The discursive hegemony of Trump’s Jacksonian populism: Race, class, and gender in constructions and contestations of US national identity, 2016–2018

Published date01 February 2021
Date01 February 2021
DOI10.1177/0263395720936867
Subject MatterSpecial Issue Articles
/tmp/tmp-18qA1kqdhmXt1b/input
936867POL0010.1177/0263395720936867PoliticsHolland and Fermor
research-article2020
Special Issue Article
Politics
2021, Vol. 41(1) 64 –79
The discursive hegemony
© The Author(s) 2020
of Trump’s Jacksonian
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https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395720936867
populism: Race, class, and
DOI: 10.1177/0263395720936867
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
gender in constructions and
contestations of US national
identity, 2016–2018

Jack Holland and Ben Fermor
University of Leeds, UK
Abstract
Contributing to burgeoning studies of populism, this article conceptualises and contextualises
Trump’s language as ‘Jacksonian populism’. We explore how this style of populist discourse
influenced political debates before and after Trump’s election. Ours is the first article to analyse
opposition and media responses to Trump’s construction of ‘real America’ as that of a Jacksonian,
White, and male working class. To do so, the article analyses 1165 texts, from the government,
opposition, newspapers, television coverage, and social media. In addition to locating Trump’s
reification of a mythologised White working class within a broader Jacksonian tradition, we find
that the Democratic opposition and mainstream media initially reproduced this construction,
furthering Trump’s cause. Even where discursive challenges were subsequently developed, they
often served to reproduce a distinct – and hitherto unspoken for – White (male) working-class
America. In short, early resistance actively reinforced Trump’s discursive hegemony, which
centred on reclaiming the primacy of working, White America in the national identity.
Keywords
discourse, populism, race, Trump, working class
Received: 19th September 2019; Revised version received: 19th May 2020; Accepted: 22nd May 2020
Introduction
This article conceptualises and contextualises Trump’s specific brand of populism, before
exploring its impact on the discursive structures of American politics and foreign policy.
We map evolving political debate, from 2016 through to 2018, with a focus on narratives
of national identity, as they emerge from three sources: the Trump administration,
Democratic opposition, and mainstream media. Specifically, our article is the first to
Corresponding author:
Jack Holland, Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.
Email: j.holland@leeds.ac.uk

Holland and Fermor
65
study the role of mythologised working, White America as this important idea traversed
the landscape of America’s political debate during Trump’s electoral campaign and at the
outset of his presidency. We go significantly further than extant research, by (1) locating
Trump’s particular variant of populism within the Jacksonian tradition of American polit-
ical history and (2) analysing the reproduction and contestation of its key underpinning
– the identity and national narrative centrality of White, working-class America – in a
moment of discursive hegemony. Ours, then, is not just an analysis of Trump’s style of
governance and communication; rather, it is an analysis of resistance and its limitations,
under the relative discursive hegemony of Trump’s particular brand of Jacksonian pop-
ulism, as it conditioned understandings of how race, class, and gender interweaved with
the US national identity.
To analyse Trump’s Jacksonian populism and its impact on US political debate, we
employ a computer-aided, ‘model 2’, discourse analysis of 1165 foreign policy texts,
across the government, opposition, and media (Hansen, 2006).1 In so doing, our research
adds further discursive breadth to the investigations of Trump’s rhetoric presented else-
where in this issue (see Blanc, 2021; Boys, 2021; Hall, 2021; Lacatus, 2021; Meibauer,
2021; Skonieczny, 2021). Our analysis draws on ideational and discursive studies of pop-
ulism, as well as broader constructivist research, developing two key contributions to
these literatures. First, we show that Trump’s language is embedded in American social,
political, and demographic history, conceptualising his style as ‘Trumpian Jacksonian
populism’. We find that the Trump administration mobilised a specific vision of the
national identity as synonymous with the White (male) working class, which served to
reify the group, elevating it to become the mythical backbone of US society and, by
extension, the US economy and foreign policy. This was done in precise ways: most nota-
bly, Trump and associated officials made use of ‘Trumpian’ emotionality and hyperbole,
within a broader, electorally effective Jacksonian rhetoric – that is, ‘a distinctively
American populism’ (Mead, 2017: 3) – which emphasised emotions such as pride, cou-
pled to specific material embodiments, such as male-dominated blue-collar industries,
particularly (a romanticised vision of) coal mining. This was a powerful vision, which
was electorally and politically consequential. And it is an approach that is more precise
and contextualised than simply archetype ‘populism’ writ large. This is important:
embodying the quintessence of the Jacksonian tradition enabled Trump to locate his can-
didacy and presidency within the specific context of the American political landscape,
even as he added his own ‘Trumpian’ flourishes. This embedding helped populist appeals
to resonate and made contestation harder (Holland, 2013; Krebs, 2015).
Following on, second, our analysis reveals that this construction of working-class,
White citizens as ‘real America’ was supported, rather than undermined, by opponents
and the media. We argue that, between 2016 and 2018, Trumpian Jacksonian populism
achieved discursive hegemony through its reimagining of the nation around the White
(male) working class. We show how even alternative imaginings of the nation served to
reproduce the notion of an ordinary (and hitherto unheard and unspoken for) White
America, which was central to Trump’s electoral success and acted as the basis for his
presidency and its policies. Early resistance was oftentimes actively reinforcing of
Trump’s position and, with it, the political stranglehold of a populist, Jacksonian presi-
dent. The impact of this reinforcement centred on the narrowing of space to resist damag-
ing policies, through the unintended reproduction of the new government’s discursive
bases. In short, Trump’s political capital, after his election, came from his own significant
discursive efforts, as well as unintentional media and opposition reinforcement. This was

