Abstract
This paper analyzes Donald Trump's political rhetoric and strategy through the lens of revanchism, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. Focusing specifically on Trump's declared intent for retribution, it situates his discourse within a longstanding geographical imagination embedded in settler-colonial logics. The paper illustrates how this rhetoric intensifies existing social inequalities and fuels reactionary political movements that seek to reinforce traditional hierarchies of race, class, and gender, which are rooted in neoliberal restructuring. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples—from Confederate symbolism invoked by Trump's supporters to racialized conspiracies propagated during electoral campaigns—the paper's analysis calls for scholars and political actors to engage with the geographic imaginaries that sustain Trumpism. By illustrating the interconnections between settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and neoliberalism this research contributes to a broader understanding of the spatial dimensions of reactionary political movements, highlighting the necessity for confronting revanchist strategies and their implications for American democracy and society.
“A revolution that does not produce a new space has not realized its full potential.”
Henri Lefebvre
On 4 March 2023, former President Donald Trump took the stage on the third day of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) (Trump, 2023a, b). Begun in the mid-1970s by conservative activists, CPAC brings together grassroots and corporate conservatives from across the United States and is known to give platforms to a range of political actors and has launched the political ambitions of prominent conservatives, many of whom have gone on to hold national office (Critchlow 2007). Taking the stage to rapturous applause and a series of chants, Trump launched into a blistering speech where he attacked his enemies, outlined his agenda if he were to be reelected, and engaged in the kind of hardcore conservative talking points that drove his corporate donors to support his bid to retake the white House. Declaring the upcoming 2024 election was the “final battle,” he indicated that if he were not sent back to Washington as President, the United States would never be able to recover. Trump said, “We are going to finish what we started. We started something that was a miracle. We're going to complete the mission; we're going to see this battle through to ultimate victory. We're going to make America great again.” To thunderous applause, Trump shouted, “In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged or betrayed: I am your retribution” (as quoted in Trump 2023a italics added).
This paper picks up the challenge of taking Trump at his word, explores the interconnections between Trump's stated desire for retribution and the punishment of his enemies, and argues that we need to place this desire within a much longer and more pronounced geographical imagination. I contend that this geographical vision is rooted within specific configurations of place and power and connects to a much longer geography of settlerism; a never-ending vision of American society rooted in domestic and international threats and a perception of a tenuous connection to the land (Bonds and Inwood, 2016; Glenn, 2015; Hoxie, 2008; Hugill 2017; Inwood and Bonds 2016; Pulido 2018; Rivera 2023; Simpson and Hugill 2022; Velednitsky et al., 2020). While much of the focus on Trump and his vision is backward-looking, perhaps best summed up in the phrase “Make America Great Again” (Huber, 2016), his blatant white supremacy (Inwood, 2019), his overt sexism, misogyny, and transphobia (Gokaroksel and Smith, 2016; Steinberg et al., 2018), this paper begins from his stated desire to enact revenge against his political enemies. Building upon the idea of revanchism, a term introduced by Neil Smith in 1996 to help understand gentrification, the term refers to processes of reactionary urban change that led to the displacement of peoples and communities deemed undesirable. As Smith explains, Revenge against minorities, the working class, women, environmental legislations, gays and lesbians, immigrants became increasingly common denominator of public discourse. Attacks on affirmative action and immigration policy, street violence against gays and homeless people, feminist bashing, and public campaigns against political correctness and multiculturalism were the most visible vehicles of this reaction (Smith 1996: 42–43).
Understanding the significance of this passage begins from knowing that revanchism is not just a set of economic policies or prescriptions but is deeply spatial, proffering a wholesale material remaking of economic, cultural, and political relationships rooted in the restoration of class-based privileges (Lawton, 2018).
By grounding Trump within an understanding of revanchism, I argue that what has been less well-understood but is necessary to understand so we can begin organizing to take on this perilous political moment is how he, along with his billionaire backers, is undertaking a revolutionary change to American society through new visions of social, class and racial exclusions rooted in revanchist politics. While benefiting oligarchical capitalism, this revolution is fueled by white resentments and a longstanding desire to enact revenge on those groups and peoples deemed a threat. In other words, and if we take the Lefebvre quote that began this paper seriously, then we need to focus on the ways that Trump and is agenda is rooted within specific geographies of place and power and in doing so, we can begin to understand how Trumpism is rooted in long held settler desires to enact revenge against those groups and individuals deemed a threat. The Trump revolution is indeed about a fundamental remaking of space and place. This remaking of socio-spatial relations is cementing oligarchical capitalism, eroding decades of civil rights progress, and, within the political economy of the United States, ushering in new forms of capital exploitation (Eckstein, 2018). Crucially, to understand this moment and its political and economic ramifications, we need to unpack this movement and place it within Trump's geographical imagination where, on the one hand, he offers a kind of political salvation to his base by highlighting retribution while simultaneously bringing about a revolution within the political economy that is remaking the very foundations of the US economy.
