Until recent years, it would have been unthinkable for jihadists to utter a positive word about the man in the White House. In an undated letter made public after his death in 2011, al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden blamed America’s forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan directly on the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The Islamic State group’s weekly magazine, Al-Naba, has long been full of violent threats against the “infidel West,” with the United States at its helm.
Even hard-line Islamist voices — distinguished from jihadists by their slightly more accommodating approach on certain issues — have rarely missed an opportunity to criticize successive U.S. administrations, especially for their unwavering support of Israel.
Not so with President Donald J. Trump.
As part of my work with BBC Monitoring, I have found jihadist groups and their supporters often delighted by Trump’s erratic and brazenly transactional first few weeks in office. Many observers have speculated that Trump’s plan to take over Gaza would galvanize jihadists and far-right circles. Yet this unlikely confluence of ideologies goes even deeper than that. Jihadists’ reasons for supporting Trump vary considerably among commentators and groups, judging by online chatter from the Telegram messaging service and other more obscure online chat rooms. The arguments have ranged across geopolitical theorizing, Trump’s expressions of social conservatism and his likely effects on the West or other enemies. But jihadists and Islamists are in agreement on one thing: The world according to “Trump 2.0” bodes well for their radical interpretations of Islam.
Jihadist optimism may come as a surprise to those observing Trump’s early days in office. He has shown no signs of going easy on U.S.-designated terrorist groups, from Syria to Somalia. A senior Islamic State figure was the target of the first major U.S. military operation under the new administration in Somalia’s semiautonomous region of Puntland on Feb. 1. On March 14, U.S. Central Command forces announced the killing of “Abu Khadijah,” identified as the Islamic State’s second in command. And there has been a noticeable rise in U.S. airstrikes targeting reported al Qaeda affiliates in Syria since Jan. 28. Trump’s trigger-happy approach to drone strikes is in keeping with his first term, which saw them double in 2017, according to the United Kingdom-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Moreover, Trump’s first term in office by and large incensed jihadists. Despite mainstream media claims that the Islamic State was essentially rooting for Trump, the group never expressed a preference for Trump over his opponent, Hillary Clinton. In fact, many supporters of the Islamic State and other jihadist groups accused the president of prosecuting a war against Islam, pointing to his staunch support for Israel and the 2017 travel ban targeting nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries. Jihadists were certainly able to exploit Trump’s more provocative policies — such as his relocation of the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — for propaganda, incitement and recruitment purposes.
But these windfalls for propagandists were nothing in comparison to the gleeful hand-rubbing and cautious respect paid by jihadists since January. The praise, both implicit and explicit, has come with a variety of guises and motivations, according to the data I gathered working with BBC Monitoring. One simple reason for the sympathy is the perception that Trump is an “honest broker” of U.S. foreign policy.
While the Democrats, embodied most recently by Joe Biden’s administration, are perceived to have disguised their policies with diplomacy and soft power, Trump’s forthright business style has been met with cautious respect. Several commentators have recently compared the international system to a “gangland” in which Trump is playing his proper role as a “gang leader,” blackmailing and extorting other less powerful gangs for private gain. The public shakedown and humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the Oval Office in February is one recent example of this racketeering behavior, according to this view.
Hand in hand with this perspective is the (arguably misconceived) notion that Trump is inherently isolationist and therefore less likely to maintain the U.S. troop presence abroad. Jihadists particularly anticipate withdrawals from Iraq and Syria, where U.S. forces currently assist the Iraqi military and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to combat the Islamic State. The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Niger and Chad last year coincided with significant jihadist gains in the Sahel region. If the same were to happen in Syria — a prospect that seems more likely after the recent deal between the new Syrian authorities and the SDF on March 10 — it may benefit jihadist groups such as the Islamic State, which have so far kept a low profile since the new Syrian leadership took charge in December 2024.
