While President Trump is continuing to be inept, crude, and inconsistent on many issues, he is consistent in his white nationalism. This is clear in the current immigrant crisis—a crisis that he created.
He campaigned as a white nationalist, planning to ban Muslims from the country and building a wall to keep out illegal immigrants, who are mostly nonwhite. That part of his campaign promises he is trying hard to keep.
Yes, there is a philosophy behind some of Trumpism. It is nationalism, the doctrine that holds that one’s own nation is superior to all others, and that nations should act independently.
Nationalism differs from patriotism in that while patriotism is love of country, nationalism is love of country combined with dislike of other countries, their peoples, or their cultures. A nation, from a nationalistic perspective, centers around shared culture, language, history, and ethnicity—a very limiting proposition if referring to the United States which has many cultures, languages, and ethnicities.
This brings us to Trump’s type of nationalism. Trump is an ethnic nationalist, which is someone who sees true Americanism meaning a particular ethnic, racial, or religious identity. Many of Trump’s core supporters see America as a white, Christian nation–no Muslims, no immigrants, and fewer other nonwhites.
Nationalism opposes globalization as well as immigration. Globalism refers to any description and explanation of a world which is characterized by networks of connections that cross countries and continents. The Cambridge English Dictionary defines a globalist as someone who believes that economic and foreign policy should be planned in an international way.
The term globalist is also used as a racist and anti-semitic epithet. The Anti-Defamation League says the far right uses globalism as shorthand for a world view based on racism and anti-Semitism.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former special advisor and reigning white nationalist, says the globalists in the White House pushed him out. Now the globalists are gone. With the resignation of the National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, the firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, Trump has effectively purged his cabinet of globalists, those who thought the Country should continue to have international alliances.
With the so-called globalists gone, Trump has moved full steam ahead in dismantling the international alliances of the United States and moving toward isolationism.
He undermined NATO by joining with Vladimir Putin in criticizing it. Note that the Soviet Union/Russia has always wanted to weaken NATO; He withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Change Agreement; He picked fights with our neighbors—our second and third largest trading partners—Canada and Mexico; He picked fights and weakened ties to our European allies; He weakened our foreign relations ability by gutting the State Department and not staffing it with experts.
Strands of nationalism have existed in the U.S. for a long time. For example, the U.S. never joined the League of Nations, organized after WW I, despite the efforts of the president of the U.S. at that time. Through the years there were always calls from some parts of American society for the U.S. to get out of the United Nations. And there is the ever-present assumption that policies and practices in the United States are superior to those in other countries, e.g., how medical care is administered.
Trump’s white nationalism plus his incompetence, all aided by the spineless Republican leaders in Congress, have put the United States in a bad situation.