Conceptual framework
Settler vengeance
Van Zant and colleagues argue that our contemporary geographies, for better or worse, are “always a product of history” and that there is a need to “draw attention to how the past shapes the present—whether analyzing the lasting legacies of oppression or by highlighting memories of struggle (2020: 169). The past shapes the present and, necessarily, how I argue understanding Trump in this longer settler geography can help us come to understand the broader Trumpism movement. Through Trump's focus on revenge and his efforts to remake socio-spatial relations, I argue we necessarily must begin with understanding the more prolonged and sustained geographies of settler colonialism woven into the fabric of the American political economy. This starts from understanding both how the United States was and remains a settler society rooted in racial capitalism (e.g., Bonds and Inwood, 2016; Goldstein, 2017; McClintock, 2018; Pulido, 2023) and how these systems of domination come to structure socio-spatial relations. Indeed, Goldstein (2017) contends that understanding the contemporary American political economy must begin from the intertwined standpoints of settlerism and racial capitalism to expose how they structure US society and politics.
Settler colonialism in the United States is a political/economic system where settlers—mainly from Europe—have come to permanently occupy and claim sovereignty over Indigenous lands (Veracini, 2011). This process differs from other forms of colonialism, which is focused on extracting resources, in that settler colonialism is focused on the permanent occupation of the land and on coming up with various ways to make seized land productive (ibid). Within the United States, settlerism includes the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples along with the introduction of enslavement and other forms of labor systems that quite literally created the nation's wealth and are instrumental in understanding how the United States became a global hegemon (Adas 2001; Curley and Smith 2020; ; Smallwood 2018).
Because settler colonialism operates through a logic of elimination and is an ongoing process that continuously seeks to eliminate Indigenous peoples to secure land for settlers (Badarin, 2021), it operates through land theft (Nichols, 2018), violence, and a set of policies that come to deny the very context of contemporary Indigeneity (Inwood and Bonds, 2017). This also introduces into the broader political economy a set of structuring relations, including ideas about private property and labor and how labor is racialized and gendered in specific ways that facilitate exploitation (Melamed, 2015). Settler colonialism and racial capital fit hand in glove in that they emerge concurrently and depend on racial hierarchies to extract profit (Robinson, 1983). The US political economy is not a race-neutral economic system but one that thrives on the oppression of racialized groups, configures power and praxis in the political economy along racial lines, and continuously remakes and reworks the geographies of the United States to enhance the power and profit of capital.
For this paper's argument, I want to concentrate on a specific aspect of settlerism and racial capitalism that helps place Trump's call for revenge into a much more prolonged and sustained geography. Settler societies are violent societies (Veracini, 2008). From their founding moments, settlerism introduces an almost “pathological” (ibid) mindset focused on securing the land and eliminating threats to the social and political order, which might call into question the claims that settlers make to the land and resources. This logic creates specific political and economic realities, including violent responses to perceived threats. Throughout the long socio-spatial development of the United States, this has produced various responses and kinds of violence including, but not limited to, retaliatory violence often highlighted by armed responses and the valorization of men in uniforms (Gilmore, 1999); historical revisionism that marginalizes and erases diverse histories and peoples from the history of the nation (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2021); legal and structural punishment characterized by the prison industrial complex (Buntman, 2021; Ross, 2016); as well as introducing the concept of revenge against those perceived as denuding the nation of its “true” culture; and finally a kind of economic revenge that constantly nourishes and restores class and economic privileges (Haiven, 2017; Sculos, 2016). Geographer Anne Bonds, in her work, argues that taken as a whole, these relationships create what she calls “possessive geographies,” a term that describes how ownership, entitlement, gender relations, and belonging are claimed by white Americans (Bonds 2020).
Perhaps no one has documented how these possessive geographies structure the political economy and come to define economic revenge more than WEB Du Bois and his seminal work Black Reconstruction in America (2017). Du Bois, in his quest to understand the end of the Civil War, the role of enslaved people in ending the war and the failures of Reconstruction and the destruction of democracy in America, focused on the role of Northern industrialists, the Southern planter class, and white workers in disenfranchising Black people thus restoring the economic power of the planter class in the South. For Du Bois, a key piece of how white supremacy operates within racial capitalism is how it is fueled by a sense of revenge against Black people after the brief burst of freedom that was ushered in after the end of the Civil War. The end of Reconstruction, according to Du Bois, was not only about restoring an economic order disrupted by the Civil War and its aftermath, it was also about punishing Black people and white abolitionists for seeking a more expansive democracy and for asserting their constitutional rights.
According to Du Bois, while this economic revanchism restored class power, it was driven by the working class and largely disenfranchised whites who were resentful of the gains African Americans had made after the legal end of slavery and the growth of abolition democracy. Du Bois states, “The world-old phenomenon of the revenge of the unprivileged upon the disinherited came again to life in America” (Du Bois 2017: 678) and ushered in an almost century-long resegregation of American society.
