Donald Trump’s America: Communicating the Seeds of Racism, Xenophobia, & Persistent Conflict

Keywords:

• Donald Trump
• media
• race
• special issue intro
• stereotype/prejudice/bias

President Donald John Trump served as America’s 45^th President for one term, from January 2017 to January 2021, and his tenure was remarkable for incline in overt racism, xenophobia, and other social conflicts. That it ended in one term, given that three Presidents who served before him all served for the maximum two terms defined America’s response to his service. Although Donald Trump was voted out by America, his mark persists and the imprint significant and deep that it may take years for America to recover and move toward civil communication across racial divisions and returning to the era of America as a land accepting immigrants.

It is notable that Trump’s presidency will forever be remembered for building a large and lengthy wall designed to keep away immigrants from crossing the Southern border with Mexico while the border in the North was never open to a debate of closure or immigrant restriction. The meaning was, particularly, on the issue of race and it was obvious to many. At the Northern border was a largely Caucasian Canadian population and at the South was the non-Caucasian Mexicans. But the closure or restriction of physical border to the South would pale in its inhumanity to the treatment of children whose parents were separated from them and housed in locations described as concentration camps where they were detained in cages. Vinopal (2019) reports were collateral in Trump’s decision to stop the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program affected 1.2 million persons and that the program would lead to the loss of $4 billion in lost taxes.

But beyond xenophobia, with race undertones, are racial upheavals within the country. Therefore, it is unsurprising that this special issue features articles addressing race and immigration, primarily. Donald Trump stoked the racial fire, within the country, via various communication even before he became America’s 45^th President. He claimed that the then 44^th President Barack Obama was not American, and Trump led the birther campaign against Obama’s Presidency (Kelley-Romano & Carew, 2018/19). Wilkie (2020) of the CNBC reported President Trump’s blistering attack of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement for highlighting police killing of African Americans across the country. According to Isom et al. (2021); Trump frequently employed the trope of “White victim” in attacking the BLM. They conclude that “The mitigating effects of Trump support and patriarchal gender normative beliefs suggest holding such sentiments likely normalizes perceived ‘victimhood’ and anti-BLM sentiments.”

Donald Trump’s presidency was not only about racism and xenophobia, but there were also numerous conflicts including alienating American foreign policy allies, exacerbating ideological divide on the supreme court, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, turning back gains in women gains in representation at the cabinet level, impeached by Congress, Trump’s lukewarm to the COVID pandemic, and his censorship by social media. His presidency was eventful and remarkable that Rimock and Bramlich (2021) of Pew Research Center wrote sagely “How America Changed During Donald Trump’s Presidency.” His presidency was, definitively, consequential.

There are several other issues concerning Donald Trump’s presidency, which are not featured in this special issue. Some of these issues include gender (Pascoe, 2017), social class (Mondon & Winter, 2019), nationalism (Restad, 2020), religion (Whitehead et al., 2018), and his repeated false claims of winning the 2020 U.S. Presidential elections (Goethals, 2021).

Nevertheless, The Howard Journal of Communications recognizes the importance of Donald Trump’s one-term presidency and dedicates this special issue to those eventful four years. The journal selects six submitted manuscripts to examine that Presidency. While the manuscripts do not cover a wide array of activities during Trump’s Presidency, they address critical issues that submitting authors have chosen to study. Not surprising, multiple articles address the long-running issue of immigration along America’s southern border. Others address a wider issue of racism, newsroom, coverage of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). I briefly introduce each of the contributing manuscripts in the next section.

Contributing manuscripts

The lead article in this special issue is Shrikant and Sierra’s focus on metadiscourse during President Trump’s press events. Shrikant and Sierra aptly label their article “Nasty question” and “Fake news” which were phrases that President Trump frequently used in responding to questions or comments during press events. The authors analyze eight excerpts from Trump’s press conferences following methods advanced by Tracy and Craig (2010). Shrikant and Sierra conclude that Trump uses a metadiscourse of “accurate” to reframe “racist” talk and then “fake news” as humor to delegitimize media and display amicable relationship with African American reporters that confront him with racist charges. At other times, Trump uses labels such as “racist” and “nasty” to dismisses journalists who persist in accusing him of racist actions.

The next three articles in this special issue focus on a frequent issue under Trump’s presidency – the issue of immigration. The first article by Kang and Yang uses computational framing analysis of the US-Mexico Cross-Border wall discourses to examine Trump’s communication of racism and xenophobia. The authors examine 967 articles from several global publications based in America, Asia and Europe using a text mining computational method that matchers patterns in text. Based on keywords and phrases. The findings identify six news frames noting that frames can be correlated to regional resonance. Importantly, by employing a rarely used computational analytic method, Yang and Yang note that it allows a framing analysis of large corpus of data that is difficult to examine otherwise.

Lizzy Galarza’s manuscript titled Jane the undocumented: Immigration law and citizenship access in Jane the Virgin takes a unique view of Trump’s era immigration practices. ‘Jane the undocumented is a 100-series network television program that ran across both Obama and Trump’s presidency. The program broadcast on CW (CBS Corporation/Warner Brother Brothers Entertainment) addresses Alba Villanueva’s journey to American citizenship. Galarza employs a critical textual analysis method to examine select episodes. This work examines the realities of immigrant life as described in the acclaimed Jane the undocumented. It exposes how citizenship or the lack of it determines a person’s relationship to the state.

The third article on immigration is by Sarabia, Zaragoza, and Limon Guzman. They examine how those affected by policy on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) rephrase and resist under the era of Donald Trump and his administration’s immigration policies and actions. The authors use stories shared by young undocumented immigrants in the New York Times to reveal ideas about belongingness, identity, adjectivity, and resistance. The authors cite Butler’s (1990) work that defines the insider and outsider to theorize about the communicative condition of the young migrants. These young immigrants, the authors argue, successfully challenge the construction of their migration and status. Citing one of the interviewees, they note: “I’m a taxpayer, entrepreneur, an Undocumented American. I have lived here for 17 years, and this is my home, this is the country I love.”

Although Holman and Chamian also address DACA in another article in this special issue, they do so by comparting how two racially different newsrooms cover DACA and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The authors use textual analysis of sampled content from the Tampa Bay Times, a predominantly White newsroom and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a more diverse newsroom. The period covers the term of Donald Trump’s presidency. The authors discovered differences in word choices, frames, sourcing, and other factors in covering the BLML and DACA. They found that coverage of DACA was more sympathetic, but they also note that specialized reporting led to better representation of both issues. The authors argue and recommend that solutions to racially biased reporting can be found by increasing specialization and employment of journalists of diverse races and ethnicities.

Solyee and Hyoyeun’s article on first generation immigrants and sojourners conclude the articles in this special issue. They use acculturation theory, largely by Kim (1988), to guide online experiment which examines believability of misinformation. The results demonstrate that first generation immigrants and sojourners with higher levels of perceived English language proficiency, longer length of stay in the United States, and greater United States’ news consumption demonstrate higher news intelligence quotient (IQ) and that higher news IQ led to less believability of disinformation. Ultimately the result from the quasi-experimental study demonstrates importance of perceived language proficiency, length of stay and news consumption enhancing news IQ and ability to determine what is true or false in consuming online news stories.

These six articles, although focused on few aspects, provide us with a glimpse of the four years of eventful presidency of Donald J. Trump. It reminds of a troubled, controversial, and eventful presidency that threatened the tenuous existence of racial harmony in the country and created a growing xenophobia within a country long cited for being a welcome home fort immigrants seeking new life and freedom. The Howard Journal of Communications publishes these six research articles with the hope that they contribute to cementing an eventful era of American history.