Abstract
President Trump verbally attacked human rights in his campaign rhetoric in 2016, leading many to believe that he would undermine the role of human rights in US foreign policy as President. I examine whether or not President Trump’s anti-human rights rhetoric manifested in US foreign policy by analyzing potential changes in how human rights were considered in foreign aid allocations under the Trump Administration. While President Trump had a number of executive tools at his disposal to exert control over foreign aid allocation, he would still have had to overcome considerable bureaucratic and legislative inertia in order to implement his anti-human rights agenda in US foreign aid. I demonstrate that he was unsuccessful in overcoming this inertia, at least in the first 2 years of his Administration (the years for which data is currently available). If anything, human rights received more consideration under President Trump than under President Obama.
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Notes
The Washington Post was on such outlet that published an opinion editorial concerned with the potential human rights effects of the Trump Administration (Editorial Board 2016).
President Trump is quoted in “Trump’s election threatens human rights around the world,” in The Washington Post (Editorial Board 2016).
President Trump is quoted in the following interview: “Transcript: Donald Trump on NATO, Turkey’s Coup Attempt and the World,” The New York Times (The New York Times, 2016).
President Trump spoke these words at a rally, which is quoted in Beauchamp (2016). The President is clearly referring to civilians and not family members who take on a continuous combatant function or who are direct participants in hostilities. When Trump is asked if he would “put out the hit on women and children,” he replies that he would “do pretty severe stuff,” which was interpreted by witnesses as approval for “the murder of women and children” (Lizza 2016).
These comments were made at the unveiling of a draft report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights.
While the Obama Administration initially supported the Saudi venture in Yemen with intelligence and refueling, and it eventually urged restraint and temporarily halted arms sales after several high-profile instances of Saudi Arabia targeting civilian infrastructure (Williams 2017).
Obama is quoted in Fisher (2013).
I include only the first two SOTU speeches delivered by President Trump because this period corresponds with the period of data we have for foreign aid disbursements under the Trump Administration (his first and second fiscal year).
I check the context of every reference to human rights to ensure that the reference is accurately positive and not a case where the President is speaking against such rights.
Speeches for the analysis were provided by the online State Department archives (U.S. Department of State 2017).
USAID Director Mark Green is quoted in Igoe (2018).
Gingrich is quoted in Eilperin, Rein, and Fisher (2017).
The official is quoted in Igoe (2021).
This is done due to the skewness of aid allocations. The dependent variable is therefore measured as ln(1 + US foreign aid).
While it would be prudent to conduct an estimation with an alternative measure, such as CIRI in addition to running different versions of PTS the CIRI data are not updated through the Trump years.
The Polity IV scores have not been updated to 2018, which would leave out all observations occurring under the Trump Administration. The Freedom House/Polity score here uses Freedom House scores to impute for missing Polity IV scores.
The variable is operationalized as ln(GDP per capita + 1).
Given the fact that the effect of human rights violations is not consistent across country regime types and varies with national security and economic concerns, the effect here should be viewed in light of these conditionalities (Demirel-Pegg and Moskowitz 2009, Nielsen 2013, Sandlin 2016, 2018). However, the constituent term effect is useful insofar as it allows us to compare the two Administrations.
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Sandlin, E.W. The Trump Administration Versus Human Rights: Executive Agency or Policy Inertia?. Hum Rights Rev 23, 333–359 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-021-00651-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-021-00651-z