Through Du Bois, I argue that the role of revenge and how it is deployed strategically to advance capitalism is central to understanding how racial capitalism operates within the US settler state. Max Haiven, for example, and building through Du Bois, writes that revenge is built into the system of racial capitalism from the moment of conception, with roots in the slave trade and colonialism (2020: 232). Not only does the transformation of people into commodities through the slave trade “rely on an excessive surplus of cruelty and abuse,” but it creates a range of structuring political, economic, and cultural relations that aim to “break down” and punish anyone or anything that stands in the way of capital accumulation. As he writes, Vengeance is reflected in capitalism's beginning and its end, and it flows through and deepens the channels of white supremacy, cis/heteropatriarchy, settler colonialism, and other systems of oppression (Haiven, 2020, p. 231).
Anyone tangentially familiar with US history will see how these processes have played out through terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, anti-communist witch hunts, the effort to discredit moderate civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., by labeling him a threat or a communist, or in the role of the police and law enforcement as tools of state repression, among myriad other examples. In other words, if racial capitalism is rooted in vengeance and if capitalism, as Marx famously observed, “comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx, 1990, 926), it behooves us as critical scholars to ask whose blood and whose dirt? This question is crucial as capital is being remade before our eyes through the growth and concretized realities of oligarchy and authoritarianism. In the next section, I want to understand how this moment is rooted in longer geographies and how this moment represents a crucial reorganization of capital through neoliberal restructuring.
Crisis of reproduction
First, one must understand the idea of crisis to tease out how and in what ways the Trump administration is using vengeance and retribution to motivate a broad-based reorganization of capital. Following Ruth Wilson Gilmore's definition (1998), broadly defined, a crisis occurs when the system (be it economic, social, or political) can no longer reproduce itself as it once had. Historically, we can see how this has ushered in broad-based changes to the political economy and how capital works to overcome contradictions and reorient the state and politics in ways that shore up class, race, and gendered hierarchies. Crucially, Gilmore argues that a crisis is not necessarily an emergency that leads to abrupt change, but a process in which the existing power structures reorganize themselves in an effort focused on maintaining dominance and reinforcing capital. Often, this includes the “organized abandonment” of communities and targeted violence, or what Gilmore refers to as “organized violence,” directed at communities and peoples (Gilmore, 2007). In other words, “the crisis” is not a momentary blip within reproduction systems but an ongoing process and strategy used by the state or other powerful actors to redistribute resources and power in ways that sustain and reinforce racial capitalism and the settler state. To understand how this process is related to this moment, it is helpful to focus on the growth of neoliberalism and the deepening of economic inequality.
Begun in 1980 under Ronald Reagan but accelerated by every American President over the last forty years, neoliberalism has shifted wealth from working and middle-class people to the wealthy through a series of efforts to deregulate and privatize the public good through tax policies designed to reward the rich and through the deregulation of banking and finance capital, among other strategies (Larner, 2003). Two measures, among many, illustrate how these changes have drastically shifted the balance of power and wealth in the United States and concentrated wealth in ever fewer hands, thus making the promises of wealth for middle and working-class Americans chimeric. First, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) documents that while worker productivity has increased by 61% since 1979, the compensation for a typical worker has only grown by around 17% (2024). Despite the economy becoming more productive and profitable, workers who create that productivity do not see the benefits. A second illustrative measure of how neoliberal economic policy created a crisis is through the distribution of income. Since 1980, the share of household wealth held by the top 1% has increased by 25% (Zucman, 2019), while the top 0.1% have seen their share of wealth double from 10% in 1980 to 20% in 2018 (Pew Research Center 2020).
Neoliberal changes to the political economy have meant that it is more complex and more challenging for middle- and working-class people to reproduce themselves. This economic strain has created a burgeoning wealth gap that fuels reactionary politics. If you take the bottom 50% of wage earners in the United States, they now hold just 2.5% of total US wealth, with an average net worth of only $60,000 (Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis 2025). These families remain burdened by high debt, a low rate of homeownership, and limited resilience to inflation and rising costs. Meanwhile, middle-income households (roughly those earning $56K–$170K in 2022) control only about 26% of US wealth, most of it in housing equity, leaving them exposed to interest-rate increases and property market shifts. Despite partial recovery since the 2007–2008 crisis, rising living costs and debt continue to squeeze the middle class, reducing both their financial cushion and real purchasing power. Thomas Piketty argues that the economic system is now completely organized around the disproportionate benefit of the wealthy and actively works to capture middle- and working-class wealth through economic policies wholly designed to shift wealth to the rich (2013). As a measure of how this has shifted income and resources, Moody's Analytics, which tracks consumer spending, found that in 2024, the top 10% of US households (those making more than $250k a year) accounted for 55% of all consumer spending in the United States (Ensign, 2025). This figure is the highest since Moody's began tracking data.
