Eight months into Donald Trump’s second term, attention has zeroed in on his domestic agenda. Abroad, the President’s approach to conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as disputes over the Panama Canal and Greenland, is drawing growing scrutiny. There is another aspect of his return, however, that also holds global consequences that warrant urgent attention.
The rise of “Trumpism,” a movement he has successfully cultivated, has long held deep symbolic weight for the global far right. Trump’s embrace of white Christian nationalist tropes has led political scientists like Cas Mudde to refer to him as the “white supremacist-in-chief.” Trump has emboldened the extremist, white supremacist sections in far right political movements and precipitated a strengthening of their transnational networks.
To frame this analysis, a brief clarification of terminology is useful. Austrian researcher and author Julia Ebner notes that the extreme right espouses “at least three of the following five features: nationalism, racism, xenophobia, anti-democracy and strong state advocacy,” while the far right can be regarded as the “political manifestation of the extreme right.”
In the U.S. context, many of the aforementioned elements of extreme right ideology coalesce in the form of white Christian nationalism. Politically, white Christian nationalism manifests itself as a far right movement that rejects the idea of a secular multiracial democracy. More precisely, it is a form of white supremacism that fuses white nationalist identity with Christianity.
While mainstream Christianity seeks racial inclusivity, white Christian nationalism promotes exclusivist “white supremacist assumptions” about the superiority of white-Christian culture and its “traditional way of life.” Its roots lie not only in the late 17th-century ideological notion that white Christian Americans possessed a divine right to rule over non-white races, but also in the practices that gave that belief force: the enslavement of Africans, the genocide and displacement of Indigenous peoples, and the construction of a racial hierarchy sanctified by theology. White Christian nationalism thus emerged as both a justification for slavery and a spiritual rationale for the settler-colonial project, embedding the idea that political power and divine favor were inseparable from whiteness.
Trump has reportedly received the backing of powerful groups that are “hoping to create a country ruled by Christianity” and who regard Trump as a “divinely appointed soldier to help them do so.”
Broadly speaking, five attributes of white Christian nationalism (WCN) are worth unpacking.
Fusion of White Supremacy and Xenophobia
WCN blends white supremacist ideas with xenophobic, racist assumptions about non-white groups, whether they are fellow citizens or new immigrants. WCN emphasises the need to maintain the “purity of whiteness” by preventing interracial marriages that would dilute the “good essence” of white people with the supposedly polluting “bad essence” of non-whites.
WCN activists regard the chastity of white women as a foundational principle to be upheld against the sexual advances of non-whites. Hence, feminism, with its emphasis on societal and sexual emancipation for women, is seen as an existential threat to the white patriarchal society that the WCN movement envisages. Some misogynistic WCN ideologues even assert that the “wombs of white women belong to white men,” and that violence can be rightly implemented to ensure women “know their place” in their patriarchal order.
Demographic Fears and the Great Replacement
WCN activists fear that the divinely-sanctioned patriarchal social order they desire to build and secure—thanks to globalisation—has been threatened by mass immigration and the relatively higher fertility rates of non-whites, creating the threat of a “white genocide.” In this regard, one especially influential conspiracy narrative has been the “Great Replacement” theory.
Emerging around 2012, this belief holds that white Christian nations are being overrun by masses of non-white out-groups such as East Asians, Hispanics and Muslims. Some WCN activists argue that the Great Replacement of the white Christian population must be urgently thwarted urgently, primarily through “accelerating” progress towards a violent race war to set up a white Christian ethnostate.
Call for a White Ethnostate
For WCN ideologues, the notion of a white ethnostate—one secured against the perceived threat of an “invasion” by non-white masses—is hardly unfamiliar. Far right-leaning American political commentators such as Jared Taylor have long argued that racial, linguistic, and cultural homogeneity are crucial for a nation’s stability. Taylor has argued that “racial and ethnic diversity is a curse” and that “multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual societies are inherently unstable and more conflict-ridden” than “more demographically homogeneous ones.”
Taylor thus argues that different racial groups are better off developing themselves in “separate homelands than in mixed-race politics.” Another influential far right (also commonly referred to as “alt-right” in the U.S.) political activist, Richard Spencer, likewise supports the creation of “white, homogeneous ethnostates” in the U.S. and Europe. Likewise, white nationalist Greg Johnson suggests that white ethnostates could be created in “European colonial societies” such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Argentina, Uruguay and the U.S.
A Strategy through “Metapolitics”
WCN intellectuals have long advanced strategies for charting a course towards a culturally homogeneous white ethnostate. The basic idea is that, in order to change politics, one must first change culture and society—an approach dubbed “metapolitics.” The French far right intellectual Guillaume Faye defines metapolitics as the systematic “social diffusion of ideas and cultural values for the sake of provoking, profound, long-term, political transformation.”
