The early months of Donald Trump’s second Presidential term have been marked by an overwhelming and often alarming barrage of Executive Orders, actions, and pronouncements. In line with The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a comprehensive conservative presidential transition plan and policy agenda, these various tests of executive power’s limits are illustrative enunciations of authoritarian populist politics. Connecting domestic authoritarian populism to global contexts, we have witnessed patterns of galvanizing nativism, stigmatizing and scapegoating minoritized populations, stoking violence, consolidating and controlling media, spreading misinformation and disinformation, undermining and criminalizing universities and civil society organizations, and weakening legislatures and judiciaries. In recent years these practices, alongside the derisive casting of discourses such as “wokeness,” “critical race theory,” “D.E.I.,” and “gender ideology” as threats to nationalist narratives, have been central to the rise of global authoritarian populism.
Those facing heightened vulnerability under iconic authoritarian populist leaders may attempt to discern recognizable discourse patterns among these figures to better anticipate, understand, and challenge their rise. However, in searching for distinctive characteristics of authoritarian populist voices we might mistakenly presume that a consistent set of communicative strategies characterize this political form when it in fact comprises various seemingly contradictory language ideologies and practices.
In some moments, contemporary authoritarian populists appeal to traditionalist perspectives by way of prohibitions on language use regarded as overly “woke,” such as discussions of systemic racism, non-binary understandings of gender, and anthropogenic climate change. In the US context, we have observed restrictive orientations to communication reflected in book bans, lists of watch words to be eradicated from government documents, and the designation of English as the nation’s sole official language for the first time in its history.
Yet, authoritarian populists are characterized not only by restrictive orientations to language, but also by the expansive deployment of a range of discourses widely regarded as unconventional, incoherent, or inappropriate in mainstream politics. In Trump’s case, language use stereotypically associated with misogyny, racism, and ableism indexes his claimed status as a political outsider—an irreverent businessman too concerned with the economic bottom line to care about political correctness. This transgressive, creative, and comedic discourse comprises novel formulations involving various dimensions of language, including gestures, words, pronunciations, and grammatical patterns, which simultaneously reproduce and transform political and cultural norms.
There are numerous manifestations of discursive and political interrelations among authoritarian populism and liberal democracy
In efforts to understand this linguistic reproduction and transformation of political and cultural norms, we might note that the same President promoting nativist ideologies and implementing an Official English policy is the only recent US head of state married to a person born outside the US whose children were socialized multilingually. The point is not that Trump and authoritarian populists more broadly are secret champions of globalism and pluralism, but rather that their language ideologies and practices cannot be reduced to a simple set of characteristics.
Just as linguistic anthropologists have continually drawn attention to how ideologies of distinct individualized voices obscure the inherently heteroglossic nature of communication, we would be wise to examine how seemingly separate political orders such as authoritarian populism and liberal democracy are mutually constituted and reproduced. Insofar as a figure such as Trump is understood as an anomalous authoritarian populist political voice, then his removal from power can be imagined as a return to liberal democratic normalcy. This reflects the tendency to exceptionalize authoritarian populist figures rather than understanding them as part of entangled sociocultural, historical, political, and economic relations. Such thinking prevents an analysis of the symbiotic relationship between liberal democracy and authoritarian populism, both politically and discursively.
There are numerous manifestations of discursive and political interrelations among authoritarian populism and liberal democracy. One example is the Department of Education’s February 14, 2025 anti-Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) “Dear Colleague” letter, which asserts that “American educational institutions have discriminated on the basis of race” by creating contexts in which students are being “toxically indoctrinated…with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism.’” In opposing the notion of structural racism, the letter suggests that it is important to look beyond the surface of DEI initiatives’ stated commitments to examine how they in fact function covertly in racially discriminatory ways. Here, a systemic analysis conventionally associated with liberal democratic political ideologies is deployed to further the authoritarian populist project of opposing the notion of systemic racism.
In higher education contexts, we have also witnessed authoritarian populists’ deployment of stereotypical liberal democratic discourses such as antiracism and antisemitism as justifications for withholding federal funding; exercising control over curricula, admissions, hiring, and leadership; and monitoring international students, revoking visas, and carrying out widespread removals. However, this is not just a problem of repressive authoritarian populists’ cooptation of otherwise freedom supporting liberal democratic discourses and practices.
Instead, liberal democratic institutions and societies have been historically and contemporarily characterized by universal pronouncements of freedom and equality alongside abject exclusion and rampant hierarchy. The liberal Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza and its efforts to stifle opposition to it in higher education and throughout the nation, which the authoritarian Trump administration has sustained and amplified, is just the latest example. Trump’s migrant surveillance, detention, and expulsion regime in his current and previous terms, combining discourses of illegality, criminality, and terrorism, would not be possible without the massive growth of Immigration and Customs Enforcement capacity during the liberal Obama administration; this includes Obama’s totalizing expansion of the Secure Communities program, a biometric surveillance initiative connecting local and federal law enforcement databases, from 14 jurisdictions at the end of the conservative George W. Bush administration in 2008 to “all 3,181 jurisdictions within 50 US states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. territories” in 2013. Destructive doublespeak is not particular to authoritarian populists; a return to liberal democratic norms is a reinvestment in rather than a rupture of this entrenched political and discursive dynamic.
Across local contexts and broader scales, everyday actors and widely recognized leaders are experimenting with discourses for forging political alternatives by refusing not only authoritarian populism but also the liberal democratic status quo. Migrants’ rights organizations throughout the nation have created multilingual community trainings to familiarize constituencies with relevant policies and discourse strategies for navigating Immigration and Customs Enforcement encounters. Trump’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk and responsible for hundreds of thousands of federal job cuts, has been the target of hackers, trolls, and protestors who have mockingly dubbed the agency “Dangerous Oligarchs Grab Everything.” Opposition to oligarchy, monarchy, and mass deportation have emerged as central discursive themes in massive nationwide anti-Trump protests and political rallies, attracting bipartisan participation while also pushing for newfound modes of political identification. And in higher education settings, students, staff, and faculty are drawing connections between “the ongoing genocide abroad and the escalating repression at home” through direct action in response to authoritarian populist and liberal democratic commitments to corporatism and militarism which mutually undermine academic freedom and liberation more broadly.
While these discourses and demonstrations are not ends in themselves, they are important signs of ongoing contestation and enactments of political possibility beyond the normative terms of debate.
Jonathan Rosa is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and, by courtesy, Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His research examines the co-naturalization of language and race as an organizing dynamic within modern governance.