But of course, the concentration of wealth has spillover effects that reorient almost every aspect of the political economy, from consumer spending to politics. As wealth has been concentrated in fewer hands, the role of the wealthy in politics has also increased. Page et al. (2013) found that the ultra-wealthy, the top 1% of 1%, not only play an outsized role in politics through political donations, impact on policy and access to power, but that these families and individuals tend to be extremely conservative in their views and especially as it relates to the economy and the role of women and racial groups in society. Perhaps usurpingly, the authors found that the “wealthy are much more favorable towards cutting social welfare programs, especially social security and health care,” and are opposed to programs that work to create “a decent standard of living” for everyone (Page et al. 2013:np). In addition, the authors found that “wealthy Americans are much less willing than others to provide broad educational opportunities” and are “significantly less favorable about regulating Wall Street, the health care industry, and big corporations” (ibid). Much of these policy preferences now drive US political debate. In 2014, Gilens and Page built on these arguments and demonstrated that the public and public opinion had “virtually no impact on public policy.” Instead, public policy and legislation since the late 1980s have aligned with the interests of wealthy special-interest groups, corporations, and the ultra-wealthy. This has created a political situation in which any effort to address economic inequality or poverty or to redistribute wealth through changes to the tax structure is met with resistance or not taken up as serious policy proposals, creating a political context in which the efforts of average citizens who have access to the vote can do little to change the political trajectory of the nation.
Taken as a whole, neoliberalism has wrought a wholesale remaking of the American political economy. It has shifted the political and economic landscape, making it harder for everyday Americans to socially, economically, and politically reproduce themselves within the broad frameworks of traditional understandings of how the economy and politics work. Returning to the ideas of organized abandonment and organized violence, a significant part of this political and economic crisis is focused on how “others” are the ones responsible for the present economic crisis and are necessarily the targets for political and violent repression. No moment in the last political campaign so effectively represents how the politics of abandonment play in this political moment than in Springfield, Ohio, and perhaps the most infamous moment of the 2024 Presidential campaign.
Rumors, begun on the internet but weresoon picked up by the rightwing blogosphere, began circulating that Haitian migrants had started eating people's pets in Springfield, Ohio and soon this rumor was picked up by President Trump on the campaign trail (Thomas and Wendling, 2024). Springfield, in many ways, is a microcosm of many Midwestern towns in the Rust Belt region. Once home to a thriving manufacturing base, the town had fallen on hard times. A story from National Public Radio published in 2016 noted that in 1999, adjusted for inflation, the average income in Springfield was around $74k. By 2014, the average income had fallen 27% to $54k. In part, this loss of income stemmed from three factors. First, the North American Free Trade Agreement opened the borders of Mexico and Canada to trade, and as it did so, many of the industrial manufacturing bases that were the backbone of this community moved overseas. Those factories that stayed in Springfield turned to automation to remain competitive. The NPR story notes that in 1999, manufacturing processes that took four workers in the early 1990s now only took one. Finally, because of the loss of manufacturing jobs, the jobs that remained available to blue-collar workers were subjected to downward pressure on their wages. The story states that workers hired in the mid-1990s had a starting wage of $17, while those hired in 2014 had a starting wage of $15.50. As these changes have taken place, the city has lost nearly 25% of its population, and with a shrinking tax base, the city has also had to cut back on social services and other services.
Returning to organized abandonment, Gilmore describes the systematic withdrawal of resources, jobs, services, and support from communities as exacerbating crisis conditions and creating conditions that make communities more vulnerable. Springfield is the poster child for how government and corporations disinvest in communities and leave communities vulnerable to harm and increased pressures exacerbated by economic restructuring. In other words, “organized abandonment starts with the intentional disinvestment” of certain communities that “results in the flight of economic activity and jobs, abandonment of social services, dilapidated housing, environmental degradation, and underemployment” (Riley et al., 2024). As the process of abandonment happens and the population ages, it becomes harder to attract workers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this problem was exacerbated, and corporations started to actively recruit legal migrants in the United States to Springfield to take on jobs in the communities. Newly arrived Haitians were attracted to Springfield because of the relatively cheaper cost of living and the promise of blue-collar manufacturing jobs. A story in the local newspaper, Springfield Sun, documents this process, noting that these migrants came to the town “to find work in an area with affordable housing” (Sweigart et al., 2024). In a classic case of chain migration, once some people came and found a better life, others followed, increasing the Haitian population in the city. This led to tensions in the city, and these tensions boiled over into rumors of Haitians eating people's pets.
First spread nationally by Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance but later picked up by Donald Trump, the attack on Haitian immigrants fits within the concepts of organized abandonment and organized violence in at least three ways. First, organized violence emerges from organized abandonment as a response to deteriorating conditions. As organized abandonment strips communities of essential resources, it creates increased pressure on the things available in the community. The tensions that Vance and Trump took advantage of stem from this disinvestment. As they spread these false rumors, threats to the community increased, including bomb threats to schools and social service providers, organized marches by neo-Nazis, and highlighting the vacuum of leadership in Springfield that let these rumors and realities persist. In other words, the systematic neglect of Springfield led to a set of social fractures, which in turn exacerbated tensions that manifested in threats of violence and the use of racism by Trump and Vance, creating a kind of revanchist politics in which the threat to livelihoods was not capital or neoliberal economic policies that create conditions of abandonment, but immigrants of color who bore the brunt of the racist and violent attacks. As the organized abandonment of Springfield took place, it raised tensions in the community. As those tensions boiled over, politicians like Vance and Trump took advantage to shape discourses and create narratives focused on marginalized members of the community and rooted within broader settler narratives.
