W. E. B. Du Bois theorized that the way Black Americans understand the racial world and their place within it shapes their connections to national identity differently from those of White Americans. This article juxtaposes Du Bois’s theory of racialized subjectivity with Identity Theory’s constructs of prominence and change to examine differences in attachment to American nationhood during a turbulent period of American politics: the Trumpism era. Using data from three waves of the American National Election Studies (2012, 2016, 2020), this study examines the extent to which White and Black Americans viewed their national identities as important before, during, and after Trump’s first presidential administration. I employ “racial identity prominence” as a nuanced measure of race to illustrate a phenomenological element of American national identity that differentially shapes attachment. The findings reveal that the Trumpism period catalyzed significant identity change between 2012 and 2020. Moreover, the degree to which White and Black Americans connected to their national identity across the three election years largely depended on the subjective importance they assigned to their racial identity—that is, their racial identity prominence. The White American archetype was reinforced, as Whites with strong attachment to their racial identity also expressed strong national identity. Interestingly, Black Americans also expressed strong ties to their national identity during this period, particularly those with a strong racial identity. Still, the question of how White and Black Americans envision the country and their place in it remains complex.

This article examines the emergence of a new politics of vision shaped by the generative capacities of contemporary AI. It argues that generative technologies craft a distinct visual order, one that enables subtle yet devastating forms of harm through anticipation, projection, and the symbolic manipulation of the future by means of visual pre-enactment. I conceptualize this as speculative violence: a form of harm that does not depict bloodshed or explicit brutality but nonetheless embeds erasure and annihilation within the frictionless aesthetic of machine-generated futures. Speculative violence arises when generative AI is mobilized for its forward-oriented capacities in politically charged contexts, enabling images of possible futures to act upon the present; while not limited to war zones, this article focuses on the Israel–Palestine context for reasons of scope. It shows how, by giving visual form to what has not yet occurred, AI contributes to normalize the disappearance of populations and the destruction of places, stripping politically inflammatory ideas of their shock by rendering them aesthetically plausible. A striking instance is the “Riviera of the Middle East” video, circulated by Donald Trump in February 2025, whose synthetic fantasy of Gaza as a luxury resort visually anticipated – and helped normalize – the logic later formalized in policy proposals, such as the G.R.E.A.T. initiative and the 20-Point Peace Plan. More broadly, the article argues that generative AI functions as archival technology. Far from merely recalling past data, it generates speculative futures that accrue into a future archive: a corpus of synthetic images that shape political discourse and collective perception by visually scripting what should be imagined as likely, desirable or inevitable. In examining this archive, the article illuminates how generative AI transforms political imagination into an aestheticized form of world-making, with profound implications for contemporary regimes of power and violence.

The 2024 election of Donald Trump has been followed by executive decisions never before experienced in the history of American democracy. This new approach is grounded on a radical right (RR) program that had already been put in place in the Hungary of Viktor Orbán, who is presented as a model by Trump. Both leaders have defined a performative communication style, attracting a large segment of their respective citizenry. This style is based on the strategic use of common sense. However, we barely know how commonsensical executive RR leaders are during one of the most sacred events in a liberal democracy: the annual State of the Union or State of the Nation address. Based on a critical discourse analysis of the multiple speeches produced by Trump and Orbán in the frame of these events, the current research investigates the routinized and multifaceted usefulness of common sense to contest liberal democracy. The findings indicate that these leaders use the state address as a ritual of liberal democracy to impose a new RR order grounded in commonsensical policies, polities, and authorities.

The first two questions that must be addressed in writing about teaching political behavior in the era of Trump are what do we mean by political behavior and what do we mean by the era of Trump. Although political behavior in its full sense encompasses a very broad subject, in this intervention, I focus primarily on the electoral behavior of ordinary citizens. As for “the era of Trump,” my position is that rise of Trump, along with the Brexit vote, and the rise of European populism are very much of a piece—a modern democratic phenomenon rather than a specifically American one. Rather than requiring a fundamentally new approach in how we think about voters, however, they are all the heightened result of things that have been true for a long time, perhaps catalyzed, but not fundamentally caused, by current events. Moreover, these are things that used to be at the core of our teaching and research about electoral behavior, but have largely fallen off the agenda—and need to be brought back to a central position. This contribution is organized under three major headings: (1) how the content of what we teach about political/electoral behavior might be adjusted in the age of Trump; (2) how teaching about politics more generally might be changed in the age of Trump; (3) and the implications of what we are teaching for democracy, and for our role as both critics of, and propagandists for, liberal democracy.

America’s history and culture wars have escalated at pace since Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025. And while the President’s second term has been marked by a rapid stream of executive orders and supporting remarks, articles, and statements affecting all aspects of life, it has demonstrated a particular interest in the nation’s cultural assets and has coalesced on the Smithsonian Institution. This article argues that Trump’s attention to the Smithsonian Institution has arisen because 2026 is the 250th anniversary of American independence. It presents archival evidence from the Smithsonian alongside contemporary analysis to demonstrate that the political playbook being utilized by President Trump has an extensive history. To make its point, the article offers a case study of The West as America, an exhibition that was shown in 1991 at the Smithsonian and generated such political controversy that it ended up being the subject of extensive questioning in Congress. The article aims to show the clear similarity between political and public responses to the 1991 exhibition—which was designed to commemorate a national anniversary but occurred in a period of heightened history wars—with conservative attempts to regulate culture in 2025, ahead of “America 250.” It exemplifies how important historical inquiry is in informing decisions and responses to processes of cultural production in the current era.

