The Trump shock: populism and changing narratives of US foreign policy

During his inaugural address on January 20, 2021, Joe Biden called on Americans to end their ‘un-civil war’ and refrain from treating political opponents as mortal enemies (White House, 2021). Biden vowed to defend democracy and the US Constitution and stressed the vital importance of facts and truth for the functioning of a liberal, open, and democratic society. Without ever naming his predecessor outright, Biden’s speech repudiated decisively the nationalist populism of Donald Trump, who had employed a divisive rhetoric of fear, anxiety, and resentment throughout his time in office; a strategy of narrative disruption and antagonistic mobilization for domestic political gain, culminating in the January 6 Capitol riot in Washington DC, where, instigated by Trump, a violent mob attempted to overturn the certification of the presidential election by force (Homolar & Löfflmann, 2021). Some of the first executive orders Biden signed in office saw the United States re-join the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization (WHO), symbolically ending the era of America First in US foreign policy. But the forces of nationalist populism and nativism did not disappear with Donald Trump’s exit from the White House, and his political influence survived his banning from the social media platforms Twitter and Facebook. The United States of America remained a deeply polarized nation, while Trump’s renewed bid for the presidency in 2024 remained a realistic, even probable proposition (Dimock, 2021). In any case, the 74 million Americans that voted for Trump in 2020 all but guaranteed that nationalist populism would continue to dominate the Republican Party and the American right at large. This enduring quality of populism in American politics challenges the structural integrity of liberal democracy and its core institutions, casting serious doubts over the future role of the United States in the international system.