24.08.2025, Aleksandrovskoye.
Trump supporters will not carry democracy on their bayonets wherever they go. But they will respond much more harshly than Democrats to any attempt to challenge US hegemony.
Donald Trump’s return to power in the US has sparked some hope in our country for a possible reconciliation with the West. How justified are these hopes? What can we expect from the “new old” Trump in terms of foreign policy? Why does he provoke hatred among globalist liberals throughout the “civilized world,” and why do his voters love him? To understand this, let’s examine Trump’s main slogans and the history of the populist movement in the US since the 1990s.
Trump’s slogans
Let’s start with Trump’s main slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
This raises the question: what does the word “again” mean? When was it already great, and who else promised this to voters?
A quick search shows that the slogan “Let’s make America great again” was used by Ronald Reagan during his presidential campaign. In other words, Trump borrowed Reagan’s successful slogan, thereby presenting himself to voters as Reagan’s successor. It should be noted that “true Trumpists” consider Reagan to be the greatest US president of the last 50-60 years. Some of them even rank Reagan second after Trump. Undoubtedly, Trump looks to Reagan as a model of an outstanding US president. In a way, Trump is the self-proclaimed successor to Reagan’s legacy, with one small caveat: according to Trump, it was Reagan who started pushing for NAFTA (the free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico), which Trump thinks is a disaster for the US.
It is also worth recalling that it was Reagan who intensified the arms race with the USSR and threatened our country with war in space (the notorious Strategic Defense Initiative). In the US, it is commonly believed that this arms race aggravated economic and domestic political problems in the USSR and led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. From the point of view of Trump’s electoral strategy, it is completely unimportant whether this causal relationship is actually true. What matters is that his voters believe it to be so.
Trump sees the greatness of the US in the fact that the US will rule the world without getting involved in local wars, but only by threatening to use force and supporting its allies with money and weapons. According to Trump, refusing to participate in all local conflicts while simultaneously setting the whole world on fire should lead to the return of manufacturing to the US. This, in turn, will increase employment in the country, and thus the income and standard of living of ordinary citizens. At the same time, citizens do not care that they will be producing weapons that will kill someone.
In an interview with The New York Times in March 2016, Trump was asked directly when, in his opinion, America was great. Trump named two periods of US military and industrial expansion: the early 20th century and the years after World War II. According to him, in those days, “we were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody, we had just won a war, we were pretty much doing what we had to do.”
It should be emphasized that such US dominance, as after World War II, given the international political situation and the current state of China, India, the EU, and other countries, can only arise after a war that leaves rival countries in ruins. At the same time, the ideal scenario for Trump is one in which the US does not fight itself, but supplies weapons and other aid to the warring parties on credit. As a result, American industry will grow, US revenues will also grow, and no one will be able to challenge the US. For us, this policy does not offer anything positive — chaos on our borders will increase.
Trump’s second slogan, “America First,” is even more interesting.
The phrase “America First” was first proposed by Woodrow Wilson during his 1916 election campaign, by which he meant a policy of non-intervention in World War I, ignoring everything that was happening outside the US and did not directly affect the lives of taxpayers, as well as focusing on domestic policy and protecting the domestic market with tariffs.
This slogan was then forgotten and only revived in 1940, when the America First Committee (AFC) was formed to oppose US entry into World War II. At the height of its popularity, the committee had 800,000 members in 450 branches. The committee itself was a broad coalition of Republicans, Democrats, farmers, and manufacturers. There were even American communists, but there were also anti-communists, radicals, pacifists, and simply opponents of Roosevelt. However, the committee’s leaders and most prominent speakers professed anti-Semitic and pro-fascist views, so leftists in the US directly call the “America First” policy fascist. The AFC disbanded on December 11, 1941, four days after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, which led to the US entering the war against the coalition of Germany, Japan, and Italy. Then, for more than 60 years, the slogan “America First” was not mentioned, partly because of the anti-Semitic and pro-fascist orientation of the AFC.
In 2000, the slogan was used in the election campaign by Pat Buchanan, a political commentator with paleoconservative views (i.e., a representative of isolationist conservatives, who are distinguished from interventionist conservatives, i.e., neoconservatives). He praised the AFC and wrote in 2004 that it “kept America out of World War II until Hitler attacked Stalin in June 1941.”