The 2016 election serves as an important case study in understanding how gendered political contexts can shape emotional reactions and engagement, particularly among women. Two important features of that election, Trump’s treatment of women and Clinton’s historic run for office, influenced emotional reactions to politics in distinct ways. We used two experimental designs in which participants were randomly assigned to read vignettes about Trump’s treatment of women or Clinton’s historic run for office. Reading about the former led to higher anger, especially among Democratic women and men, while reading about the latter increased enthusiasm among highly educated women. These elevated emotions increased intended future engagement. We conducted a third study in which we induced anger about Trump’s treatment of women and found that it led to greater intended engagement.

Michael Blake, Yuna Blajer de la Garza, and Alex Zakaras offer insightful critiques of several arguments central to my book Beyond the Law’s Reach? In the process, they raise large questions in political philosophy more generally, especially as it pertains to global affairs. Blake is skeptical about the distinction, driving much of the book, between consolidated liberal democracies and jurisdictions where the “shadow of violence” prevails. Blajer de la Garza worries that the international reparative duties that the book highlights may linger indefinitely, and, consequently, be exploited by cynical political actors. Finally, whereas Beyond the Law’s Reach? argues that liberal democracies’ collective integrity is affected by their entanglement in violence and corruption abroad, Zakaras doubts whether this collective moral problem carries over into the individual level, given individual citizens’ reasonable ignorance of policy details. I offer responses to each of these critiques in turn. I conclude by highlighting the picture of democratic civic responsibility that emerges from these responses.

Transitional justice (TJ) emerged during the consolidation of the liberal international order (the LIO). It was deemed to flow from, and contribute to, the emergence of democracy, human rights and the rule of law in post-authoritarian and post-conflict states. The LIO generated material and discursive support for processes of accountability, truth, repair and guarantees of non-repetition. The LIO is now widely perceived to be under significant threat with the rise of authoritarian states (most notably China and a revanchist Russia) and the erosion of liberal democratic values in the US and Europe. Some worry that TJ may have peaked and is doomed to decline in this more challenging ecology. This article is an attempt to show how the material and discursive environments of TJ have altered with the decline of the LIO and the rise of a multipolar world. In material terms, there are fewer democratic transitions that might facilitate the type of state-level rule of law or rights-promoting impact associated with accountability, truth or reparation processes, while liberal peacebuilding is now far less premised on democratisation and human rights that post-conflict TJ processes built upon. In a world where authoritarian rejections of human rights and the rule of law meet widespread support and where a chastened liberal West resiles from effectively exporting or supporting norms like TJ, there is also a lowering of the argumentative burden for those who want to outright defy, water down or find workarounds for TJ.

Individuals who particularly like or dislike a president or presidential candidate may, through a process of motivated reasoning, personally support or oppose the politician’s policy positions as a consequence. I examine the extent to which attitudes toward Donald Trump shaped public opinion on immigration policy, a case that appears to invite motivated reasoning. I estimate the influence of attitudes about Trump by comparing them directly to views of Barack Obama and trade policy using large reputable national surveys. I find a material, if limited, Trump effect. Trump polarized Americans on immigration considerably. However, the polarization was not along racial or ethnic lines. Moreover, any Trump effect on immigration appears not to have been as large as that he brought to bear on trade. Contrary to some recent work, such an effect also appears to have elevated immigration only marginally in the list of those deemed important.

The two economic superpowers operate increasingly outside WTO norms. China's reliance on non-market practices challenges the competitive equality among WTO members, while the US, under a second Trump administration, has unilaterally raised tariffs in defiance of multilateral rules. This essay examines how the rest of the world is de-risking from the two rogue superpowers while shoring up trade multilateralism. It identifies three interlinked strategies: (1) recalibration – reducing trade dependency through targeted trade remedies against China and narrow bilateral agreements with the US; (2) shielding – collective and unilateral responses to economic coercion of both superpowers; and (3) containment – preventing illegality from spreading to the rest of the world. Together, these modes of governance not only mitigate systemic spillovers from rule-breaking but also help rebalance global trade by addressing structural imbalances in Chinese overproduction and US overconsumption. In doing so, the rest of the world may lay the groundwork for a renewed and more resilient multilateral trading system.

This article presents a short selective history of contemporary collecting at the Smithsonian Institution. I explain what contemporary collecting is and show how contemporary collecting in the 1960s and 1970s produced histories of political reform movements and participatory democracy. I argue that many material records would not exist today if it had not been for a small group of committed curators who pioneered this practice in the absence of policy guardrails—and often despite a lack of institutional support. I present a brief overview of contemporary collecting methods and outcomes to argue that it is more important than ever for us to collect evidence of diverse political activity in our current moment—a moment in which cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, are being attacked by executive orders issued by President Donald Trump, despite their long-standing reputation for maintaining truth and public trust in times of political change and contestation. The article concludes by suggesting how people can approach this work today.