The first argument of this book, Suoud Trump: Tahawulat Al-Siyassa Al-Amrikiya fi Al-Qarn Al-Wahed wal ‘Ishrine (The Rise of Trump: US Political Transformations in the 21st Century, published by the Egyptian Centre for Strategic Studies) is that the political and popular rise of Donald Trump started on the day of 9/11, when the US policy makers realised that they were coming face to face with the militant Islamist movements Washington had engineered and operated to fight the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
The second argument of this book is that popular anger following the 9/11 attacks created a space for Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th US president — who was sworn in on Monday for his second non-consecutive term in office — as an uncompromising voice who was not going to hesitate to hit hard, and to encourage hard hits, against Islamist militant groups, including but not restricted Al-Qaeda. According to the author, Ezzat Ibrahim — editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram Weekly and Ahram Online, and former Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington — “Trump-mania” is only part of a wider phenomenon of radicalisation in US public opinion that gradually enabled for Trump, who might have otherwise been perceived as a non-starter for a US presidential runner, to make it to the White House, first in 2016, in the wake of the presidency of Barack Obama who was open for business with non-militant political Islam groups, and again on his election last year.
However, as Ibrahim also argues, the case for Trump relies not just on the anti-Islamist momentum that took over the US following the attacks of 9/11 but also, maybe even more profoundly, on increasing space at the end of a unipolar moment in international politics for White supremacy as a way to fulfill the Trump call — or for that matter claim — to “Make America Great Again.”
According to Ibrahim, whose book is based on thorough research, many interviews and direct insight into the decision making processes of US foreign policy, the election of Barack Obama in 2009 as the first non-white president was another “transformational moment” on the path to the rise of Trump, the president who openly shares supremacist views and openly decries immigrants while heading a country that was built on the hard labour of immigrants and slaves, 300 years ago. As Ibrahim recalls, in one 2011 White House dinner, Donald Trump, who was then invited in his capacity as the anchor of a popular TV programme, challenged Barack Obama on his identity as an American and a Christian.
The debate of ethnicity and religion is subject to a full chapter in Ibrahim’s book as it tries to understand the present and look to the future in view of the history of US politics. This point is particularly significant since it attempts to explain the rise of the extreme right, which it tends to attribute to internal US strife dating back two centuries, with a feud between the ultra-religious who live in the Midwest and the liberals who live on the west and east coasts. “A few years ago, I asked a relatively younger professor from Chicago to share her thoughts from the day of the 9/11 attacks in New York. After a brief pause, she replied that she actually felt that this was something that hit another country,” Ibrahim wrote.
Today, he argues, this sense of divisionism and lack of connectivity is a lot more prominent in the American mindset “as has been demonstrated with the debates leading to the presidential elections of 2024”, which enabled Trump’s return to the Oval Office. However, as Ibrahim stresses in several parts of the book, examining specific political moments, “polarism” is hardly new to American society. Understanding this polarism, the author argues, is the way to make sense of “the unexpected Trump victory back in 2016 and his sweeping victory of 2024. If we contextualise [this rise of Trump] we will realise that it is not so peculiar after all.”
Actually, the book recalls that, following the first election of Trump back in 2016, a poll showed that there was a segment within American society that wished for a president with some “authoritarian prerogatives”. Later, in 2024, the book notes, came the rise of the Maga anti-democracy movement that had already dominated the Republican Party under the leadership of Trump. Previously, there was the Bush Doctrine, which lead to several aggressive foreign policy decisions in the early 2000s, including the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Ibrahim feels this was an example of how the dominant views in US political quarters were compatible with, or at least responding to, a popular mindset. It is all about supremacy, whether of a particular segment of the American population or of the US over the world.
In his chapter on the war on Iraq, Ibrahim reminds the reader that it was an accepted view among “liberals and conservatives in the US that government-engineering in foreign countries” was something the US should be involved in. That said, Ibrahim also recalls that it is wrong to dismiss the disapproving voices who were not on board with the calls of supremacy or those of aggressive interventionism. While those voices were turning into a minority, even at the intellectual level, he argued, they were still important, at least in as much as they offered an antithesis for the prevailing views.
Moreover, according to Ibrahim, it is hard to assume that the Maga sentiment will necessarily continue to prevail, given the social and intellectual changes slowly unfolding in the US. According to a 2018 General Social Survey poll on the issue of religion, the segment of Americans who identified themselves as religious topped those who identified themselves as Catholics or Protestants. “This was a first” and the expectation of demographics is that this is a growing preference for more and more Americans who feel comfortable to disassociate themselves from any particular religious association, Ibrahim underlines. To put things in context, according to polls of the early 1990s, around 90 per cent of Americans would spontaneously and simply identify themselves as Christians, when it came to religion. Ibrahim also noted that it is hard to disassociate this trend from rights movements including Black Lives Matter and MeToo, based on the equal rights of all Americans irrespective of race, ethnicity, religion or gender.
In the short term, however, followers of the Trump Doctrine will continue to have the upper hand. They are opposed to immigration and they associate themselves with far right ideology, whether on economy or foreign policy — including on the Middle East where Israel will continue to have unchallenged support, come what may, and where rich Arab states will have “to pay the US” for leading the “international war on terror”, part of which is the support of the regimes in those rich states. The evidence for this, he wrote, is clear in the make-up of the Trump foreign policy team, especially those who will manage his Middle East policy and certainly his choice of Vice- President JD Vance.
Ibrahim’s book comes with a section dedicated to interviews he conducted with top American intellectuals over the past few years. Each chapter is appended with a list of references suggesting further reading.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 23 January, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: