Blessing America First: Religion, Populism, and Foreign Policy in the Trump Administration. By David T.Buckley, New York: Columbia University Press, 2024. 305 pp. $32.00. ISBN: 978‐0‐23‐120755‐3.

What happens when populism and the foreign policy bureaucracy collide? This is the guiding question of Blessing America First. By the time President Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2017, accounting for religion in the construction and implementation of US foreign policy had become institutionalized inside the US State Department. The book tells the story of how a bureaucracy focused on diplomats understanding the role of religion in governance and diplomacy across the globe morphed into one focused on promoting religious identity boundaries and personal loyalty demanded by Trump's brand of populism. The book documents how the foreign policy establishment, often cited as an important brake on President Trump's populist goals, shifted in response to presidential efforts to control it. In this narrow area of foreign policy, at least, the brake was but a speed bump, largely owing to the brittleness of institutional checks on the presidency in foreign policy, writ large, and the broader political context most evident in partisan polarization. As a comparative politics scholar, David Buckley offers important insights into the Trump populist phenomenon often overlooked by American presidency scholars, providing a fresh account of several key questions, including: (1) how populism impacts foreign policy, both in process and content; (2) how bureaucracy responds to populist leadership; and (3) how populist leaders shape existing bureaucracy to their own populist ends. In short, none of the answers provided fit well with our conventional understanding of bureaucratic politics. Trumpism has the potential to reshape the foreign policy bureaucracy, demand (and receive) obedience, and overwhelm the institutional constraints we generally consider significant. Given global trends in populism, a comparativist's analysis of Trumpism is necessary to make sense of it. Fortunately, there has been a bevy of scholarship in the discipline applying theories of populism to the Trump presidency. There is much we, as presidency scholars, can learn from this scholarship, as demonstrated in Blessing America First. The direct observations provided by the author focus on the State Department's Office of Religion and Global Affairs (RGA), which developed a regularized process to ensure that the important political effects of religion were accounted for in how diplomats were trained and policy was developed and implemented. From his perch as an academic fellow in 2016–2017 in the RGA, Buckley carefully documents how that office responded to the transition from Obama to Trump. He adds to this account carefully done case studies of major policies in the religion and foreign policy realm, including Trump's controversial 2017 “Muslim ban” and less well-known policies related to human trafficking and counterterrorism. Buckley provides a theoretically and empirically rich account of Trump's brand of populism on the intersection of religion and foreign policy. Buckley starts with a definition of populism that emphasizes “thin ideology” and “a recurrent combination of inclusion and exclusion: advocacy for the people and rejection of both elites and threatening outsiders” (66). Thus, we see how the policy focus of offices meant to account for the effect of religion in global affairs morphed into emphasizing the priorities of Christian nationalists. For example, policies shifted to promote the freedom of Christian minorities across the globe rather than all religious minorities. The other key dimension to populism is the existence of personalism that rejects institutional constraints, privileges “direct ties to the populist leader,” and deploys populist rhetoric and style (88). Political appointees, especially those with direct ties to Trump (e.g., his daughter and son-in-law) take on more significant policy roles, while “expert religion” takes a backseat to policy development. Bureaucrats have numerous options when responding to populist leadership, including bounded persistence (i.e., continuing their work without making waves); adapting to the wants and demands of the populist to survive; voicing dissent; or exiting government altogether (116). While Buckley witnessed each response to varying degrees, he concludes that career staff did not obstruct populist foreign policy priorities. Buckley does an excellent job of distilling a rather complicated theory into testable hypotheses, displayed in easily digestible tables throughout the book. Readers are then able to follow along with the careful qualitative analysis. While the ethnographic analysis is the book's most significant strength, the author broadens the analysis to examine institutional constraints on populist foreign policy emanating from the Courts and Congress, finding them to be quite weak. One possible constraint on populism is the public's response. Buckley creatively employed an original survey to test the impact of pastors “blessing America First” on their credibility among the public. The findings indicate a polarized effect: while support for clergy among Trump supporters grew, endorsements of Trump caused a “blowback” among non-supporters, suggesting the limited capacity of Trumpism on public leadership, which comports with what is conventional wisdom on the limited effects of the public presidency.