66
Politics 41(1)
a moment of relative discursive hegemony, centred on a particular Jacksonian imagining
of race, class, and gender in the United States, even as political debate appeared to rage
around Trump’s presidency.
To develop our analysis and the two contributions that derive from it, the article is
structured in two parts. First, we set out the ideational/discursive populism literature to
which this article contributes, outlining the distinctly American populism of the Jacksonian
tradition. Second, we present the project’s empirical analysis, exploring the construction
of the national identity within Trump’s Jacksonian populism and its intended critique – if
ultimate reinforcement – in the language of the media and political opponents. We con-
clude by noting that Trump’s discursive strategy has remained constant, from birtherism,
through the Travel Ban, to coronavirus. The discursive structures it has engendered will
guide his re-election campaign and shape its chances of success.
Trump’s Jacksonian populism and the White (male)
working class
Since at least the 1960s, studies of populism have developed a range of competing
approaches, such as the organisational and performative. Here, we understand populism
minimally, as a chameleonic style of discourse, which pitches elites in opposition to the
people, but crucially adapts to its specific environment (Norris and Inglehart, 2019: 4; see
also Hawkins et al., 2018). This ideational approach to the study of populism extends
back to Ernesto Laclau’s work in the 1970s, and focuses on the framings, language, and
style of populism. Analysing language enables an exploration of how populism functions
in context; for example, amid the specific demographic landscape of the United States.
‘After all, it is the national and political cultures in which populist actors mobilize that
provide a better understanding of the conditions under which people come to see political
reality through the lenses of populism’ (Mudde, 2017: 41). Populism comes in many
forms and a discursive approach enables us to analyse Trump’s specific variant and its
impact across US political debate.
We are not the first to apply such an approach to the United States or to Donald
Trump. As Homolar and Scholz (2019) have argued, for example, the socio-linguistic
features of populist ‘Trump-speak’ include emotionally charged, anti-establishment cri-
sis narratives. We agree that Trump’s preferred narrative structure is one of crisis, as ‘a
leader who uses populist rhetoric’ (Norris and Inglehart, 2019: 3; see also Hall, 2021)
which taps into nostalgia and exploits ontological insecurities, diagnoses their cause,
and promises a return to pre-eminence (Homolar and Scholz, 2019: 15). It is these
qualities – emotionality and hyperbole in particular – we suggest, that can be thought
of as distinctly ‘Trumpian’, when contrasted with other leading political figures.
However, we argue that, as a...

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