Metapolitics involves messaging in “multiple arenas of social behaviour and communication,” such as creating a “parallel educational system saturated with radical values,” exploiting “expressive genres like film, literature, art, theatre and music,” and creating an alternative social media ecosystem promoting WCN values and tropes.
In this regard, Trump’s well-known tendency to berate traditional media outlets as sources of “fake news” has encouraged higher societal consumption of alternative media such as Breitbart, InfoWars, Truth Social, Discord, Substack, Gab, and Telegram, amongst others. This has enabled “far-right fringe ideas” to be mainstreamed and further amplified when picked up by right-wing mass media platforms such as Fox News. Thanks to years of the mainstreaming of aforementioned WCN tropes, once-fringe ideas such as the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory have become widely popularised not only in the United States, but in Europe, as well.
A telling 2022 survey in the U.S., for instance, found that half of the Republican electorate agreed “at least to some extent” that “native-born Americans are being deliberately replaced with immigrants.” It is no coincidence that in 2024, “far right parties and coalitions” collectively secured a third of the seats in the EU Parliament. Moreover, in Austria, the far right Freedom Party won the largest percentage of vote share in the September 2024 elections, while the far right Alternative for Germany secured victory in the eastern German state of Thuringia and did well more generally.
Violence as a Divine Mandate
WCN ideology in the U.S. arrogates to white Christian men an ostensibly divine right to use violence to defend a preferred hierarchical order; one with them at the top. In short, WCN grants whites in authority the freedom to maintain a patriarchal sociopolitical order that “privileges ‘good people like us’” through violence if necessary. Notably, in one of his first acts since returning to power, Trump pardoned all 1,500 individuals that had been charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, an act which senior Republicans criticised as sending the “wrong signal.” Moreover, throughout 2024, “neo-Nazi groups and other white supremacists engaged in a stream of violence” mainly in Europe but also the United States, targeting Jewish communities, Muslims, non-Whites and migrants.
Trump, WCN, and the Global Far Right
Undeniably, the ideas and traits associated with WCN have not been confined to the United States, but have diffused and permeated across the global far right where parallel movements and political parties have effectively glocalized similar anxieties about demographic change, the dilution of nativist culture, and a crisis of masculinity and patriarchal authority. The “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, for example, has taken root well beyond the U.S., embedded deeply in the ideological core and shaping the rhetoric of far right political parties across the world.
In Europe, parties like France’s Rassemblement National, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, and Hungary’s Fidesz have adopted Trump’s narrative that the appointed native populations are being displaced by immigrants as a rallying cry for exclusionary politics aimed at retaining Europe’s native ‘whiteness.’ Beyond Europe, where the nativist, exclusionary impulses are not fixated on cultural whiteness, similar logics have been employed to operationalize campaigns like the Hindu nationalist movement’s “love jihad” and “population jihad” campaigns, or Jair Bolsonaro’s deployment of evangelical Christian nationalism in Brazil.
These examples underscore that the defense of “traditional values” and cultural homogeneity, together with the rejection of pluralist liberal democratic norms and values, forms the core common ideological grammar of U.S.-based WCN and the broader global far right. The narrative is adapted to local contexts but deeply and increasingly interconnected through shared tropes and digital networks since the rise to Trump’s rise to global prominence and his consolidation of influence. The argument here, it is imperative to note, is not that these globally-metastasized ideas find their origin in Trumpism. In fact, many of these ideologies and conspiracy theories date back to movements that find their roots in the late 19th century.
Trump’s contribution, though, is essentially one of legitimization and emboldenment. He has demonstrated that openly illiberal, ethno-nationalist and conspiracy-laden politics can resonate with electorates even in long-standing liberal democracies and translate into the effective capture and exercise of state power. In doing so, he has effectively emboldened and spurred previously fringe far right political actors to pursue similar strategies, offering a template for illiberal, hyper-nationalistic and xenophobic leaders seeking to weaken democratic checks.
Trump’s role within this transnational ecosystem should thus be understood as both symbolic and catalytic. He has evolved into an indispensable node within the global far right’s organizational and digital infrastructure. His like-minded political allies and far right ideologues like Steve Bannon have actively sought to cultivate ties with other far right European movements and parties, while his army of influencers circulate Trumpist narratives across social media networks. In this aspect, WCN in the U.S. and its symbiotic relationship to Trump is not merely a domestic phenomenon, but a key pillar within a broader, relatively inchoate transnational far right political movement that heralds Trump as not merely a political leader and phenomenon but as a symbol and harbinger of an emergent new global order.
(Kumar Ramakrishna is Professor of National Security Studies, Provost’s Chair in National Security Studies, Dean of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), as well as Research Adviser to the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR), at RSIS.)
(Pravin Prakash is Head of Strategic Initiatives at the Centre for the Study of Organized Hate.)