Recall from the previous sections that from the founding moments of the US nation's history, settler colonialism introduced into the United States an almost pathological mindset focused on eliminating threats to the social and political order. Settlers are constantly made to feel under threat and think that their connection to the land is tenuous. The kinds of violent responses to these perceived threats include retaliatory violence (like bomb threats to schools) as well as more overt appeals to white supremacy (neo-Nazi marches). What is essential to understand is that while the idea that Haitian migrants are eating people's pets is, on the surface, completely ridiculous and fantastical, race and racism historically have operated through absurd and fictitious narratives—often with deadly consequences for people of color. During the civil rights era, rightwing pundits and organizations like the John Birch Society pushed wild conspiracy theories about Black people in the South, focused on how the civil rights movement was part of a vast communist conspiracy. During the late 1800s and throughout the 20th Century, conspiracy theories and fantastical claims of Black men assaulting white women drove lynchings and other racially motivated hate crimes. More recently, Trump's claims that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and was in fact Kenyan are all examples of how racism operates through white fantasies designed to delegitimize Black claims to rights and land, and which create conditions for violence to take place and have taken place within the context of settlerism. The key is to understand that the rumors that Vance and Trump pushed are not only part of that legacy but also reinforce and reinscribe racism through these white racial fantasies. It is part of the longue duree of threat that is an animating feature of the United States racial state, and which has formed the backbone of various political and economic coalitions in the United States.
Trump and Vance were pushing a kind of economic fantasy that motivates revenge, where immigrants and others are seen as taking jobs, what Smith (1996) and others refer to as revanchist politics. This kind of narrative operates by directing the ire of people away from capital and the actions of corporate and government leaders, the true architects of America's turn towards neoliberalism and the ones most responsible for the economic conditions of organized abandonment that personifies Springfield. While Trump and Vance's rhetoric not only fits within a settler context that expands and reinforces broad-based economic realities that disenfranchise working people in the United States, as critical scholars we need to not only take his words seriously but focus on how Trumpism is a product of racial capitalism and we should be speaking to how this particular geographic imaginary is rooted through revenge. To understand how and in what ways this geographic imagination manifests itself, I want to turn more specifically to the theme of revenge, which arguably became the animating force of Trump's campaign and, with his return to the white House, his use of Presidential power. I argue that it is the most potent source of his appeal and power.
Come retribution
Focusing on revenge and how revenge emerges from specific geographical imaginaries is more than an academic exercise; it reveals the deeper power structures behind Trump's rhetoric and exposes the much longer geographies of settler violence at the heart of his movement. More than that, it also reveals how the slow burn of crisis that has long characterized neoliberalism coalesces into reactionary political movements that turn the violence of the state towards populations and peoples deemed to be subversive or a threat to the nation-state or economic order. I argue that these connections are more than perfunctory but capture a key moment in the campaign that reveals how and in what ways the Trump administration is organizing itself to strengthen capital and to restore class, gender, and race-based privileges that many in his coalition see as having been surrendered since the United States civil rights movement. Recall from the introduction that Trump kicked off his campaign at CPAC and used his speech to declare, “I am your retribution.” For Trump supporters, especially key ally Steve Bannon, this moment cemented Trump's place as the head of the Republican field and made him the frontrunner for the Presidential election. Bannon, host of the War Room Podcast, one-time investment banker at Goldman Sachs, and fervent white nationalist, gave an interview to journalist Jonathan Karl shortly after the speech, much of which was discussed in various podcasts by Karl while on book tours and quoted in an article by Martin Pengelly (2023).
For Bannon, the speech has become known as the “Come Retribution Speech.” This reference is instructive as Come Retribution was the code word for the secret Confederate States of America plan during the waning days of the Civil War, when defeat was inevitable, to kidnap and murder Abraham Lincoln and other US government officials. The plan was also a response to Lincoln's efforts to free enslaved people with the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery in the United States. By referencing the speech as Come Retribution, Bannon was making an overt and specific reference to a moment in history associated with the beginning of the restoration of white power and white nationalism in the United States. As Karl goes on to explain, Bannon argues that the Confederate and insurrectionist government decided to “repay some of the misery that had been inflicted on the South.” As Bannon argues, “Trump's speech was not an overt call for the assassination of his political opponents, but [the speech] did advocate their destruction by other means […] only if we dare to complete the job, bury the deep state, reclaim our democracy and banish the tyrants and Marxists into political exile forever” (quoted in Pengelly 2023).
