Reordering Threats: January 6, Ontological Security, and Trump's Tactical Détente with Beijing

This article argues that the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol marked a decisive turning point in Donald Trump's worldview and, consequently, in the China policy of his second administration. During Trump's first term, China policy emerged from an unstable coalition: Trump's own transactional nationalism coexisted with a Republican establishment and national-security hawks who defined China as a comprehensive strategic and ideological adversary. January 6 and the political struggles that followed threatened Trump's biographical narrative as the authentic representative of the American people. Drawing on Brent J. Steele's framework of ontological security, the article treats January 6 as a critical situation that disrupted Trump's routinized practices of self-legitimation and pushed him to relocate the primary source of existential danger from the foreign to the domestic sphere. Drawing on Ted Hopf, it further argues that this reordering of threat also reorganized the identity discourse within Trumpism and altered which officials could be imagined as plausible and reliable instruments of policy. Trump's second term has remained coercive toward China, and in tariff terms it has often been harsher than the first. Yet it has also been less programmatically ideological, more transactional, more personalized, and more clearly subordinated to Trump's struggle against the “enemy within.” This dynamic helps explain why the second Trump administration has oscillated between tariff escalation, tactical détente, and renewed efforts at leader-level stabilization.