Donald Trump’s Settler-Colonist State Fantasy
Throughout his term of office, Donald Trump has done his best to disconnect American democracy from the liberal principles and the liberal institutions foundational to its workings. In doing so he has sought to foster and normalise a mindset of illiberal democracy as reflective of national belonging. Key to this strategy has been the resurgence of the white settler-colonist attitudes and animosities with which he animates his populist movement.
Immigrant Scapegoats
In his presidential campaign Trump created a narrative that transmuted his supporters heterogeneous motives and purposes into a singular fantasy. This fantasy possessed two vital dimensions: Trump’s signature injunction “Make American Great Again!” offered his illiberal populist base a bellicose fantasy of the dispossession of the alien power that made them feel “strangers in their own land.“ Secondly, the power of Trump’s appeal was that he provided compelling explanations for America‘s decline by isolating the immigrant as the condensed signifier for everything that caused it.
In campaign rallies Trump instructed alienated working class, predominantly white voters, to direct their hostilities against the immigrant as the figure responsible for the disappearance of their jobs and cause of the nation’s global decline.
Identifying immigrants with the economic and social crises effected by globalization whose resolution requires their expulsion, Trump turned his rallies into settler-colonist liturgical ceremonies that cast immigrant populations as scapegoats within national rites of cathartic purification.
The frontier site Trump restores at his rallies opens up an interval between the rally-space and the normal political order where his followers collectively participate in the fantasy of their regression to the primal scene of their white settler ancestors’ acts of dispossession and re-appropriation. Reduced to the political demand underwriting it, this fantasy can be restated as a collective desire to overthrow usurp control over and re-settle the 3rd world colony to which Barack Obama had devolved the United States of America.
Following Trump‘s election into office, he needed to construct a site within the domestic culture where the violence the state directed against immigrants would also foster the production and reproduction of the mindset of illiberal democracy. He created such a site at the Southern border where the ongoing daily spectacle of border agents forcibly turning away political refugees, breaking up immigrant families, putting children in cages, taunting and torturing deportees in their custody violated rules and laws of every institution within the national and global order established to protect the rights of stateless peoples.
Trump‘s encompassing strategy of illiberal hegemony acquires spectacular power each time these border patrol agents proffer no justification for the use of lethal force other than America’s interest.
Trump discovered the figure of the immigrant desirous of entry at America’s Southern border offered the most effective means of decoupling American democracy from its liberal attachments. As a form of human life that has not yet been sutured to American democracy the immigrant body offers a site whereon the distinction between liberal and alternative political iterations of national belonging become starkly visible.
The immigrant has been the locus for the contestation between liberal and illiberal construals of U.S. national identity throughout American history. Located at the border line separating the U.S. national community and the Liberal International Order, the immigrant provides a figure of double-faced otherness through which the nation defines itself as an imagined community and against which the state affirms its sovereign power to secure and protect that community’s borders.
A self-differentiating figure, the immigrant can confirm one of the foundational liberal myths of the United States as a tolerant, welcoming, political asylum for the oppressed; the immigrant can also offer the illiberal settler-colonist state a threatening body upon which it can exert its sovereign nativist force.
The United States liberal democratic imaginary conceptualizes the immigrant as a necessary supplement to its procedures of national self-representation. The core liberal beliefs that the United States is a nation of immigrants, a refuge for the politically oppressed, and a nation of nations all require the immigrant body for representation and perpetuation.
White Settler Colonist Violence
While Trump may not want legal or juridical warrant for his immigration policies, however, he does need historical antecedents to verify their Americanness. Although it is not clear that Trump is acquainted with the specifics of Andrew Jackson‘s presidency (or any historical facts for that matter), his consultant and one-time national security adviser Steve Bannon has endorsed the claim, first proposed by Walter Russell Mead, that President Andrew Jackson‘s policies and populist constituency furnish useful historical precedents for understanding Trump’s illiberal democracy.
Jackson, as a commander of a frontier militia, demolished Native American tribes and drove the British and Spanish from the deep-south. As President, he based his stratagems of governmental rule on the need to protect America from external and internal enemies. The twinned policies of Indian Removal and continental expansion that Jackson took up also marked the historic moment of the shift in America’s status from a colonial settlement to a New World Imperial Republic. The Jacksonian Americans who carried out both policies turned white settler-colonist violence against Indigenous peoples into the principal agency of the emergent American Empire.
The deepest correlation between Jackson’s presidency and Trump’s is the uninterrupted and ongoing eventfulness of Jackson era white settler-colonist violence. The Army Corps of Engineers enlisted to install the Dakota Access pipeline on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, the participants in the "Unite the Right“ rally who chanted "You will not replace us“ in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11-12, 2017, and the spectacular acts of violent dispossession that legal and extra-legal military patrols carry out each day at the nation’s Southern borders bring into stark visibility the entire history of white settler colonist violence.
The Jacksonian white settler-colonists who dispossessed Indigenous peoples from their lands also characterized this act of dispossession as what entitled them to claim that, as the first inhabitants to legally own this land, that they, and not the Indigenous tribes they removed, were the real Native Americans. These twinned acts of negation - severing the traces of British identity and the destruction of native peoples ties to the land - also in effect constituted the precondition for white settler-colonists’ production of the Nativist America that President Trump aspires to make great again.
However, Trump’s latter day white settler-colonists have replaced the Indian with the Immigrant as the figure through whom they reactivate this nativist dialectic. The Trump administration’s policies of caging, deporting, and killing immigrants gratifies the desire of the descendants of Jacksonian era white settler-colonists to banish and “disappear” the indigenous peoples they dispossessed. Since, in Trump’s view, the Indian Removal policies of Jackson’s settler colonist state made America Great the first time, he aspired to make this relentlessly Nativist American State Great Again.
The Struggle for American Democracy
As these remarks indicate, the white settler racism and entitlement embraced by Trump’s populist supporters continue to manifest the ongoing cultural, political, and economic, and intensely militant attitudes sedimented in the matrix of Jackson era white-settler colonist imperialism.
The seizing of Indigenous lands supplied the historical foundation of both wealth and power in Jackson’s America, it continues to provide the context and primary driving force behind the uneven distributions and force of racial capitalism. The current dispossessive logics shaping financialization and debt are founded on the racial regimes of transatlantic slavery and the colonial logics that justified theft of Indigenous lands and death for Indigenous peoples.
This reconfiguration of the stratagems and tactics of settler colonialism makes it clear that white settler colonialism should not be construed as an ephemeral historical event but the chronological template by whose means the present rewrites the past to cast the future.
Trump’s advisors may have selected the Jacksonian settler colonist state to establish historical precedents for state policies that do not otherwise appear recognizably American. In so doing they have also resurrected a historical moment when the liberal strand had not yet become a seamless portion of the political fabric of American democracy.
But the Jacksonian era was also a moment in which the widespread opposition to Jackson’s Indian Removal policies, the Southern slave power and predatory capitalism fostered activist political formations and literary movements whose members imagined political dispositions to discredit the democracy Jackson fostered. The transcendentalists and abolitionists of the era also rendered imaginable the complete change in the nation’s political coordinates that seems more sorely needed now than ever before in the nation’s history.
Donald E. Pease is the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities at Dartmouth College. This article is selectively excerpted from a chapter in Trump’s America: Political Culture and National Identity, ed. Liam Kennedy – it will be published by Edinburgh University Press in August 2020.