In 2000, Buchanan’s rival in the American Reform Party primaries was none other than businessman Donald John Trump. Three months later, he withdrew his candidacy, and Pat Buchanan ran for president on behalf of the Reform Party. It seems that Trump, who loves to borrow ideas, borrowed the phrase “America First” from Buchanan.
When Trump outlines his vision for US policy at rallies, he clearly refers to this slogan in the same sense that Wilson understood it. However, after the slogan was used, the liberal media began accusing Trump of anti-Semitism and fascism. It should be noted that Trump may not have been aware of the “baggage” associated with this slogan, although this seems doubtful. However, his advisor Stephen Bannon, who has close ties to far-right circles in the US, was well aware of this “baggage.” If Trump had wanted to get rid of the ambiguity of the slogan, he would have done so.
Let us note in the margins that if we understand fascism as an ideology that divides people into fundamentally different groups (conditional superhumans and conditional subhumans), then any US citizen who believes that the US is a God-blessed shining city on a hill, and therefore has the right to impose its order throughout the world for the “good” of those it conquers, while all other countries are realms of darkness and horror, can be considered a fascist. In any case, the distance from the ideology of American exceptionalism to fascism is quite small, since this ideology fully allowed for the genocide of the indigenous population of North America.
Thus, even a cursory glance at Trump’s slogans shows that he is interested only in the US and that he will pursue industrial growth in the US at any cost, including at the expense of allies and on the ruins of the rest of the world.
Trump will seek to withdraw US troops from potential hot spots, but these hot spots themselves will be ignited even more intensely than under Biden. And Ukraine is no exception here. At the same time, Trump will try to avoid the direct involvement of US troops, but he does not care at all about the lives of soldiers from European countries.
Moreover, back in 2016, long before the election, Trump said that he was not opposed to Japan or South Korea, or both countries together, acquiring nuclear weapons. Trump will most likely transfer nuclear weapons to these countries if China proves intransigent.
Trump’s ideological predecessors
Trump appeals to Americans with a libertarian-populist-conservative agenda. Let’s look at where it came from and how it infiltrated the Republican Party.
Contract with America
From 1955 to 1995, the Republican Party, which at the time was rightly considered the party of the oil industry and the military-industrial complex, did not have a majority in the US House of Representatives because it did not have an electoral platform that appealed to the majority of the population. During this entire period, Republicans controlled the US Senate for only six years, from 1981 to 1987, which were the first six years of the very popular President Ronald Reagan’s term in office, who promised, as already mentioned, to “make America great again.”
It is believed that Newt Gingrich, who was the first in the Republican Party to promote a populist agenda, helped the Republicans regain control of the US House of Representatives. Gingrich, a historian by education, received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Emory University in Atlanta in 1965, a Master’s degree (1968) and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in European history (1971) from Tulane University in Louisiana. After completing his studies, he taught history at West Georgia College. In 1978, on his third attempt, he was elected to the US House of Representatives from Georgia. By 1981, he had founded several factions in the House of Representatives and was focused on increasing Republican representation in the House.
In 1983, Gingrich founded the Conservative Opportunity Society, which included young conservative Republicans from the US House of Representatives. Initially, the “society” focused on analyzing polls and public opinion, and then put forward a political platform that implied economic growth, increased access to education, reduced crime, and expanded social assistance.
In the same year, 1983, The New York Times wrote that the US House of Representatives resembled a one-man show starring Newt Gingrich: “One day, the Republican from Georgia demanded that the House condemn two colleagues for sexual harassment. The next day, he led a campaign for covert aid to rebels in Nicaragua. The third time, he proposed a ban on International Monetary Fund loans to communist countries.” Immediately afterwards, he supported a bill making the birthday of civil rights activist Martin Luther King a national holiday.
The newspaper reveals Gingrich’s interesting motivation. Gingrich led the fight against lawmakers accused of sexual harassment because “there is a deep longing for fundamental values in this country.”
“The cornerstone of Mr. Gingrich’s philosophy is that both major parties are bankrupt, controlled by notions of a ‘liberal welfare state’. Democrats, he says, have turned welfare recipients into victims, making them dependent on the government, while Republicans have adopted a ‘’maniacal, anti-government belief’ bequeathed to them by Herbert Hoover,” the newspaper writes.
Gingrich considered Theodore Roosevelt, one of the four US presidents depicted on Mount Rushmore, to be a role model. The newspaper writes that Gingrich sees himself as an “old-school” reformer and advocates for a government that would offer incentives and leverage to the private sector, but not replace it.
