Historians seem to have a problem with Trump. I do not mean by this the dominance of partisan hostility to Trump in the ranks of the historical profession, or even the way in which many historians have been offended by the way in which the president has treated history as a resource to be exploited,…
Tag: Donald Trump
Policy Series 2021-5: Disrupt and Expose, but Clarify: Trump’s Legacy
Much has happened since July 2017 when my previous contribution to this H-Diplo project appeared.[1] The central purpose of that essay was to push back against those who were then castigating President Donald Trump for tearing down a norms-based liberal international order that successive U.S. administrations had ostensibly erected since World War II. I strenuously…
Policy Series 2021-4: Trump to the Intelligence Community: You’re Fired
Assessments of President Donald Trump in any future history of the U.S. intelligence Community (IC) will differ dramatically from those of any of his predecessors. While Trump made little use of the IC to inform or implement policy, he abused and ignored it incessantly. The closest precedent is Richard Nixon. Yet Nixon reserved his scorn…
Policy Series 2021-2: Leo Ribuffo and “the “Paranoid Style” in American (Intellectual) Politics”
Leo Ribuffo should be writing this reflection on the four years since Donald Trump’s election. Diane Labrosse kindly asked me to contribute after reading my 2017 remarks celebrating Ribuffo’s pathbreaking 1983 The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War. Andrew Hartman put together the roundtable that took…
Policy Series 2021-1: Trump ReTweeted
It is interesting to look back on the predictions made by contributors on the eve of the Trump administration. They run the gamut from seeing him as a radical departure from previous presidents in his policies to someone radically different in style but not markedly different from his predecessors in his policies. Most assume that…
Policy Series 2021- Introduction from the Editors
Introduction from the Editors General Editors: Robert Jervis, Stacie Goddard, Diane Labrosse, and Joshua Rovner Donald Trump’s election forced international relations scholars to reassess our views of international politics. In the quarter-century between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Trump, scholars took some big things for granted. They assumed there was…
Review Essay 48 on Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever
One of Donald Trump’s superpowers is to dominate all spheres of American life, and the book industry is no exception. The nonfiction market is littered with best-sellers about life in the Age of Trump. The past two years have generated numerous genres of political tomes: the tell-alls by those who have served in his administration,[1]…
Policy Series: Fractured: Trump’s Foreign Policy after Two Years
The presidency of Donald Trump is the strangest act in American history; unprecedented in form, in style an endless sequence of improvisations and malapropisms.[1] But in substance there is continuity, probably much more than is customarily recognized. It is hard to recognize the continuity, amid the daily meltdowns (and biennial shutdowns), but it exists. In…
Policy Series: The Unprecedented President: Donald Trump and the Media in Historical Perspective
Since the start of the twentieth century, when the White House first became “a full-time propaganda machine,” the president’s relationship with the media has been in a state of constant flux.[1] The underlying cause has been the media’s technological evolution, from its newspaper and magazine roots to the radio and television era, and finally to…
