. Competing regions discourse also overemphasizes military power-especially in Europe, the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East-at the expense both of other regions and of softer tools of foreign policy. This policy paper puts forward a complementary conceptualization of regions in US foreign policy that highlights their interconnectedness: countries in one region can help the United States and its allies address problems in another region. This is essential to recognize at a time when adversaries of the US are increasingly engaging in cross-regional cooperation with each other. Rather than pursuing a unilateral or bilateral foreign policy predicated on the competing regions discourse, the second Trump administration could learn from its predecessor and pay heed to this potential for interregional complementarity. We argue that the Biden administration largely recognized and acted upon the complementary nature of the world's regions in its foreign policy. Allies of the US should stress the value of complementarity in making the case for multilateralism and seeking incremental changes in Trump's foreign policy. Researchers and policy-makers should focus on how the US and its allies can employ a variety of fungible tools to increase interregional cooperation and create a more resilient foreign policy.