Why Trump is winning outside of America His support base extends from China to Gaza
Lily Lynch
August 12, 2024 https://unherd.com/?p=615126
Across much of the Euro-Atlantic, Donald Trump is an object of derision. The list of his foreign-policy sins is long: He’s callous towards his Nato allies and disdainful towards multilateral institutions and treaties. He introduced a “Muslim ban” and has derided the states of the so-called Global South as “shithole countries”. Breaking with bipartisan orthodoxy, he doesn’t get misty-eyed when talking about the “rules-based order”. When Biden was sworn in as president, we were told that the world breathed a collective sigh of relief: America was back, and everyone was glad.
To back up this claim, liberals cite polls which invariably give countries under the US security umbrella disproportionate representation, and which seem to confirm that the rest of the world shares their view. But as anyone who has lived or travelled extensively outside of the West in recent years will tell you, the reality on the ground is much more complex. Trump’s base extends far beyond the United States.
Trump’s allies abroad take many forms, with motivations ranging from an ideological affinity for Right-wing anti-communism to a preference for a limited “America First” policy over the Democrats’ liberal internationalism. When liberals encounter these positions, they tend to label Trump’s foreign admirers as authoritarian. There may be some truth to this: Trump’s populist tough-guy persona is something that people in many parts of the world like, perhaps because it’s familiar. But such linear explanations are also self-serving, and neither entirely accurate nor honest.
The reality is that Trump’s overseas approval can be found in unlikely places. For instance, according to polls from the 2020 election, the country where Trump was most perceived to care about “ordinary people” was Nigeria. In that year, to the incredulity of American reporters, hundreds of Nigerians held a rally for the former president, clad in t-shirts showing his face and waving placards calling for his re-election. At the time, one 23-year-old artist told Reuters that Nigerians appreciated Trump’s “radical” approach to politics. Some liked him so much, in fact, that they weren’t that concerned with the Muslim ban. “If we have a person like Trump… Nigeria will be a better place to stay,” another supporter said. “There will be no need to go outside the country.”
Some attribute Trump’s popularity in Africa to the continent’s Christian minority, and the perception that Trump is the defender of Christians and their interests. He is, for example, a perennial favourite of African preachers and prophets — and none more so than Uebert Angel, a Pentecostal minister from Zimbabwe and an ambassador for the African Union’s Pan-African Parliament. In a recent broadcast, Angel — who has three million Instagram followers and over half a million YouTube subscribers —explored Trump’s “spiritual alignment”. “Donald means the ruler,” Angel explained. And “John, for J, means ‘the voice’”. Angel believes that prayers transmitted by his enormous following saved Trump from that fateful bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Nigerian televangelist Christian Oyakhilome, known as “Pastor Chris”, has also openly backed Trump. As the founder of the megachurch Christ Embassy, which has spread internationally, he alleges that Trump has been targeted for advocating for his flock. “They are angry at Trump for supporting Christians,” Oyakhilome has said. “So the real ones they hate are you who are Christians.”
Elsewhere, some in Africa explicitly support Trump’s dismissive approach to the continent, including his insistence on cutting aid. “For some strange reason, while I despise his divisive rhetoric and certainly don’t think he’s the best choice for President of the United States, I agree with Mr Trump’s position on Africa,” business strategy specialist John-Paul Iwuoha wrote in 2016. “Africa needs to wean itself off the tranquilising milk of foreign aid… and thanks to Mr Trump’s nationalistic ideals, Africa now has a rare opportunity to stand on its own and create a bright and prosperous future for itself.”
This aversion to aid is largely a response to its politicised and transactional nature. On one recent pan-Africanist podcast discussion about Trump and Kamala Harris’s hypothetical Africa policies, the hosts agreed that Harris would step up engagement and aid for Africa, while Trump would likely scale it back. But as they saw it, the Democrats’ supposed generosity with aid is an underhanded tool of manipulation — a means of buying the support of corrupt African leaders and ensuring continued allegiance to the US.
