1
INTRODUCTION
Barney Warf
Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States, is arguably the most famous person in the world at this juncture in history. Brash, bombastic, flamboyant, and constantly in the limelight, he is at the center of enormous political and cultural controversies. He is the defining figure of American politics, generating strong views across the political spectrum, ranging from being a demigod to his supporters to a symbol of authoritarian neoliberalism for his detractors. Since his surprising electoral victory in 2016, Trump has generated wave after wave of publicity, often for his crass outbursts and Twitter storms. For many people, Trump embodies the worst of American culture: arrogance, ignorance, racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. For his followers, the famed “base,” largely consisting of white working class voters that propelled him to victory, Trump speaks truth to power, undermines liberal coastal “elites,” and is the only force between them and the horrors of the global economy.
Trump is in many ways an icon for those dispossessed by globalization and neoliberalism, the working class that has seen limited opportunities, declining fortunes, and stagnant wages for two generations. His outlook and behavior are often mirrored around the world by autocrats and dictators who rode similar waves of conservative populism to power.
Since he announced his presidential ambitions, it became abundantly clear that Trump was a candidate – and a president – unlike any other. Trump has systematically violated every norm of politics, hurling childish taunts and insults, boasting incessantly, and spewing forth vast numbers of lies. His aggression and pugnaciousness are unrivalled. Indeed, many mental health professionals have expressed concern about the dangers posed by his sadism and narcissism (Lee 2017). He has repeatedly said outrageous things that would have quickly ended the careers of other politicians, yet seems to pay no price. He has attacked the media and his own federal law enforcement agencies, expressed sympathy for white nationalists and neo-Nazis, slandered every political rival and opponent, and run an administration that has been continuously mired in scandal and blatant corruption. The shadow of collusion with Russia hung over Trump for the first two years of his presidency, although it was largely disavowed by the Mueller report. As president, he insulted and alienated allies, started trade wars, and rejected the long-standing internationalism that defined both major political parties, unapologetically advocating an “America First” agenda. Trump has violated numerous political norms, appointed family members as advisors, refused to release his tax forms, and used public office to enrich himself. As Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MI) said, “You have to think of the Trump phenomenon as a religious cult surrounding an organized crime family” (Goldberg 2019). There have been many demagogues in American political history, such as Huey Long of Louisiana, but Trump is the first demagogue to be elected president. Kakutani (2018, p. 4) notes that “If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump – a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery, and tyrannical impulses … she or he would likely be accused of extreme contrivance and implausibility.”
The list of topics concerning Trump nears infinity: the racism, sexism, misogyny, and Islamophobia; the grifters, nepotism, and corruption of his administration; the mystery of his appeal among the white working class and evangelicals; his lies, insults, boasts, infantile behavior, and rank hypocrisy; his prolific use of Twitter and rallies; his disastrous environmental record; the undermining of the post-World War II global order; his trade wars and tariffs; the border wall with Mexico and mistreatment of immigrants; his celebration of dictators and autocrats and alienation of allies. No one volume can do justice to all these topics.
The Trump phenomenon exists simultaneously at many conceptual levels: it is economic, social, political, and psychological. But it is also geographical, a dimension mostly overlooked in the rapidly increasing libraries dedicated to the subject. Not surprisingly, Trump's visibility and policies have generated a growing body of literature in geography concerned with his racism, geopolitics, and immigration and environmental policies (e.g., Ingram 2017; Finn 2017; Pulido et al. 2019; Sparke and Bessner 2019). This volume is concerned with the political landscapes of Trump and Trumpism, i.e., how he and his administration are embedded within and in turn reshape multiple spatial scales. There is the geography of the 2016 presidential election, in which Trump won the Electoral College, including several “blue” or traditionally Democratic-leaning states in the Midwest such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, drawing unprecedented support from non-college educated whites. There are the spatial dimensions of his rhetoric and policies, notably concerning Muslims and immigrants, particularly those from Latin America, and his obsession with the border wall with Mexico. Trump has altered the international standing of the U.S., withdrawn from global agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, marginally revised NAFTA, and started trade wars with China, Canada, and the European Union. He has alienated allies and courted autocrats around the world, notably including Russia's Vladimir Putin. His foreign policy toward North Korea and Iran, among others, is, to put it mildly, unique. Trump is both a reflection and promoter of global authoritarian neoliberalism. And then there are the environmental dimensions of Trump, a long-standing geographical concern, including the reversal of many Obama-era policies and withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. All of these issues, and more, point to the need to examine Trump and his policies from a geographical standpoint.
