Backlash politics and Trump's second term

By now it’s hard to deny that Trump’s second term is defined in large part by culture war backlash themes. The attacks on DEI (and targeted attacks on universities), the opening of the country to white South African refugees (with accompanying tropes about white genocide), the relentless anti-trans efforts. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about what kinds of distinctions between Trump’s first and second terms might be important, and that question is extremely important for understanding these developments. There are plenty of themes bridging both terms. Yet in the second term, government efforts to make cultural backlash a policy and not just a means of doing politics have been that much more authoritarian and intrusive.

One reason I’ve been so invested in thinking about the politics of Trump’s first and second terms as fundamentally different is that it fits the argument I lay out in my forthcoming book, Backlash Presidents, much better. Trump 1 is a historical parallel to Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon. Each followed a leader who changed and challenged the racial status quo, and brought the politics of backlash, in very different ways, to the White House. Ultimately, each faced impeachment for their interference with elections and disregard for institutional boundaries. Trump 2 is a parallel to presidents like Rutherford B. Hayes and Ronald Reagan, who set the terms of politics in years after racial transformation, backlash, and impeachment. These periods saw the incorporation of key elements of the backlash. There were presidents like Hayes who did this passively, turning attention to other issues and removing troops from the Reconstruction South, effectively ending any federal efforts to control what states were doing to their African Americans residents. Reagan was more active, shifting federal policy away from certain kinds of enforcement and making great strides in the political language of racial dog-whistling. It’s not hard to imagine Trump fitting into this mold, admittedly in a more active way than in the past, when federal inaction was enough to ensure that backlash priorities won out. I made the case for Trump fitting the pattern this way early on, after the election.

But a few months in, I have to acknowledge that there are other possibilities.

Possibility #1:

Trump 2 is a whole new backlash to a new set of cultural and political developments.

This possibility is consistent with the idea that the second term is fundamentally different; it suggests that politics shifted again during the Biden-Harris years. I mention Harris here because it was a new thing to have a woman of color in the vice presidency. A serious consideration of a new backlash would have to start before the 2020 election, though, and take into account the pandemic and the George Floyd protests. The upheaval of that year at times suggested that there might be a possibility for real societal change and changes in the way we think about identity, resources, and power. The reaction forces have been just as fierce. We might think about Trump’s second term as a response to promises of hope and change that went beyond anything from the Obama years. This framework helps explain the consolidation and expansion of the Trump coalition, and why the resulting presidency has been so authoritarian and so focused on not just racial backlash but also undermining LGBTQ equality, things like women’s health initiatives, and broad crackdowns on immigrants and immigration.

Possibility #2:

Trump 2 is a continuation of the same backlash as Trump 1 –

The opposite argument holds that we’re still in the same basic backlash politics that defined Trump’s first term. Despite the disruptions of 2020, the same political positions still hold. There’s some logic to this: Harris was very much an Obama-style politician, Biden was Obama’s vice president, and the Obamas have remained very much on the political stage. Viewing Trump’s second term as a continuation of the 2016 backlash suggests that, in contrast with the argument above, that not much fundamentally changed between 2020 and 2024, and that the two parties may be anchored in the same kind of politics we saw in 2016 for a long time.

Possibility #3:

There’s another category of “backsliding” presidency (that I didn’t take seriously enough in the book).

My basic assumption is that most presidents are pretty cautious, not wanting to rock the boat much in either direction, which is what makes the combinations of racially transformative presidents with their backlash successors so unique and explosive. But it was suggested to me a few times that presidents like Woodrow Wilson and possible Ronald Reagan differed from presidents who maintained the status quo around race – they actually pushed the nation backwards with their words and policies. Wilson didn’t just keep out of Jim Crow in the South, he also re-segregated the executive branch (including the military). In writing the book, I treat these actions as essentially maintaining the order of the day, moving it further in the direction of legally sanctioned racial hierarchies. But maybe this was an analytical mistake on my part: maybe there are presidencies that aren’t explicitly about racial backlash to progress, but are distinctly regressive. I hope the book can get other scholars thinking about these dynamics and categories, and producing work that moves that conversation forward. This possibility gets right to the question of norms: why are these presidents not constrained by the same concerns and fears that others are?

In other words, we know that race and cultural backlash play a heavy role in the second Trump White House, and that the tactics and some of the goals seem different from the first term, even as the broad contours remain the same. Thinking through these different possibilities highlights questions about how race, gender and other issues animate party competition. They also pose questions about the impact of 2020 and the subsequent Biden presidency – whether we’re in a new and more threatening world of backlash politics, or simply a more intense form of what emerged in 2016.