Further afield, Trump seems to be just as popular in Vietnam, where scooter businesses bear his name and the wall of a Domino’s Pizza restaurant displays a picture of him on The Apprentice. Binh Lee, an entrepreneur in Ho Chi Minh City, has written that Vietnam’s “love affair” with Trump can be explained in part by his nationalism. In the West, nationalism is often associated with ethnic cleansing and genocide. But in Vietnam, as in much of the so-called Global South, nationalism served as the ideological basis for decolonisation. While many rightly emphasise the sharp distinction between these two contexts, some in Vietnam do not. As Lee explained: “With his slogan ‘Make America Great Again’, Donald Trump… embodied the kind of ideal leader forever ingrained in our collective psyche: the hero who would appear at the darkest moment of his country and lead his people through the struggle to ultimate triumph.” Meanwhile, others link Trump’s appeal to Vietnam’s fast-growing economy, where new would-be entrepreneurs view the former president as the embodiment of capitalist success. Others still attribute Trump’s popularity to his anti-China sentiments, which some in Vietnam share.
In Indonesia, meanwhile, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, attitudes about Trump are also unexpectedly mixed. While some leaders lambasted him for his bellicose rhetoric, others were more circumspect. One prominent lawmaker dismissed Trump’s Indonesian critics, stressing that the president had only adopted anti-Muslim rhetoric to drum up support among the electorate, while another minister described Trump as a “non-ideological and non-confrontational” leader who would treat Indonesia as a “democratic equal”. In a similar vein, researcher Andrew Matong has noted that Trump’s presidency was conspicuously free of the American flag burnings across the Muslim world that were ubiquitous in the time of George W. Bush. Many of these countries’ citizens may find Trump’s language repugnant and dislike his policies, but for many, these pale in comparison to the wholesale destruction of countries overseen by “respectable” Republicans and Democrats.
Similarly, few foreign countries celebrated Trump’s 2016 victory more than Serbia, where Bill Clinton is still despised as the leader who spearheaded the bombing of then-Yugoslavia in 1999. Trump has appeared on billboards there, and you can buy socks emblazoned with his face on Belgrade’s central streets. More recently, the current Right-wing Serbian government has made little secret of its preference for another Trump presidency. Indeed, it has already signed an agreement with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to develop a complex on the site of the old Yugoslav Army headquarters, which was bombed by Nato in 1999. The planned development will reportedly include a controversial memorial complex “dedicated to all the victims of Nato aggression”.
Yet perhaps the most surprising locus for Trump approval is China. Within hours of the assassination attempt, Chinese vendors had printed t-shirts depicting the image of a bloodied, defiant Trump with the slogans “fight, fight, fight” and “shooting makes me stronger”. One vendor on the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao claimed he had received 2,000 orders within three hours of putting the t-shirts online.
No doubt many of Trump’s Chinese supporters find him appealing because he shares their distaste for platitudinous liberalism. On a more elite level, however, there is some muted hope that another Trump presidency might be “realistic and balanced”. This is an echo of the Seventies’ logic that “only Nixon could go to China” — the implication being that only an anti-communist hawk could oversee US-China rapprochement, because the same move by a centre-left Democrat would have been tarred as “soft on China”.
In many instances, then, Trump’s foreign support is motivated by his businessman credentials: he is viewed as someone who prefers making deals to launching secular crusades in the name of democracy and human rights. At the negotiating table, we can surmise, such a distinction matters. While liberal internationalism is sustained by faith, deal-making implies a certain crass rationality.
Indeed, this line of thinking was even evident in a recent interview with Mohammed Al-Hindi, a top leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who was asked whether Biden or Trump would be better for Palestine. (The interview was carried out prior to Biden stepping down as the 2024 nominee.) While noting that “Trump, at the end of the day, just like Biden, would be looking after American interests”, Al-Hindi seemed to suggest that Trump might be slightly preferable. “We kind of miss Trump now, his debates and statements,” he explained. After observing that the current war in Gaza had affected Israel’s standing “in the eyes of the world and the region”, he concluded that “any future president will find those changes on the table and they cannot be disregarded — especially if he is a businessman like Trump”.
Thus, a more complicated picture of US foreign policy emerges from beyond the West. Democrats like to say that the world’s dictators will be happy if Trump comes to power, because he will put an end to Washington’s promotion of “democracy” abroad. But plenty of people who’ve endured such policies do not view their outcomes in the same self-mythologising terms. In fact, many see them as disastrous. The result is something less flattering for both sides of the US political divide: while some of Trump’s overseas defenders like him for what he is, many more like him for what he is not.
Lily Lynch is a writer and journalist based in Belgrade.