Outline of chapters
The essays in this volume are grouped into three broad categories. The first puts Donald Trump into context, provides biographical details about his life, personality, and policies, and examines his real estate empire. The second concerns his upset electoral victory, the geography of votes, Trump's support among the white working class, the discourses that emanate from Trump and which, in turn, are used to view him and his administration, and his victims. The third part concerns the major foreign policy initiatives of the Trump administration, notably in Korea and the Middle East, and his actions and policies concerning climate change.
In Part I, Chapter 2, by Barney Warf, contextualizes Donald Trump in several ways. The chapter opens by outlining his essential biographical information. It then briefly explores the 2016 presidential campaign, including Trump's popularity with white working class voters and Russian collusion. It summarizes Trump's persona and rhetoric, including his racism, misogyny, anti-intellectualism, extreme narcissism, contradictions, boasts, insults, and lies, and questions about his mental health. The chapter then turns to Trump's relations with American institutions such as the media and law enforcement agencies. It offers a summary of the dynamics of the Trump administration, including its nepotism, corruption, and disastrous environmental policies. Finally, it addresses Trump's foreign policies, including the wall with Mexico, immigration, trade wars, and alienation of U.S. allies.
Samuel Stein writes in Chapter 3 of Trump as both embodiment and driver of the globalization of real estate. Far from being geniuses of the private market, the scions of the Trump Corporation benefited mightily from public policies. Stein traces the history of the family's relations with real estate, starting with Friedrich Trump's migration to the U.S. in the early 20th century and Fred Trump's empire in Queens. A racist slumlord, Fred provided the wherewithal to launch Donald into the business as a tycoon profiting from government-subsidized housing. The young Donald mastered the art of the public-private partnership, and globalized the empire.
The second major part of the book opens with Chapter 4, by Ron Johnston, Charles Pattie, Ryne Rohla, David Manley, and Kelvyn Jones. They chart the geographical dimensions of Trump's electoral success. They compare the 2016 and 2012 elections to probe the regions in which Trump enjoyed successes at multiple spatial scales, including states, congressional districts, counties, and precincts. They also deploy regression analyses to explore the demographic and spatial dimensions of votes for Trump and note campaign strategies and the allocation of advertising expenditures. Third, they turn to the dynamics of the Electoral College that propelled Trump to victory, even though he lost the popular vote by almost three million votes.
The 2016 election was shocking in part because Trump won many traditionally Democratic Rust Belt states. In Chapter 5, Ryan Weichelt offers an in-depth examination of Trump's victory in Wisconsin. Republicans, led by Governor Scott Walker, had been making steady gains in the state. After contextualizing Trump's victory within national voting results, Weichelt looks at the Republican primary contest in the state, in which Walker was another contender for the nomination, Trump's rallies, and television coverage. In the general election, the Trump campaign exploited Wisconsin's political geography to maximum effectiveness.
Sociologists David Norman Smith and Eric Hanley write in Chapter 6 about the intersections among race, class, and prejudice in the Midwest. As in the South, in the Midwest Trump captured the lion's share of votes from non-college educated white voters. Using data from the American National Election Studies on voter attitudes in 2016, they show that, despite their educational and regional differences, white voters tend to share a strong sense of racial prejudice. They compare the Trump and Romney campaigns, and find disturbing evidence of support for an authoritarian leader. Finally, they look at the social and spatial similarities between support for Trump and that for Andrew Jackson in the 19th century; Jackson is Trump's hero, and the similarities in terms of racism are striking.
Trump's victory provoked widespread fears of impending fascism and racial conflict. Scott Markley and Coleman Allums in Chapter 7 write of postfascist suburbanism, whose policies are manifested in ethnic cleansing. Grounded in white anxiety over demographic displacement and a mythologized past, Trumpian fascism, or at least the 21st century form of reactionary populism that it has assumed, is the latest manifestation of racialized neoliberalism. They examine how this revanchism plays out at the local scale through a case study of Marietta, Georgia, where rapid population growth was accompanied by growing economic distress and ethnic cleansing took the form of eliminating “urban blight” in areas populated by African Americans.