Key themes that jump out from Bannon's description of the speech include obvious and overt white supremacy. By linking Trump to the failed Confederacy and their plan to seek vengeance even in the face of defeat, Bannon is making a direct link with a rebellion that was focused on preserving enslavement and which was rooted in theories of white domination (Wright 2024). More so, it is an invitation to think about how Trumpism is also rooted within a kind of racialized geographic imagination and reflects the very foundations of racial capitalism as rooted in the US settler context. Within the context of settlerism and racial capitalism, revenge has long been an animating feature of the system. We can see this through the concepts outlined earlier around organized abandonment and organized revenge explained through Gilmore, and we can also see how revanchism and the policies of revenge come to focus attention on broader and more nebulous forces in society that end up reinforcing class and gender based privileges and positions. This includes supposed Marxist or socialist conspiracies, the loss of white masculinity, the takeover of the US government by globalists, and the surrendering of state power in the face of these global forces.
Conspiracy theories involving Marxists or communists taking over the federal government have long proliferated in American conservative circles. Lovelace (2022) notes that “red-baiting” is “a lynchpin of white supremacy” and claims that the civil rights movement was a communist conspiracy, which was a way to introduce “colorblind” language into the debate around the Black freedom struggle (29). This reality has long animated extremists on the far right to push back against even the most modest of civil or social gains made by minority groups in the United States. Additionally, red-baiting is and remains a potent rhetorical tool that animates extremists within the far right. By invoking the idea of Marxists and globalists, Bannon is tying into some of the most longstanding calls to violence, which have been foundational for conservatives in the United States to push back against progressives in the US. Jessica Johnson (2019) describes how podcasts like Bannon's link into a broader conservative ecosystem and are a kind of “affective networking” of narratives that continually center white victimhood and conspiracy-laden revenge fantasies, often through tropes designed to simultaneously present white men as victims and saviors of the nation (298). These platforms reinforce the idea of a nation under threat from perceived enemies and channel emotional responses to “get even” with those enemies. In the next section, I build on this theme and speak to how Trump mobilizes settler narratives that ultimately seek to create a context that preserves white privilege and supremacy.
Mobilizing whiteness to secure capital
Understanding the modern conservative movement and the growth of the Republican Party, as well as this political moment, necessarily must begin from the standpoint of white-grievance politics. Since the 1960s, the Republican Party in the United States has used perceived racial and gender grievances to create political coalitions to win elections. Perhaps the earliest example of this was in 1968 and the election of Richard Nixon. President Nixon's campaign utilized the “Southern Strategy” to win disaffected whites in the South and the North who were frustrated over civil rights and the racial tensions that manifested in the 1960s (Inwood 2019). Put simply, the Southern Strategy was designed to appeal to white voters and use racial resentment and opposition to liberal reforms in the United States to move those voters from the Democratic Party to the Republicans. In various ways, the strategy has been used by every successful Republican candidate for national office since Nixon.
The politics of racial resentment tie into a geographic imagination that has direct links to settler colonial violence and the settler imaginary, which is central to understanding Trumpism and his vision for American society. Crucial for understanding the Southern Strategy and its connection to revanchism is their reliance on grievance-based mobilization and white resentment to mobilize political coalitions focused on retribution rather than governing or enacting legislation to address social or economic challenges. According to Jeremy Engles (2010), this strain of conservatism emerged in the 1960s as a direct response to broad-based changes in Western societies that saw the end of colonization in Europe as African and Asian peoples and nations asserted their independence and in response to the US civil rights movement, and changes to the political economy towards consumer culture. This was also a time when the United States and Western Europe were engaged in the struggle against the Soviet Union and at a time of heightened global competition. Engles explains that the modern conservative movement was built through the cultivation of resentments towards perceived enemies (communists) and came to view the West as victims of broad international plots to overthrow the Western liberal order (the assertion of rights by minority groups). This included everything from Marxists and globalists to threats to masculinity and society through women's rights movements and black liberation struggles (Engels 2015: 310). Perhaps no better example of this modern vision of victimhood exists than in Trump's first Presidential rally in Waco, TX.
Waco, in the 1990s, was the site of the Branch Davidian Compound and a raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), a federal agency charged, as its name suggests, with regulating ATF in the United States. The Branch Davidians were religious extremists led by David Koresh, who was affiliated with a splinter group of the 7th Day Adventists, a Christian religion focused on the return of Jesus, grounded in the Book of Revelation. In 1993, the Federal Government raided the Branch Davidian Compound. In the ensuing siege, several federal agents were killed as well as all of the Branch Davidians in the compound when Koresh and his followers were incinerated as the federal government initiated a raid with tanks, teargas, and a militarized police force. For anti-government extremists, the Branch Davidian raid was a seminal moment. For extremists in the conservative movement, it has long been a rallying space for anti-government forces in the United States (see Bonds and Inwood 2016). At first glance, it seemed absurd to begin his campaign in Texas, a deeply conservative state that was all but guaranteed to vote for him in the primary and general election; however, by launching his campaign in Waco, Trump connected with two historical episodes in US history.
