Blessing America First

Blessing America First Religion, Populism, and Foreign Policy in the Trump Administration

Hardback (10 Sep 2024)

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Publisher's Synopsis

How did the Trump administration change the place of religion in U.S. foreign policy? How did the guardrails of America's foreign policy bureaucracy respond to a populist president? Drawing on firsthand experience in the State Department's Office of Religion and Global Affairs during the Obama-Trump transition, David T. Buckley traces how the Trump administration's populism affected the foreign policy bureaucracy, with significant implications for U.S. domestic and international politics.

Blessing America First argues that under Trump, religion in U.S. foreign policy shifted from an implement of statecraft to a tool of populist political strategy. Populism constructs ideological bounds between "the people" and threatening outsiders, and embraces personalist governance while rejecting bureaucratic constraint. This domestic political logic, Buckley demonstrates, influenced foreign policy decisions and reshaped bureaucratic offices in the State Department and USAID. Populism also promoted international religious ties in a surprising range of settings, from Poland to India, Brazil to Russia. Buckley shows that the possibility of curbing these changes was limited by conditions in American democracy that predated the 2016 election, including norms of nonpartisanship among career officials, malleable legal institutions, and polarization in public opinion. A groundbreaking examination of Trump's State Department, blending insider experience with original quantitative and qualitative data analysis, Blessing America First draws broader lessons for understanding the relationship between religion and democracy under populist rule.

Book information

ISBN: 9780231207546
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Pub date:
DEWEY: 327.730090512
DEWEY edition: 23
Language: English
Number of pages: 320
Weight: 640g
Height: 229mm
Width: 153mm
Spine width: 22mm