From the series Chronicles of the new American nationalism
The tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump on allies, partners and opponents of the United States have opened a phase of negotiations with the affected countries and caused reactions from some key States. The legal opposition from almost all areas of the US poses a test: whether States, courts, and Congress can influence trade policy and constrain the expansion of executive powers. Amid conflicting rulings, the tariffs have been reinstated – an outcome that, The New York Times remarks, has “left Washington, Wall Street, and much of the world trying to discern the future of US trade policy”.
California’s dispute with the federal government has expanded to immigration policy and the domestic use of military force. The political, economic, and power struggles overlap with the electoral dimension.
The establishment remains critical of or perplexed by Trump’s foreign policy and has delivered a severe assessment of the results of his trade negotiations. But some are beginning to acknowledge, or concede, a certain recognition of his goals and methods. In ten years, “Mr Trump has come to define his age in a way rarely seen in America, more so than any president of the past century other than Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, even though he has never had anywhere near their broad public support”, writes Peter Baker of The New York Times. Somehow, he “has translated the backing of a minority of Americans into the most consequential political force of modern times, rewriting all of the rules along the way”, and “he has also upended the old conventional wisdom that optimism was the key to success in presidential politics [...] He is a voice not so much of American greatness as American grievance, one that resonates with many voters”.
An open secret
California is pursuing legal opposition to tariffs, and has defended the State’s prerogatives against the federal government even on the sensitive issue of immigration policy.
In June, demonstrations took place in Los Angeles against the arrests of undocumented immigrants by federal agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The protests were triggered by ICE raids in the Fashion District and at a parking lot of a Home Depot – a chain of hardware stores – where immigrants seek work as day labourers. Trump ordered the National Guard, which is under the governor’s command, to protect ICE agents, and mobilised the marines.
As unrest spread, Governor Gavin Newsom accused Trump of instigating the incident and provocatively using federal powers to trample on those of the State. The clash increased the visibility of Newsom, a nationally prominent Democrat, even before demonstrations took place in 2,000 cities across the nation under the slogan “No Kings”.
The Wall Street Journal criticises Trump’s “excesses” and certain “cruelties” in the expulsion of immigrants, but notes that a migration policy framed in terms of security concerns strengthens every politician. Although Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has declared a curfew, Trump is banking on the Democrats not breaking from their progressive orientation.
Newson “bets” that the president’s heavy-handed approach will alienate a portion of voters, and Sacramento has taken the federal government to court for overstepping its authority. A federal judge in San Francisco temporarily stopped the mobilisation of the National Guard, but that ruling was itself temporarily blocked by a higher court in San Francisco, the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. A few days later, it was Trump himself who softened ICE’s directives on agriculture, food services, fish farming, and meat processing. Pressure from Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, as well as from major Republican donors and exponents who channelled the concerns of business owners, is likely to have weighed heavily: their companies and respective sectors risk being unable to operate if irregular immigrants do not show up to work for fear of arrest.
The incident, like the pandemic before it, uncovers the colossal social compromise on which the American economy is based, driven by a total of almost 50 million immigrants born abroad, of which 11 million are irregular, a quarter of them concentrated in California. Sanctuary cities limit cooperation with the federal government on immigration, and in California, reports The Washington Post, irregular immigrants have access to driving licenses, healthcare, universities, and some State assistance. “Even irregular migrants”, explains the WSJ, “have some form of residence document”, and fill “the labour-power shortage” that hinders business.
No State, whether Democratic, Republican, or Sanctuary, can do without immigrants. However, immigration is the outlet for the anxiety of an electorate shaken by the crisis in the world order, and the search for electoral consensus responds to this, rather than to the logic of economic interests.
MAGA idealism and realism
In the clash in California, Trump had to back down; migrants are too crucial to essential sectors. However, his intimidation of such a significant portion of wage earners remains.
In addition to the domestic deployment of security and law-and-order rhetoric, it should be noted how the firefighter-arsonist tactic – stoking fears about immigration under the guise of defending Western identity – has become an instrument of international politics.
Washington’s line in foreign policy is evolving. Trump, as in 2017, chose to make his first trip abroad to the Middle East. The WSJ has gone so far as to read a “Trump doctrine” in the speech he delivered in Riyadh, where he spoke in terms of interests and business with Saudi Arabia and avoided lessons on democracy. It is difficult to discern a doctrine in Trump’s deliberately unpredictable moves; as for Tehran, negotiations backed by military pressure devolved into the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites.
In Asia, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseh conveyed a realist approach in his speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue, urging partners to accelerate their defence efforts in light of an “imminent” threat to Taiwan from China.
In February, during negotiations with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov regarding the war in Ukraine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke of “the incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians” in business. In the same month, Vice President JD Vance harshly criticised Brussels at the Munich Security Conference in the terms of idealism: “what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values – values shared with the United States of America”.
Vance’s words were taken up on the State Department’s website in a post, “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe”, which laments the lack of US allies in Europe on the fundamental issue of “civilization”. The document bears the marks of American exceptionalism and Catholic conservatism from the three officials to whom it is linked. Samuel Samson, the 26-year-old author of the post, describes himself as “a proud Thomist” and before directing the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor under Rubio, worked at American Moment, a conservative group supported by Vance. The document assures that “the United States remains committed to a strong partnership with Europe and working together on shared foreign policy goals”, but that this “must be founded upon our shared heritage rather than globalist conformity”. The Department is concerned that, conversely, the European Union and Great Britain’s “suppression of speech, facilitation of mass migration, targeting of religious expression, and [...] of electoral choice”, undermine the very foundations of NATO.
Hungary, a “Christian nation”, has been “unjustly labeled” as authoritarian by Brussels, the post reads, while Britain restricts prayer demonstrations outside abortion clinics, France penalises Marine Le Pen, and Germany sanctions Alternative für Deutschland.
Le Monde notes that, in the Polish and Romanian elections, MAGA emissaries have lent their support to candidates opposing the “Brussels globalists”. A policy of conservative American values seems to be wedging itself between the Old Europe of the Franco-German axis and the New Europe of the east. According to The Washington Post, “it’s worth remembering”, for those who think that Trump invokes values in a selective and insincere way, that since the time of Woodrow Wilson the idealism of American foreign policy “has always been selective, its sincerity always questioned”.
In Europe, a measure of security-related and xenophobic demagogy is now common across all political trends, accompanying and even masking policies of selection and competition over the recruitment of migrants.
But for a while, the sign of US interference in the EU will be the support for nationalist and identitarian movements that can stand in the way of the advancement of the European project. It is no coincidence that Vladimir Putin’s Russia has often followed the same tactical ploy.