One of the most salient features of Trump's political victory was his widespread support among blue-collar whites. David H. Kaplan writes in Chapter 8 about white ethnonationalism's ties to Trump. He unpacks the multiple meanings ensconced in the term ethnonationalism, how it has changed in the U.S. over time, and how it feeds white identitarian politics. He then examines how this ideology gave Trump broad appeal among working class whites, less educated voters, white evangelicals, and those who ethnically identify as “American.” Fear of ethnic diversity is a common thread that ties together these disparate groups.
Trump is the world's most famous user of Twitter, which he uses habitually to boast, assault antagonists, and mobilize followers. In Chapter 9, Lewis J. Dowle puts a microscope to Trump's use of this medium during the 2016 Republican primaries to install fear and humiliate rivals. Trump's tweets, he writes, reflect the constipated geographical imaginations of white racists and their imagined Other, i.e., immigrants and Muslims. In this way, right-wing identity politics is mobilized by a drumbeat to create fear and loathing.
The Trump phenomenon is ripe for theoretical analysis. In Chapter 10, Sam Page examines Donald Trump not as a singular individual, but as part of a Deleuzo-Guttarian “war machine” that generates and feeds off waves of affect and the emotional geographies of fear and hatred. As a rhizomatic assemblage that constantly mutates from one form to another, the Trumpian monstrosity directs its anger at “elites,” the state, immigrants, liberals, and any others who stand in its way. So powerful is this war machine that it has irrevocably altered the political landscape, the Republican Party, and the U.S. government itself.
Trump's demagoguery has a parallel to the rhetoric of professional wrestling, a sport with which Trump has long had a curious relationship. David Beard and John Heppen argue in Chapter 11 that wrestling taught him the art of lowbrow populism, and illustrate how his choice of words and phrases mimics that of wrestling promoters, including boasting, insults, misogyny, and the glorification of violence. Trump's close ties to the World Wrestling Entertainment's Vince McMahon gave him insights into the world of what would later become some of his most ardent followers. From wrestling, Trump learned to pose as the hero for the common fan.
In Chapter 12, Barney Warf details the frequency and extent of Trump's lies (more than 20,000 to date), the reasons he uses them, and why he gets away with them. Contrary to the widespread idea that Trump suffers for his mendacity, much of the country actively enjoys it. Warf examines the geographic aspects of Trump's lies, including the border wall with Mexico, immigration and refugees, the environment, and international trade. The chapter then offers a brief contrast of theories of truth proposed by Habermas, Foucault, and Trump himself, who is an inadvertent philosopher given to a nihilistic, self-serving version of truth suited to the era of simulacra.
Part III begins with a study of the Middle East, a region to which the Trump administration has devoted considerable attention and where the administration's policies have generated waves of consternation. Carl T. Dahlman and Nathan S. French examine in Chapter 13 how the region became a laboratory for Trump's dismissal of conventional norms and policies, kowtowing to Israel, arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and dismissal of human rights. They look at his speeches and tweets to decipher if the administration truly has the policy of principled realism that it claims, i.e., whether there is such a thing as the Trump Doctrine. They point out how Trumpian geopolitics in the region mirrors assaults on Muslims and others in the U.S. (e.g., with the proposed ban on Muslim immigrants). Trump's use of extrajudicial suspension of international legal norms creates a space of exception in the region in which the normal rules of international diplomacy and law fail to have their intended effects. The repercussions of this strategy are felt in the multiple tragedies underway in Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, and Lebanon, and among refugees in Turkey.
Chapter 14, by Richard N. Gioioso and Lisa Baglione, turns to Cuba, where the Trump administration largely reversed the Obama-era policy of engagement. Drawing on ethnographic data of younger Cubans, they reveal not only the widespread demoralization and cynicism on the island but also how Trump's neoconservative policies aimed at deterritorializing the country have failed. Hard power is not enough. Disillusionment with the Castro regime and the Cuban Communist Party has hardly laid the groundwork for the collapse of the Cuban government.
The examination of Trump's geopolitics is continued in Chapter 15, by Steven M. Radil and Jin-Soo Lee, who focus on the Korean peninsula. Trump's “love” of North Korean dictator “Rocket Man” Kim Jong-Un is well known, as it is with many autocrats around the world. The chapter contextualizes the long-term peace process in Korea, a...
