Trumpism’s racial turn: From civilisation to whiteness

Donald Trump’s political resurgence is often described as another manifestation of American populism. Yet such a characterisation understates a deeper structural shift. In its second phase, Trumpism has evolved into a racialised political project — a 21st century reinterpretation of Aryanism — redefining American identity not through ideological conflict, as in the Cold War, but through a rigid racial ordering.

Trumpism reframes global politics as a struggle among racial blocs, with whiteness reinstated as the normative and embattled core of national belonging.

This transformation is rooted in the breakdown of a narrative that once structured American global identity. During the post-Cold War era, several American and Israeli strategists promoted the concept of a “Judeo-Christian West”, a civilisational alliance linking the US, Europe and Israel.

Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations thesis gave this project intellectual legitimacy, providing a framework through which Americans interpreted allies, enemies, moral duty and foreign aid — particularly towards Israel. For nearly three decades, this civilisational paradigm informed US foreign policy, military interventions, media framing and political rhetoric.

Today, that architecture is collapsing. Two forces are especially consequential. First, demographic change in the US has undermined the demographic foundations of white majoritarian rule. Second, technological change — especially the rise of non-Western media platforms such as TikTok and Al Jazeera — has fractured the narrative monopoly once held by white, Western legacy media.

These digital infrastructures challenge, and in many respects outstrip, the legacy propaganda machines of the 20th century — whether Nazi, communist or capitalist — by producing faster, more adaptive and more affectively charged forms of political persuasion.

For instance, Gaza-related content on TikTok, has reshaped US youth opinion on Israel-Palestine. Surveys show that fewer than half of Americans under 35 express sympathy for Israel, a generational rupture that exposes the crumbling of the ideological and cultural architecture long invoked to sustain the idea of a “Judeo-Christian West”.

As the Cold War’s ideological framework fades and its civilisational successor erodes, a vacuum emerges — particularly for white Americans seeking to preserve status and privilege. Into this vacuum flows a more primordial and politically pliable logic: racial classification and hierarchisation.

Trumpism seizes this opening by re-centring national identity around whiteness itself. In Trumpist discourse, white victimhood becomes a political resource: socioeconomic distress among white Americans — whether in the Rust Belt or in impoverished rural regions — is reframed not because of structural inequality but because of racial displacement.

The rise of JD Vance illustrates this reframing. His personal narrative — growing up in a family marked by addiction and instability — has been elevated as emblematic of white suffering and redemption. Such narratives are mobilised to portray whites in the US and abroad as collectively endangered by demographic transformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies, immigrant populations and supposed political persecution, often illustrated through distorted portrayals of South Africa.

Within this worldview, Trumpism presents itself not merely as resistance to liberalism but as a project to preserve a shrinking “superior” racial core. This logic helps explain Trumpist proposals that treat mostly non-white Americans — particularly the poor, unhoused or addicted — as threats to urban order, even as objects to be removed from “beautiful” American cities such as Washington, DC.  Even well-established non-white lawmakers such as Ilhan Omar are cast as outsiders who should be “thrown out of our country”.

The implication is that citizenship itself is being reimagined as a racial privilege — an unsettling shift that recalls, in structural form, the exclusionary logics used in Nazi Germany to classify and expel those deemed racially impure.

Trump’s selective empathy makes this racial reframing explicit. His vocal concern for white South African farmers as victims of anti-white violence signals an imagined transnational white victimhood. Meanwhile, the suffering of Palestinians, Haitians or Central Americans rarely appears in humanitarian terms; instead, it is framed as evidence of demographic danger or racial inferiority. Trump’s recent announcement that he would “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” while explicitly welcoming white Afrikaners from the third world represents a strikingly direct expression of Aryanist logic.

This racial order extends beyond US borders. Trumpism increasingly aligns itself with white-majority or white-populist states, irrespective of political system. Russia — imagined as a white, Christian, traditionalist society resisting liberal cosmopolitanism — appears as a racial sibling. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is celebrated for defending “Western civilisation” — now largely a euphemism for white race and privilege. In a striking instance of transnational racial politics, Marco Rubio of Cuban origin, urged US diplomats to pressure European governments on immigration policy, an effort to shape not simply geopolitics but the demographic composition of the West itself.

What distinguishes this new Aryanism from its 20th century predecessor is its technological infrastructure. Nazi Germany relied on centralised propaganda and state-managed eugenics. The contemporary racial project operates through digital platforms, algorithmic amplification and emotionally optimised feedback loops. Elon Musk’s political transformation reflects a broader shift in the information environment. Platforms such as X and TikTok now influence political attitudes with a reach and speed that dwarf those of traditional media or propaganda machines, accelerating narratives of invasion, replacement and demographic anxiety.

If this trajectory continues, the convergence of demographic panic, ideological erosion and algorithmic acceleration may yield an unprecedented phenomenon: a digitally mediated racism that is more adaptive, pervasive and globally networked than earlier forms. This raises a fundamental question: in this emerging racial order, where will non-white Americans — including Black, Latino, Asian, Muslim, Indigenous and Jewish communities — be positioned?

America stands at a critical juncture. The collapse of the civilisational narrative has left the country suspended between two divergent futures. One path trends towards a racially exclusive national identity, fortified by demographic anxiety, ideological exhaustion and digital infrastructures that algorithmically reward polarisation. The other — still faint but increasingly visible — emerges through new electoral possibilities.

Zohran Mamdani, a non-white politician of immigrant heritage, recently secured a breakthrough victory in New York City, signalling a potential democratic countercurrent to the racialisation of American politics. His ascent embodies a multiracial, rights-based vision of the US — one grounded not in inherited racial hierarchy but in the universal principles of justice, equality and human dignity that animated the nation’s founding ideals.

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