Understanding Trump’s Second Term: Can Huntington Guide?

This paper analyzes how Samuel P. Huntington’s post–Cold War writings on American foreign policy and American national identity provide a useful framework for understanding the political discourse and policy orientation of the Trump administration. In his later work, Huntington shifted his focus from geopolitical conflicts to what he perceived as a deeper, internal challenge: the erosion of a cohesive American identity under the pressures of globalization, multiculturalism, and large-scale immigration. He argued that the United States risked losing its cultural core, and that political stability required reaffirming national boundaries and a clearer sense of collective purpose. This study contends that Huntington’s concerns—and his proposed solution, centered on the idea that a nation must define itself in part by identifying and delimiting its “others”—anticipated the identity-driven politics that became central to Donald Trump’s rise. Trump’s rhetoric on immigration, border security, and economic nationalism echoed Huntington’s warnings about fragmentation and loss of coherence, while his “America First” doctrine operationalized a worldview grounded in sharp distinctions between insiders and outsiders. Through discourse analysis and an examination of key policy documents, the paper explores how Huntington’s identity framework helps explain the Trump administration’s domestic and foreign policy choices, including restrictive immigration measures, the reassertion of national sovereignty in international institutions, and the reframing of foreign policy around the protection of cultural and economic boundaries. Rather than treating the Trump presidency as an anomaly, this analysis situates it within a longer intellectual trajectory that views national identity as the central axis of political conflict.