Trump’s Taboos: Elite Rhetoric and the Foundations of American Grand Strategy

• In Event: International Survey Experiments on Nuclear Weapons

Abstract

In the weeks leading up to the 2016 American Presidential election, we conducted an experiment that randomly assigned participants to read news stories about Republican candidates making foreign policy statements. The experiment compares the impact of elite rhetoric on popular attitudes regarding a typical partisan nuclear issue to their impact on attitudes that undergird the normative foundations of American nuclear strategy. Half of the stories attributed the statements to Donald Trump, and the other half attributed the statements to Paul Evans, a fictional Republican candidate for U.S. Senate. Participants read news stories on one of three topics: criticizing the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, supporting the development of nuclear weapons by Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia, and using nuclear weapons to destroy ISIS. The Iran deal story represents a typical Republican foreign policy position, while the other two stories present significant challenges to the norms supporting American nuclear strategy. Our results present a mixture of good news and bad news regarding the popular foundations of American grand strategy. First, our results indicate that the principles of American nuclear strategy are generally–but not universally–popular. Second, we find that Trump did not differ from our fictional “generic” Republican candidate in terms of his ability to alter public attitudes. Consequently, we find that Trump is likely to be able to use the bully pulpit of the White House to rally Republicans and some independents to support typical Republican policy positions. On the other hand, our results indicate that President Trump will have difficulty persuading the public to abandon the norms that undergird American nuclear policy.

Authors

• Christopher F. Gelpi, Ohio State University

• Elias Assaf, The Ohio State University