Knowledge production about the Middle East, Edward Said argued, has been a geopolitical project of empire. This is why the following dispatches to Trumpland provide a crucial intervention. Collectively, the dispatches ask the following: What does Trumpism mean from the peripheries of US empire? How is it felt and experienced? Does it diverge from previous administrations and in what ways? In other words, how does the greater Middle East define Trumpism?

These dispatches are snapshots of a dynamic and transforming region. In some cases, political contexts have already transformed from the moment the dispatch was written. In all cases the snapshots are just that: fleeting moments of experience that are moving at rapid speed. What we gain from them is a sense of what US empire looks and feels like from the vantage point of the Middle East region, and this is a view all too frequently overlooked in the story of Trumpism.