Julien Zarifian is a professor of U.S. history at the University of Poitiers in France, a fellow at the Institut Universitaire de France, and currently a visiting scholar at American University, in Washington, at the School of International Service. He is the author of The United States and the Armenian Genocide: History, Memory, Politics (Rutgers University Press, 2024).
Armenians in the United States, and anyone sensitive to the memory of the dark pages of history, eagerly awaited President Donald Trump's statement commemorating the 110th anniversary of the Armenian genocide on April 24. In his first term, Trump had opted, like all his predecessors before him, for a message in which no mention was made of the term "genocide." Trump's first administration also opposed several draft resolutions from Congress to officially recognize the events of 1915, when more than a million Armenians were killed in a campaign of ethnic cleansing by the Ottoman Empire, as genocide. Yet despite that opposition, the first Trump administration was not able to prevent Congress from voting in favor of finally recognizing the genocide in 2019, a historic vote, although it was non-binding for the executive branch.
Trump's position during his first term was not, however, surprising. It was in line with the refusal of American presidents, at least since President Richard Nixon, to take a position on the Armenian genocide, despite the progressive academic consensus that it was genocide and the growing international recognition of the mass killings of Armenians as such. This enduring refusal in Washington was mostly due to opposition from Turkey, a NATO ally hostile to any mention of the Armenian tragedy orchestrated by its predecessor state, the Ottoman Empire.
Everything suggests Trump's refusal to say "genocide" is above all a political and self-serving choice, guided by the desire to maintain the course of his first term while rejecting and erasing Biden's legacy.
- Julien Zarifian
This year, at 100 days into Trump's second term, the situation might have seemed different. Indeed, in the intervening years, President Joe Biden had reversed the trend of his predecessors, becoming the first American president to officially recognize the massacres of Armenians as genocide. Following in the footsteps of Congress, the April 24 message Biden issued in 2021, and in the following years, addressed the Armenian genocide without ambiguity. With the exception of the authorities in Turkey and Azerbaijan, who have spearheaded opposition to recognition of the genocide, Biden's decision was widely perceived as a considerable step forward, and a permanent shift for future American presidents.
Indeed, many observers thought the die had been cast. It wasn't. The message issued in late April by Trump reverts to the evasive language of so many previous American presidents, without naming the Armenian genocide as such. Trump's statement, like the ones he had issued during his first term, uses the Armenian term Meds Yeghern, which can be translated as "Great Catastrophe." It speaks of "one of the worst disasters of the 20th century" and of "one and a half million Armenians [who] were exiled and marched to their deaths in the final years of the Ottoman Empire," but without using the g-word. While it does not explicitly annul President Biden's policy of genocide recognition, it implicitly does, making the issue of actually calling this what it was a taboo again in the White House. Trump's reversal seemed to make genocide recognition taboo not only in the White House, but in the whole executive branch. As State of Secretary Marco Rubio declared in a social media post commemorating the anniversary, "Today, we remember the Meds Yeghern."
The memory of the 1915 genocide has been weakened by Trump's backtracking.
- Julien Zarifian
The Trump administration's official statements are tantamount to a step backwards, refusing to call the Armenian genocide what it was and realigning the United States with the official position of a denialist state, Turkey. This decision was, nevertheless, not totally unexpected. The Trump administration has never shown any particular interest in human rights and the role they should play in U.S. foreign policy. Trump's fondness for Turkey's strongman president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and his administration's interest in cultivating close ties with Ankara also very likely played a key role.
Still, everything suggests that Trump's refusal to say "genocide" is above all a political and self-serving choice, guided by the desire to maintain the course of his first term while rejecting and erasing the legacy of Joe Biden. Indeed, if Trump had used the term genocide in his April 24 message, like Biden had throughout his presidency, it would have symbolized a break with Trump's own decision not to do so during his first term—even a self-disavowal. It could also have been perceived as Trump following in Biden's footsteps, giving the impression that he was lending credence to his Democratic predecessor's policies. Those are all inconceivable steps for Trump.
The memory of the 1915 genocide has been weakened by Trump's backtracking. One hundred and ten years after the terrible events, it is clear that, in the United States, the Armenian genocide has not attained the level of universality that academic research suggests and that it has attained in other countries, such as France. Despite significant achievements, made possible by the extensive academic work of recent decades and sustained lobbying efforts by the organized Armenian community in the United States, Trump's refusal to say the word "genocide" shows that there is still a long way to go. Historically led by Armenian American circles, education and advocacy efforts for formal recognition of the Armenian genocide would benefit from the widest possible support. Yet it seems hard to come by.