As examples of Gingrich’s policy initiatives that the Conservative Society for Opportunity proposed to implement, the newspaper cites: government payments to children from poor families for reading lessons; vocational training courses for job seekers; and daycare for their children. He also proposed tax breaks for working-class families buying home computers.
In other words, Gingrich and his like-minded colleagues became the founders of conservative populism, the essence of which is that US citizens should be given opportunities to earn money, but not given money for nothing. This is precisely the view held by Trump, at least in words.
Gingrich also initiated the sharp political polarization of the parties, which reached its peak in the 2020s. Now, calls to kill opponents no longer surprise American society. As reported by The New York Times, Gingrich “believes that the only way to increase the power of Republicans is to oppose Democrats at every step and draw clear lines between the parties.”
In September 1990, The New York Times wrote about a memorandum, most likely authored by Newt Gingrich. At least, the accompanying letter to the memorandum was signed by Gingrich. The memo was sent to all Republican candidates and recommended for use in public speeches to “create a clear and easily understood contrast” between the parties. The memo offered a set of words to characterize opponents, i.e., Democrats and their track record. Here are some of those words: decline, sick, union bureaucracy, greed, corruption, radical, permissiveness, strange. And to describe Republicans and their position, it suggested using positive words such as opportunity, challenge, courage, clean, principle(s), care, common sense, peace, and pioneer. It should be noted that Trump speaks at rallies precisely along these lines, as do all his supporters. The only addition was a few words related to religious themes. So Gingrich’s memo has not become outdated in 45 years.
US President Ronald Reagan borrowed some ideas from the Conservative Society of Opportunity for his 1984 election campaign, supporting the group’s conservative goals on economic growth, education, the judiciary, and social issues — goals he did not mention during his first term. Reagan also mentioned the “Society of Opportunity” in his first State of the Union address during his second term (i.e., in 1985).
It should be noted that the use of aggressive rhetoric did not help Republicans significantly improve their electability in Congress. In order to improve the party’s image and in an attempt to unite the different wings of the Republican Party, in 1994 Gingrich and Texas Congressman Richard Arme (an economist by education and a fan of Ludwig von Mises, one of the founders of libertarianism) launched an initiative they called the “Contract with America.” This document outlined 10 bills that Republicans promised to bring to a vote in the House of Representatives within the first 100 days of the new Congress if they won the election. At the same time, only measures that were supported by at least 60% of voters (according to polls) were prudently included in the “Contract.” Issues that divide society, such as abortion or mandatory prayer in schools, were not included in the “Contract.”
The “Contract” included promises to reform social welfare, limit the terms of congressmen and committee chairmen in the House of Representatives, adopt a balanced budget while reducing taxes for small businesses, civil justice reform, tougher penalties for criminals, and restrictions on US military participation in UN missions. Reagan biographer Lou Cannon wrote that more than half of the text of the “Contract” was taken from Ronald Reagan’s 1985 “State of the Union Address,” but it was this address, as has been said, that borrowed the ideas of the “society of opportunity” Gingrich and his like-minded colleagues. Researchers in the US also report that many of the ideas in the “Contract” had previously been developed by the Heritage Foundation, indicating a clear link between conservative populism in the US and the Heritage Foundation. The “Contract” was signed by Gingrich and other Republicans running for election to the House of Representatives.
Some historians in the US dispute the influence of the “Contract with America” on voter sentiment, as it was published only a month and a half before the election, However, in 1994, the Republican Party took 58 seats in the House of Representatives from the Democrats in the midterm elections and, for the first time in 40 years, gained a majority in this legislative body, which it had not had under Nixon, Reagan, or George H.W. Bush. Gingrich became Speaker of the House of Representatives and remained so until his resignation in 1999. Time magazine named Gingrich “Man of the Year” in 1995 for his role in the elections. And that’s one side of the coin, the obvious one. We’ll look at the other side a little later.
As Speaker, Gingrich sought to increasingly link Christian conservatism with the Republican Party. By 2000, Christian conservatism was firmly entrenched in the Republican Party’s political platforms.
Let us note another similarity with Trump: in 1995, the US House of Representatives fulfilled Gingrich’s promise to put all ten points of the “Contract with America” to a vote within the first 100 days of the session. Only a small portion of them became law, as President Clinton used his veto power to block the bills. However, Gingrich fulfilled the promise he made to voters. The same is true of Trump: he is fulfilling what he promised voters.
