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.

This article explores the relationship of foreign policy and domestic politics under Trump by making use of two complementary theories. We employ Gramscian theory to make sense of US foreign policy structures, conceptualising the Trump administration as engaged in a discursive war of position with detractors over narratives of national identity and security.Second, we use securitisation theory to conceptualise agency, change, and continuity within this. We analyse 1200 official, opposition and media texts to identify discursive changes over the 20 months following Trump's election. First, we consider Trump's attempted securitisation of immigration. Second, we explore the counter-securitisation of Trump as a threat to (progressive) America. Third, we analyse how the Trump administration securitised the opposition, conflating the constructed threat posed by immigration with political elites. We show how this led to the further polarisation of US political debate, which became underwritten by securitised language, with competing actors, referent objects, and audiences. We note that security's referent differed for both groups, with Trump's ethnocentric 'real' America opposed to the values-based patriotism endorsed by his critics. This poses important implications for how we understand change in US foreign policy, not least because it creates a favourable discursive landscape for Trump's re-election.

This is a repository copy of Trump's rhetoric at 100 days: contradictions within effective emotional narratives.

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