‘Securitising’ the Nation AND the President: Making Political Ends Meet

Donald Trump's presidency may have been one of the most out-of-the-ordinary and polarising presidencies of the entirety of American history. This is largely due to his populist political personality that we have come to recognise through his strategic choice in language, acknowledged by many for its exceptionality and distinctiveness, compared to your average Washington DC Beaurocrat. Trump directed his specific choice of language at a large constituency of Americans, or what Pazzanese calls the 'worried working class'. Choosing specific rhetoric is a political decision, and this was the rhetoric of securitisation; Trump routinely engaged in the process of constructing security threats out of political issues. However, as Trump used the language of security to pursue his realist foreign policy agenda, his competitors in the Democratic Party deployed similar tactics to securitise him and remove him from office to consolidate power. Both sides used the language of security to construct existential threats and gain audience acceptance, thereby legitimising their own actions in dealing with that threat quickly and in any way they wished. Their securitisation moves were political decisions, made with political objectives in mind.

It is now common knowledge that Trump's language was intended directly for the millions of white working-class voters in the United States. Donald Trump knew that in order to win, he had to invoke an emotional response from his potential voters. According to sociologist Michèle Lamont, Trump's word choices "signalled a deliberate effort to court supporters without college degrees, including working-class whites and those in lower-paying jobs… the very subset of voters who overwhelmingly turned out to put him in office." These voters were increasingly feeling as if 'their' country was beginning to favour 'others'. According to some analysts, Trump exploited this sentiment by using a very divisive 'us vs them' rhetoric, reflecting an American nationalist sentiment and the alleged threats imposed upon it. Nationalistic voters elect populist leaders because populists claim to put the national interest ahead of all else (E.g. ‘America First’). Thus, populist leaders construct security threats towards the national community, and when they are elected, they are granted the legitimacy and ability to deal with them. Trump won the 2016 election through the strategic implementation of discourses that cited the existential threat that the democratic party and their non-America First policies allegedly posed to America's national security. Trump is not a 'normal' politician, and he built his whole campaign upon his ability to move outside normal politics.

On September 24th 2019, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced that the US House of Representatives would begin its impeachment proceedings against the President for his 'betrayal of [our] national security.' Again, in January 2021, Pelosi began impeachment proceedings stating that “the situation of this unhinged president could not be more dangerous, and we must do everything that we can to protect the American people.” Democrats and many Republicans were very adamant about the dangers of a Trump presidency. The Democrats and the rest of the western neoliberal world greatly feared Trump's reverse to realist America-first policies. Nancy Pelosi consistently attempted to appeal to her audience and construct Trump as a threat to United States security. According to Neo, this was "politically compelling and [constituted] a securitization move." This securitisation of Trump led to a withdrawal from normal politics and set the stage for the entrance into exceptional politics with two impeachment trials. A United States president had never been impeached twice, prior. This can be seen as a counter-securitisation, which Stritzel and Chang define as "the linguistically regulated process of resistance against crucial elements of the securitization process which typically involves processes of legitimization and delegitimization in relation to relevant audiences." Thus, we can see how the American political climate during the Trump presidency and through the continued employment of securitising moves by Trump became a back-and-forth of attempts to gain legitimacy from a relevant audience to move outside of normal politics. In the case of Trump, these were attempts to enact realist foreign policies and in the case of the Democrats, to maintain the status quo.

Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde, prominent securitisation theorists, argue that acts of securitisation are always political decisions. Trump frequently used the language of existential threat when citing issues such as migration, the economy, crime, and multilateralism, for political gains - whether to get him elected or for him to enact unilateral realist foreign policies. On the flip side, after Trump entered office, it is clear that his democratic opponents used similar tactics to socially construct Donald Trump as an existential threat to the United States security. In both cases, there existed a relevant audience. Donald Trump appealed to a nationalistic, white working-class group in America - one that felt as if they were becoming disenfranchised by a neoliberal, technocratic elite and ceding relative power to growing minority groups. In the securitisation of Trump, the Democrats appealed to their less nationalistic, more cosmopolitan constituencies to gain audience acceptance for portraying Trump as an existential security threat. A closer look at this game of securitisation and counter-securitisation can reveal how American politics has shifted from normal to exceptional and how leading actors strategically securitise to make political ends meet.

Image courtesy of Gage Skidmore, ©2018, some rights reserved.