It is generally accepted that it was Gingrich who secured the adoption of a deficit-free US budget for 1999. Failure in the 1998 midterm elections (reducing the Republican majority in Congress to a minimum) forced Gingrich to step down as Speaker in 1999 and then leave Congress altogether. However, he retained his influence over the Republican Party and profitably engaged in political consulting.
It should also be noted that Gingrich is still an active political commentator, and in 2016 he was one of the first in the Republican Party to back Trump and support him. So Trump is Gingrich’s heir, both in terms of his policies and even in terms of his support. During Trump’s presidency, Gingrich did not hold any official positions, but his wife became the US ambassador to the Vatican and remained in that position until the Democrats came to power.
The Tea Party Movement
In 2006, against the backdrop of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Republicans gave up control of the House of Representatives to Democrats after 12 years. The party was experiencing a crisis of ideas and needed something new to regain voters’ interest in the party. The answer came in 2009 with the formation of the Tea Party Movement. The name refers to an important episode in the struggle for US independence — the Boston Tea Party, when residents of Britain’s North American colonies, dressed as Native Americans, threw tea from the ships of the East India Company into Boston Harbor. In this way, they protested against the tax preferences established by the metropolis for English tea.
The movement was formed to oppose the policies of Democratic President Barack Obama and helped Republicans take 63 seats from Democrats in the House of Representatives and regain control of it. At first glance, the movement appeared to be a decentralized, grassroots activist movement. Its members advocated for lower taxes, reduced government debt, and a smaller federal budget deficit. To achieve these goals, they demanded cuts in government spending by reducing the functions of the central government and transferring powers to the states. In addition, supporters of the movement generally opposed the Affordable Care Act proposed by President Obama (also known as Obamacare). In 2013, at the height of the movement’s popularity, approximately 10% of US residents considered themselves supporters. American researchers describe the ideology of the Tea Party movement as a mixture of libertarianism, right-wing populism, and conservatism.
Historian and writer Walter Russell Mead, in his 2011 essay “The Tea Party and American Foreign Policy,” published in Foreign Affairs magazine, writes that Jacksonian populists, such as the Tea Party Movement, combine a belief in American exceptionalism and its role in the world with skepticism about “America’s ability to create a liberal world order.” When necessary, they prefer “total war” to “limited wars for limited purposes.”
Mead identifies two main trends in this populism, one embodied by former Texas Congressman and libertarian Ron Paul, and the other by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Ron Paul’s like-minded colleagues adhere to the approach of one of the founding fathers of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, who prescribes avoiding military intervention outside the United States whenever possible. However, only “whenever possible.” If it is not possible, then intervention and foreign intervention will occur. Sarah Palin’s supporters seek to avoid dragging the US into unnecessary conflicts, but believe it is necessary to respond aggressively to anything that threatens US primacy in international relations. Mead says that both groups share a dislike of “liberal internationalism.”
It should be noted that in 2022, Sarah Palin “rose from obscurity” and attempted to enter the US House of Representatives from the state of Alaska. Since she had Trump’s support, it took an unprecedented collusion between the local Republican elite and the Democrats to prevent her from taking her seat there. Trump’s support for Sarah Palin indicates that he is not her staunch opponent, including in the field of foreign policy. Thus, the libertarian-conservative-populist movement took shape during the Tea Party Movement, and Trump merely gave it a second wind. It is also worth noting that although former Tea Party supporters support Trump at the grassroots level, not all career politicians who came to the US Congress support him. It is also worth noting that, although former Tea Party supporters at the grassroots level support Trump, not all career politicians who came to the US Congress on the wave of the Tea Party movement are Trumpists. Adam Kinzinger, an active member of the US House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters, was a Tea Party nominee, yet he was one of the most aggressive opponents of Trump within the party during his first presidential term. At the other end of the spectrum is Matt Gaetz, Trump’s nominee for attorney general (who declined the position), also a Tea Party nominee who became an ardent supporter of Trump.
It follows from the above that Trumpists will not carry democracy on bayonets wherever they go. But they will respond much more harshly than Democrats to any attempt to challenge US hegemony (which is what Russia did in Ukraine), even resorting to “total war.” So there will be no improvement in conditions for Russia with Trump’s arrival, nor can there be. There may be an easing of sanctions if Ukraine renounces its stated goals of denazification and demilitarization and stops fighting. But no one will stop pumping weapons into the Kiev regime, and the war will flare up with renewed vigor at the most inconvenient time for us.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
