‘Enemies of the people’: Donald Trump and the security imaginary of America First
| Author | Georg Löfflmann |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481211048499 |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481211048499
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2022, Vol. 24(3) 543 –560
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/13691481211048499
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‘Enemies of the people’:
Donald Trump and the
security imaginary of
America First
Georg Löfflmann
Abstract
The discursive domain of (in)security is integral to nationalist populism, as documented in the
political rhetoric of Donald Trump. This article combines insights from political psychology
on blame attribution with scholarship in International Relations on security narratives to
show how the reframing of national identity through a populist security imaginary elevated
internal ‘enemies of the people’ to an ontological status of equal, or even superior standing
to that of external threats to national security. Portraying internal and external Others as
equally existential threats endangering the ‘real’ United States informed both foreign policy
choices and mobilised voters through an affective persuasion of audiences, actively dividing
society for political gain. Populist appeals to resentment, fear, and anxiety constituted a shared
affective space between Trump and his followers that provided a source of mutual ontological
reassurance and the legitimation of America First measures from immigration restrictions to
trade protectionism and a Jacksonian foreign policy.
Keywords
America First, critical security studies, Donald Trump, narratives, national security, political
rhetoric, populism, US foreign policy
Introduction
This article applies the analytical framework of a populist security imaginary to the
political rhetoric of President Donald Trump. It examines how America First actively
divided audiences for political gain through a set of interlinking narratives that attrib-
uted blame for the existential threats facing the nation with internal and external ‘ene-
mies of the people’ (Hameleers et al., 2017). Through the antagonistic logic of
populism, insecurities perceived by ordinary people are framed as the responsibility of
a corrupt establishment (Mudde, 2004) and misguided ideologies and concepts, such
as transnational ‘globalism’ or ‘political correctness’ that are pursued by a
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Corresponding author:
Georg Löfflmann, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4
7AL, UK.
Email: g.lofflmann@warwick.ac.uk
1048499BPI0010.1177/13691481211048499The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsLömann
research-article2021
Special Issue Article
544 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 24(3)
cosmopolitan elite in politics, business, media, and academia. In nationalist populist
discourses, fears about the existential threats emerging from immigration, violent
crime, or terrorism and anxieties surrounding socio-cultural and socio-economic shifts
in society are simultaneously linked to affective appeals to collective narcissism (De
Zavala et al., 2019; Marchlewska et al., 2018) that urge national belonging through
nostalgic sentiments for an idealised past of national greatness (Browning, 2019). In
his populist construction of identity, security, and threat, Donald Trump, not only
problematised issues of popular sovereignty (Canovan, 2005) and engaged in anti-elite
hostility (Mudde, 2017), but he constructed an alternative political reality through
existential crisis narratives (Homolar and Scholz, 2019), post-truth rhetoric (D’Ancona,
2017; Kakutani, 2018), humiliation discourse (Homolar and Löfflmann, 2021), and
conspiracy theories (Silva et al., 2017). Through these discursive devices, popular
anxieties surrounding the socio-cultural and socio-economic effects of globalisation
and demographic change and fears of threatening and alien Others (Norris and
Inglehart, 2019; Wodak, 2015) were reproduced and reinforced in the everyday,
including their promotion and multiplication through various right-wing media chan-
nels and social media platforms (Engesser et al., 2017; Gerbaudo, 2018).
A populist security imaginary produces a reframing of national identity through affec-
tive appeals and narratives that parochialise the national Self, conflating it with the onto-
logical insecurities of populist voters, while significantly expanding the category of the
threatening Other to include political opponents, the press and media, courts and institu-
tions, the national security establishment, and civil rights groups as ‘enemies of the peo-
ple’. This dual reframing of the dominant ideational categories of the Self and Other in
populist rhetoric plays an integral part in processes of political communication, the legiti-
mation of policy, and the mobilisation of voters. Operating from a discursive understand-
ing of populism as antagonistic rhetoric of anti-elitism and people-centrism (Canovan,
1981; Hawkins, 2009; Kazin, 1998; Mudde, 2004), this article advances an analytical
framework that goes beyond the people versus elite core dichotomy to capture the par-
ticular internal and external identity performing dynamics of populist rhetoric and its
security dimension. Conceptually and empirically, this research engages a growing litera-
ture in International Relations (IR) and security studies on the interlinkage of ontological
security and populism (Steele and Homolar, 2019), while expanding on existing works on
the impact of nationalist populism on US foreign and security policy (Löfflmann, 2019),
and the securitisation of immigration (Fermor and Holland, 2020).
The article seeks to make two principal contributions to the study of populism and the
performance of security narratives in IR. First, it argues that while existing works on
identity discourses and security narratives have overwhelmingly focused on the identity-
building function of differentiating the threatened national Self from the threatening
external Other (Campbell, 1992; Homolar, 2021), populist security narratives elevate the
internal Other, the ‘enemy of the people’ to an ontological status of equal, or even supe-
rior standing to that of external threats to national security. This internalisation of enmity
in populist rhetoric from undocumented immigrants to Black Lives Matter activists and
news reporters results in popular identity displacing national identity as the premier refer-
ence point of a security imaginary, a development that so far has not garnered a lot of
attention in constructivist IR scholarship. As a result of this dual antagonism and the
amalgamation of popular and national identity, the populist security imaginary applies a
Schmittian enemy-centric framework both to the legitimation of external policies, such as
trade, immigration, and foreign policy, and the domestic mobilisation of voters. In
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