A third cause for their celebration is the theory that Trump’s sheer disregard for the rules-based world order and mockery of traditional allegiances will ultimately bring down the West. In 2016, scattered jihadist voices similarly hoped that Trump’s election would augur the collapse of the U.S. and, eventually, the Western world. But the apocalyptic salivating has been more widespread this time around. In a recent edition of Al-Naba, the Islamic State sought to frame Trump and Zelenskyy’s recent clash as the beginning of the end for the West. “The disintegration of the U.S.-European-led world order, the loss of a central command and the emergence of newly forged alliances and camps” is nigh, the Islamic State wrote in an editorial.
Trump’s anticipated hard-line stance on Iran also chimes well with jihadists who are vehemently opposed to Iran’s influence in the Middle East. It may seem contradictory, but in recent years jihadists have cheered as the U.S. and Israel have decimated their enemies, from the assassination of Iran’s Qassem Soleimani in Iraq to key Hezbollah figures in Lebanon. A recent example came in September 2024, when Islamists and jihadists widely celebrated Israel’s killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the chief of the Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah. Islamist jeering focused especially on Hezbollah’s crimes against Sunni Muslims in Lebanon and Syria.
There was some brief debate in online jihadist and Islamist chat rooms about whether it was religiously and morally justified to gloat over Hezbollah’s setbacks, given that this effectively meant cheering for Israel. But those with such scruples appeared to be a minority. The Islamic State dedicated the Al-Naba editorial of Sept. 26 to arguing that a war between “the Jews” and “the Shia” (Shiite Muslims) would ultimately be good for Sunnis, because it would weaken both of their “enemies.” A week later, the group went a step further, describing Iran as an even more dangerous enemy than Israel.
Perhaps more predictable is a mutual appreciation of conservative social values. Jihadists have gone so far as to compare Trump favorably to the new transitional Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa, who is seen as a sellout with loose morals in hard-line jihadist and Islamist circles. The comparison underlines a degree of grudging respect for Trump for his socially conservative decisions. For example, several jihadists and Islamists hailed Trump’s “No Men in Women’s Sports” executive order, comparing the decision to the perceived laxness of Islamic law under the new Syrian authorities. “Trump, the father of ignorance and enemy of religion, demonstrates chivalry which is incomparable to the weakness of [al-Sharaa], enemy of Sharia,” wrote one Islamic State supporter on Telegram. Trump may be an “infidel,” they argue, but at least he looks out for his people and doesn’t tolerate excessive liberal values.
There are other, more abstract concepts flying around this small corner of the internet. Jihadists often view geopolitics through the prism of an eternal civilizational struggle between Christianity and Islam, and more broadly between “Western” and “Eastern” values. Trump’s controversial suggestion that the U.S. could “take over” Gaza appeared to validate this worldview. Online Islamists used artificial intelligence tools to depict Trump as a medieval Crusader on horseback, gazing stoically into the distance. Reading the jihadist discourse around Trump’s return to power, it is sometimes hard to avoid the sense that, for this radical fringe, Trump is fulfilling his assigned role in the ongoing and eternal civilizational struggle between Christians and Muslims.
At the same time, jihadists relish the prospect of Western civilizational decline. There was keen attention paid to comments about the “decline of our civilization” made by Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as the NATO alliance seemed to begin to fray. In response to Meloni’s words, one high-profile jihadist cleric wrote on Telegram that Western civilization had “already begun its downfall.”
Such civilizational musings have much in common with other thinkers beyond jihadist circles. The emphasis on eternal, traditional values is similar to the multipolar world envisioned by Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian writer who is sometimes dubbed “Putin’s philosopher.” In this vision of humankind, the Westphalian system of nation-states is outdated and will ultimately be replaced by great powers connected by kinship and common traditions. Neither is it a far stretch from Samuel P. Huntington’s famous — and frequently criticized — “clash of civilizations” theory, which sees “civilizations” as the most important grouping in global society, set to eclipse nation-states and other modern groupings in an increasingly globalized world.
Jihadists, like many others, will continue to study Trump closely as he rips apart multilateral institutions, spurns traditional allies, undermines liberal values and espouses traditionalist ones. The U.S. remains as much of an enemy to jihadists as it did in the early days of transnational jihad. Recent attacks and incitement suggest that this is unlikely to change any time soon. But jihadists are learning that, sometimes, it is also worth sitting back and watching as the West undoes itself.
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