First and most obviously, he was making a geographical connection to many of the most extreme elements in the conservative movement in the United States, a movement that sees the federal government as the enemy of the people and a threat to civil and political liberties. This ties back into the work by Engles (2015) outlined in the previous section and work in settlerism, which sees settlers as constantly under threat and at the edge of the empire. Resistance to federal enforcement of laws and distrust of the metropole is a thread that has longstanding resonance in settler countries. Inwood and Bonds (2017) explain that a contradiction exists within settler societies. On the one hand, the metropole needs settlers to advance on the empire's periphery and, in many cases, to commit extreme violence. Still, when those violences turn towards resisting the state's imperatives, the metropole will impose itself on settlers. This creates a rhetorical context in which leaders can simultaneously use the power of the state to enact revenge against perceived enemies—including undesirable settlers—while also using the rhetoric of revenge to motivate their base against a range of nebulous enemies, everything from Communists and Marxists to women and transpeople as well as racial minorities, among others. This creates a geographic vision rooted in revanchist politics and is foundational to understanding Trump and his geographic vision, rooted in the realities of America as a settler society.
The Waco raid was a foundational moment that brought together several fringe and radical groups who united around the perceived threat by the federal government. In her seminal book Bring the War Home (2018), Kathleen Belew explains that Waco galvanized a post-Vietnam white power movement that saw itself at war with the US government. In addition, Stern (1996), in his exploration of the American militia movement, argues that Waco was central to the growth of the militia movement who saw the federal response to Koresh as a symbol of the growth of a tyrannical government—and as evidence of this Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber who destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma timed his attack to coincide with the first anniversary of the Waco raid. In other words, the Waco raid unified a set of disparate conservative and white supremacist movements through their vision of a tyrannical federal government that had grown too big, too powerful, and which was under the control of globalists or other groups that were bent on destroying the United States and ushering in the end of American democracy. This subtle but marked appeal to white nationalism is essential to understand as it reflects the longstanding geographical vision of settlerism as a nation constantly under siege.
A crucial piece of how this geographic imagination operates is through the creation of racial scapegoats—what Cedrick Johnson (2017) argues is the politics of racial resentment that often becomes a substitute for class consciousness and is a strategy deployed by capital to undermine working-class solidarities. In other words, politicians and business leaders focus the resentment of white working-class people on marginalized groups or focus on nebulous geographic threats to the social order to orient politics away from broad-based critiques of capital or the failures of mainstream politics and politicians to improve the lives of ordinary people. whiteness, and specifically, white masculinity, is a central foil against which perceived enemies are seen as attacking the foundation of white male privilege or the foundations of an American democracy rooted within contexts of white masculinity. This creates a broad-based political coalition that can include a range of groups and individuals who might have antithetical views but unite around a politics of revanchism.
Second, Trump was harkening back to the start of Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign in 1980 when he held an early campaign event at the Neshoba County Fair in Neshoba County, Mississippi. The site was close to where several civil rights workers were murdered during the 1960s, and by choosing this site, Reagan was sending a not-so-subtle signal to whites across the South about the nature of his campaign and the role he played in fighting against civil rights, especially while governor of California. Reagan invoked the idea of “States’ Rights,” and his speech connected with white supremacists and those opposed to civil rights and helped to cement his coalition in the South. Reagan was offering up a geographic vision of the United States that was accessible to whites within the United States, while at the same time interjecting enough ambiguity that he could deny there was any larger meaning to his rally, quite literally a form of gaslighting to the nation. By connecting to the geography of those murdered civil rights workers, Reagan could invoke the violence of the era and a promise to end the civil rights era.
Similarly, Trump set out to do the same thing for his coalition and wanted to geographically ground his campaign within a geography rooted in broad-based opposition to the federal government, white victimhood, and through a geographical vision rooted in settler victimhood. Trump was using a specific geographic location and coupling that with his longstanding litany of grievances was giving voice to extreme elements in his coalition, arguing for a politics of revenge that would take care of the “threats” his coalition was focused on. For example, Trump began his speech by noting: Before we begin, I also want to express our sadness and send our prayers to those who have been touched by the devastating tornadoes today. A lot of people were killed. We love you all for seven years. You know that we've all been fighting together. Those people were fighting with us, too. No longer with us. Devastating. But for seven years, you and I have been taking on the corrupt, rotten, and sinister forces trying to destroy America. They've been trying to destroy it. They won't do it, but they do get closer and closer with rigged elections.
He then went on to state: We've been the ones in this fight, standing up to the globalists and standing up to the Marxists and communists. That's what they are. We don't even talk about the socialists anymore. That train left that station a long time ago. Standing up to the warmongers, the stupid warmongers, the neocons and the rhinos, the big money, special interests, the open border fanatics, crazy people. Standing up to the fake news media.
