United by Division: How Trump Won the Battle for Belonging

As the Trump administration closes out the second calendar year of its second presidency, many still ask: How did it happen? How, in the face of the Democratic coalition, a party with a commitment to equality, did Trump’s ethno-nationalist, Make America Great Again (MAGA) agenda triumph?

Examining Michael Williams’ concept of ‘liberal sensibility’ and the role of the inclusion – exclusion dichotomy in constructing identity can help to illustrate the two methods of political belonging each side pushed, helping to explain Donald Trump’s opportunistic second rise. Kamala Harris’s campaign championed an inclusive identity defined by universal rights and a rejection of exclusionary narratives, while Trump’s MAGA movement pushed a divisive identity through the existential threat of the ‘other.’ Although the 2024 result cannot be attributed solely to identity creation, this stark contrast in campaign approaches offers a lens into how creating a restrictive national identity mobilises voters, explaining the pull of Trump’s vision in the face of the Democratic establishment.

Michael Williams’ Identity and the Politics of Security explores the concept of ‘liberal sensibility,’ how modern theories of governance, based upon liberalism, are not devoid of identity but constituted by it; this constitution, however, is facilitated through a deliberate absence of identity. He explains that in a conscious “desire to exclude identity concerns” from the liberal platform, foundational liberals participated in negative identity practice. Echoing Steve Toulmin’s thesis, Williams argues this was a response to the theological, unsolvable violence of the Thirty Years’ War. He writes that Thomas Hobbes’s and John Locke’s pursuit of materialist- empiricist foundations of knowledge, with qualifications, in the construction of liberal identity, was a deliberate avoidance of the non-empirical claims that characterised the violence of the wars over faith. Attacks upon the innatist ideas of hierarchy from the war characterised the liberal vision, which championed “equality and political right.” Modernists positioned the citizen as an abstract, universal subject, reduced to “purely atomistic individuality,” in a pursuit of “universal citizenship and legal equality.”

Contemporary Democratic rhetoric then draws on this basis by employing the broad revolutionary foundations of American natural rights to life, liberty, and property. These values were built on Locke’s baseline concepts of individual equality, a man who, as Williams expresses, ‘devalued…innatist theories of knowledge.’ We see today how this rhetoric permeated the 2024 presidential campaign of former Vice President Kamala Harris. In a campaign speech, four days before election day, Harris proclaimed to the citizens of Phoenix, Arizona, “Democracy can be complicated, but we believe in democracy and the right of everyone.” By delineating the subject of benefit as “everyone,” Harris participates in negative identity practice, avoiding exclusionary claims in pursuit of the universal. Harris characteristically began her speeches by condemning the “unstable” and “unhinged” exclusionary rhetoric of Donald Trump, one that fuelled his move to “[send] an armed mob to the United States Capitol.” Thus, as a reaction to the violence Trump caused, one based upon a discriminatory discourse, she promotes her own policies, rooted in equal opportunity.9 She creates an identity through universalism in opposition to Trump’s divisiveness.

This then prompts the question: Is this universalist political identity defensible in the face of the explicitly bounded one Trump brings? We know, retrospectively, that Harris’s campaign rhetoric did not prevail against Trump’s on election day. How come her avoidance of exclusionary identity, in rejecting Trump’s violence, failed to mobilize Americans to vote?

Vivienne Jabri explores this in her “Construction of Identity” chapter in Discourses on Violence. Here, she investigates the appeal of belonging to a defined group. She emphasises how identity is the link between the individual and violence, with this identity constructed through comparison with other groups.10 Building on the continuities between Freud, Mead, and Erikson’s theories of personality construction, Jabri claims social identity is based on an “early differentiation between the self and the other,” with origins in a “biological drive for survival,” this need providing the basis of social interaction later in life. She uses this to understand social identity theory’s explanation of how identity then becomes a securitised discourse of protection against a constructed enemy. Because of its strength, an identity constructed via the “other” can be used as “an anxiety-controlling mechanism,” framing those in the out-group as a fundamental threat to the security of the in-group, then used to justify violent policymaking against them.

We see this constructed enemy and strong rejection of the “other” characterise much of Trump’s 2024 campaign rhetoric. To instil fear and anxiety, and rationalise his destructive immigration policies, Trump constructs a threat to the in-group. For example, in a campaign speech in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, where an undocumented Venezuelan in the U.S. was detained for allegations of sexual assault, Trump characterised all undocumented immigrants as “monsters,” “stone-cold killers,” and “vile animals.” He pairs this violent rhetoric about Americans’ safety with other claims that immigrants are stealing jobs from citizens, positioning the threat of the outsider as warranting immediate political action, namely in the form of the enactment of the Laken Riley Act in January 2025. This act requires U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain, with no ability to request release, undocumented noncitizens on arrests or charges of certain criminal conduct, which can further exacerbate the racial disparity in the justice system. By positioning immigrants as existential threats, the campaign develops national belonging in terms of difference. In a time of economic disparity, during the aftermath of COVID-19, Trump attempts to legitimise exclusionary policy in the name of national security. Trump’s constructed identity made the economic hardships Americans faced politically powerful, thus mobilising voters.

Drawing on Jabri’s mention of Freud, Mead, and Erikson’s claims that one’s “first knowledge is the self-knowledge of alienation,” it is no surprise that such rhetoric of belonging to the in-group, bolstered by fear, appealed to so many Americans. In opposition to the broad, universalist rhetoric pushed by Harris, Trump’s promotion of destructive policy as a need to maintain security prevailed. Harris’s attempt to foster political community via universal values did not appeal to fear, fear which Trump used to feed into political organisation. While Trump’s appeal to fear is deeply immoral, and theoretically fear should not have been used to mobilise voters, it did in November when Americans hit the polls that year, resulting in a 312 to 226 Electoral College breakdown between the two candidates.

In the days before the 2026 midterm election, we see the promising rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and the renewed vision of a strong sense of belonging in the American Left. Politicians like Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez push rhetoric rooted in identity and ideology, with TIME Magazine even characterising Mamdani’s moves as “drawing younger voters…into a coherent political identity.” With Trump’s approval rating down to 32%, and these new politicians’ attributions of the current economic disparity to Trump’s policies, we can see a glimmer of hope for the Left. It is important to note that even though these politicians still push universalist economic policy, they do so under a distinct ideology, demonstrating how equality could be pursued within a strong identity. This leaves us with the question: Was Harris’s problem the universalism itself, or her inability to reshape liberal values into an attractive sense of belonging?