Anti-populism and the Trump trauma in US foreign policy

Abstract

In challenging normal patterns of foreign policy legitimation and undermining the internationalist consensus in favour of liberal hegemony, Donald Trump's populism constituted a political trauma for the foreign policy establishment (FPE) of the United States. How did the FPE respond? Based on a discursive approach and using the methodology of qualitative frame analysis, we examine the anti-populist response to the Trump trauma on the part of the FPE. The findings show how the FPE framed Trumpian populism as a political anomaly through interlocking frames of authoritarianism, irresponsibility and immaturity. This could only be rectified through a process of foreign policy normalization, carried through the first two years of the Joe Biden administration, which aimed to stabilize US leadership and restore the consensus that existed prior to the populist disruption. Highlighting the emotional dimensions of anti-populism, the article contends that to fully understand the effects of global populism, we must examine elite responses to populist 'ruptures' of the kind Trump represented. By extending the concept of anti-populism to debates on foreign policy, the article addresses existing gaps in the literatures on anti-populism and the effects of populist foreign policy.