Trumpist Ethnonationalism and the Federal Response to the COVID-19 Crisis and Other Natural Disasters in Puerto Rico (2017-21)

The federal political system we call the United States is both a multinational and a multiethnic state. Puerto Rico has been a peripheral part of the United States since 1898, and its inclusion in the outward edges of the U.S. state apparatus turns the U.S. into a multinational democracy, exhibiting a form of peripheral multinationalism. In recent years, the rise of Trumpism and the transformation of the Republican Party have energized those who envision an ethnonationalist view of U.S. national identity: a political momentum is strengthening, sustaining a nativist, white majority nation reaction that would revive ancestral racial and ethnic concepts of U.S. national identity. This of course is not a favorable development for the accommodation and the fair treatment of Puerto Rico within the U.S. federation and has multiple ramifications, including the foot dragging behind the Republican federal government's response to the COVID-19 crisis of 2020-21, and the other major natural disasters that have impacted the island, especially the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria.