Trump’s overt racism differed in style from prior administrations but not substance.

Evidence

In this chapter, I outline the foreign policy of the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. I study various policy documents as well as influential articles and statements by policy makers to argue that while Trump represented a break with the bipartisan consensus around liberal hegemony with a turn toward nativism and the “America first” policy, there are also continuities among all three administrations. In place of the standard self-representation of the United States as a force of liberty and benevolence in international relations, the Trump administration marked a turn toward what has been called “illiberal hegemony.” Unlike his Republican predecessors, Trump did not operate through covert dog-whistle forms of racism; he threw away the whistle and adopted overt forms of racism consistent with that of the Far Right Islamophobic network discussed in Chapter 7. Moreover, if the neocons were liberal interventionists on steroids, as Stephen Walt claimed (see Chapter 4), Trump was a neocon on steroids minus a liberal human rights cover. Liberal imperial racism was replaced by blatant racism for a period. With the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020, liberal multicultural imperialism was back on the agenda. The key argument in this chapter is that whether packaged in liberal or right-wing terms, racist policies have been central to all administrations since 9/11. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 481

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Connects to the author’s earlier chapters on the neoconservative consensus and Far Right Islamophobic network — reinforcing a through-line of the whole book.

Related

• Imperial ethnocratic racism spanned the pre-Trump bipartisan consensus (similarity 0.85)
• Trump’s America First foreign policy was illiberal hegemony, not isolationism. (similarity 0.82)
• Trump’s foreign policy abandoned the bipartisan liberal-hegemony consensus for unilateral nationalist imperialism. (similarity 0.81)
• Post-Cold War US imperial consensus traded liberal veneer for white nationalism under Trump. (similarity 0.81)
• Liberal hegemonic soft power rhetoric masked imperial ethnocentric racism. (similarity 0.80)
• Trump’s foreign policy swapped liberal for illiberal hegemony while keeping empire (similarity 0.80)
• Trump’s anti-Muslim measures continue rather than depart from prior policy (similarity 0.79)
• Trump kept US hegemony aims while ditching multilateral institutions for nationalism (similarity 0.79)
• Trump’s presidency legitimated overt anti-Muslim racism and drove a spike in hate crimes. (similarity 0.78)
• Trump marked a new phase where rhetorical Islamophobia aligned openly with policy (similarity 0.78)
• Liberal Islamophobia and right-wing racism are interchangeable imperial instruments (similarity 0.78)
• Trump-era racism was more overt than anything since the civil rights era (similarity 0.78)