What is crucial to understand from Trump's speech is the way it connects with whiteness and settler colonial logic as well as how it is rooted in revenge through the idea of narrative control, what Dunbar-Ortiz (2021); Wolfe (2006), and Miles (2015) in various ways described as central to the settler society. Narrative control centers white narratives about the nation-state as essential to the broad-based workings of the United States, what we might call the epistemological generation of origin narratives. It seeks to control how we talk and understand the United States and is focused on both the erasure of alternative histories and reinforcing the claims of settlers to the land. The origin narrative draws from mainstream histories about the founding of the United States as well as whitewashes the violent histories and extreme politics that make up the settling of the frontier and the violence that drives Indigenous erasure and racial capitalism.
Because epistemology is focused on the nature of knowledge, what counts as valid claims, and how knowledge becomes acquired, claims to defend the nation or claims of retribution are necessarily understood through a covert reinforcement of whiteness and white supremacy. In other words, Trump can claim to be “your retribution” because the idea of retribution is rooted within the context of settler colonial logic, and these claims necessarily draw upon larger geographic narratives of whiteness and white settlerism that are foundational to the very idea of the United States as a nation-state. Just as Neil Smith, in his book on revanchism, The New Urban Frontier, points to this reality by situating gentrification within the framework of the frontier, Trump, by kicking off his campaign focused on revenge and then going to Waco, was able to draw from these longstanding geographic visions and ideas. Come retribution and the “sinister forces” that are trying to destroy America are longstanding racialized and gendered tropes within the US settler nation that are broadly focused on strengthening existing race, class, and political hierarchies in the United States and which ground the United States in an epistemological origin narrative of white supremacy and white male privilege and it is this geographic imagination that we, as academics and as a broader public, must center if we want to organize a broad-based coalition to take Trump on and to address the underlying realities of racial capitalism.
Significance
The first months of the renewed Trump administration have revealed the material and symbolic consequences of a political project rooted in retribution. From assaults on trans rights and immigrant protections to attacks on federal research infrastructure and the amplification of authoritarian policing, among other examples, these developments should be understood not merely as political tactics, but as manifestations of a more profound and longstanding geographical imagination rooted in settlerism and racial capitalism. This imagination, forged within the settler-colonial logics that are central to the US socio-spatial dialectic, is premised on exclusion, displacement, and the violent reassertion of white, patriarchal order.
This paper has traced how Trump's invocation of “retribution” is not simply a rhetorical flourish but a mobilization of deeply spatial imaginaries—geographies forged through settler conquest, racial capitalism, and a longstanding desire for revenge. From Waco to Springfield, the symbolic and material landscapes of Trumpism reveal an obsession with reclaiming a vision of American space that is often presented as under siege—where settlers are framed as the rightful inheritors of the land. The geographical imagination at the heart of this movement is animated by historical memory: of the frontier, of Reconstruction, of neoliberal abandonment, and of demographic and political change that threatens settler dominance. It is a reactionary cartography that remaps threats and grievances onto landscapes already saturated with historical violence.
Moreover, this movement is sustained through what Dunbar-Ortiz, Wolfe, and others describe as narrative control. This settler epistemology renders specific histories illegible while reaffirming origin myths grounded in whiteness, masculinity, and capitalist order. Trump's invocation of “retribution” at CPAC, and its subsequent framing by Bannon through the language of Confederate vengeance, reflects an explicit call to respatialize American political life along lines Du Bois reminiscent of the white counterrevolution (Inwood 2019) that followed Reconstruction (1937). Like earlier moments of reaction—from Du Bois's account of the end of abolition democracy to the Southern Strategy and the Waco mythology—Trumpism relies on a deeply affective geography predicated on fear, loss, and racial grievance that is geographically encoded and historically durable through an invocation of retribution.
Ultimately, resisting Trumpism and its broader revanchist formations requires more than policy critique or electoral opposition—it requires geographic refusal. We must challenge not only the surface expressions of political violence but the deeper spatial imaginaries that authorize and sustain it. As this paper has argued, Trump's politics of revenge are intelligible only when situated within the spatial structures of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and neoliberal dispossession. Future research must further trace how these logics are mobilized across space and scale, how they mutate in response to crises of reproduction, and how they sediment into landscapes of fear, nostalgia, and reaction. At the same time, critical geographers must continue to foreground counter-geographies—of Indigenous resurgence, Black radicalism, migrant solidarities, and abolitionist futures—that unsettle the coordinates of a space forged through revanchist politics. Only by confronting the settler geographical imagination can we chart a path toward spaces of justice, pluralism, and collective emancipation.
Footnotes
Acknowledgment
Thank you to the two anonymous reviewers who provided insightful comments on previous drafts of this manuscript. Thank you as well to Alex Moulton and Kate Derickson for their work on seeing this manuscript through the review process. I am indebted to Derek Alderman, James Tyner, and Katie Hildebrand who read and commented on previous drafts. Omissions are my own.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.