Imaginaries of trauma and victimhood: The role of the ‘China threat’ in Trump’s populism of the privileged
| Published date | 01 February 2025 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481241259383 |
| Author | Alexandra Homolar,Juan Alberto Ruiz Casado |
| Date | 01 February 2025 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481241259383
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2025, Vol. 27(1) 179 –198
© The Author(s) 2024
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DOI: 10.1177/13691481241259383
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
Imaginaries of trauma and
victimhood: The role of the
‘China threat’ in Trump’s
populism of the privileged
Alexandra Homolar1
and Juan Alberto Ruiz Casado2
Abstract
This article speaks to an established interest of International Relations scholars in the construction
of the ‘China threat’ in US political discourse. We advance recent works which have argued that
the rise of China has contributed to the success of populism in the United States and Western
liberal democracies more widely. Specifically, we transpose the concept of the ‘populism of
the privileged’ to the international realm to understand how narratives of status loss nurture
perceptions of collective trauma and victimhood. We argue that the concept helps explain why
Trump’s anti-China populism is centred on the counterintuitive articulation of an American
underdog identity at the domestic and international levels. It sheds light on why populist narratives
of unjust suffering have grip even if supporters stem from comparatively privileged groups.
Victimhood-centric narratives are always relational and, as we show, the imaginary of lost status
is a powerful device in the populist toolbox.
Keywords
China, narratives, populism, privilege, relationality, Trump, victimhood
Introduction
What role does the representation of a country’s loss of status in global affairs play in
populist discourse and how does it relate to the construction of enmity in domestic and
international political discourse? To better understand the dynamic relationship between
international positioning and populist mobilisation, this article explores the discursive
aggregation of diverse groups of ‘elites’ into a singular source of harm to the ‘American
people’. It pays particular attention to how representations of China and the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP), in conjunction with other national and international elites, as a
1Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
2Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy
Corresponding author:
Alexandra Homolar, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: A.Homolar@warwick.ac.uk
1259383BPI0010.1177/13691481241259383The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsHomolar and Ruiz Casado
research-article2024
Original Article
180The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 27(1)
threat to US national security and the wellbeing of the public construct the identity of an
American ‘underdog’ community that has been stripped of their rightful place domesti-
cally and internationally.
The study of domestic politics and international affairs has seen a surge in attention
to both populism and China as subjects of study. This includes works on the ‘China
threat’ narrative (Gries, 1999; Pan, 2004; Roy, 1996; Zakaria, 2020) and more recently
research on the connection between international politics and populism (Bonansinga,
2022; Destradi et al., 2022; Lacatus and Meibauer, 2022; Lacatus et al., 2023). Yet in
the IR disciplinary field, there has been a noteworthy absence of in-depth engagement
with the China-as-enemy narrative in assessments of Trump’s populism and how this
shaped US foreign policy towards China (for notable exceptions, see Löfflmann, 2019,
2022; Marandici, 2023; Wojczewski, 2020b). Because of an ongoing tendency within
IR to prioritise systemic factors over individual-level and domestic mechanisms in
explaining changes and continuities in threat perceptions (Homolar, 2023: 18;
Marandici, 2023: 514), there has been a lack of exploration into how Trump’s populist
discourse fosters perceptions of enmity towards China by generating a sense of loss,
betrayal, and victimhood.
To address this lacuna, we advance recent works that have argued that China’s eco-
nomic success over the past two decades has contributed to the success of populism,
specifically among individuals who fear the decline of the West or being left behind by
globalisation (Cox, 2017; Norris and Inglehart, 2019). Building upon works discussing
Donald Trump’s populist use of emotions such as fear, resentment, and humiliation to
frame an antagonistic division between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ (Biegon, 2019; Hall,
2021; Homolar and Löfflmann, 2021; Homolar and Scholz, 2019; Skonieczny, 2018;
Wojczewski, 2020a), we explore how anti-China populism contributes to constructing
perceptions of collective trauma and victimhood to create a sense of unjust betrayal that
helps to mobilise domestic political support. As we show, the imaginary of lost status is a
powerful political device in the populist discursive toolbox even (or especially) when the
cause of deprivation is located in foreign ‘Others’ that are constructed as part of a power-
ful elite harming the people-as-underdog.
The article proceeds as follows. The first section introduces ‘populism of the privi-
leged’ (De Cleen and Ruiz Casado, 2023) as the article’s primary conceptual lens to draw
attention to the centrality of relative social positioning in populist discourse that is other-
wise largely obscured in the study of political mobilisation strategies. It also explains the
relationship of ‘populism of the privileged’ with other theoretical concepts such as pop-
ulism, nationalism, and national victimhood. The second section unpacks former President
Donald Trump’s and his administration’s China-as-enemy narrative, with a specific
emphasis on the main plotlines that revolve around the notion that the United States and its
‘people’ experience unjust suffering and abuse at the hands of China and various domestic
and international ‘elites’ connected to it. The third section puts this in the context of the
populist construction of trauma and victimhood, exploring how collective injury can be
represented in populist discourse by relatively privileged and dominant groups.
We conclude by arguing that the concept of the ‘populism of the privileged’ helps us
explain how Trump’s anti-China populism is centred on the counterintuitive articulation
of an American underdog identity at the domestic and international levels. It also helps to
shed light on why his narratives of unjust suffering have grip even if populist supporters
stem from comparatively privileged groups both within US society and in a global frame.
The lasting bipartisan support of the idea that China and the Chinese communist
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