Julian E. Zelizer - The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment

THE PRESIDENCY OF DONALD J. TRUMP

The Presidency of Donald J. Trump

A First Historical Assessment

Julian E. Zelizer, Editor

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2022 by Princeton University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Zelizer, Julian E., editor.

Title: The presidency of Donald J. Trump : a first historical assessment / edited by Julian Zelizer.

Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021032764 (print) | LCCN 2021032765 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691228945 (paperback) | ISBN 9780691228938 (hardback) | ISBN 9780691228952 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Trump, Donald, 1946 | United StatesPolitics and government2017 | Political cultureUnited StatesHistory21st century. | PresidentsUnited States.

Classification: LCC E912 .P74 2022 (print) | LCC E912 (ebook) | DDC 973.933092dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021032764

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021032765

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Bridget Flannery-McCoy, Alena Chekanov

Jacket/Cover Design: Karl Spurzem

Production: Erin Suydam

Publicity: James Schneider, Kate Farquhar-Thomson

Copyeditor: Elizabeth Schueler

Jacket/Cover Credit: Shutterstock

In honor of all the people whose lives were lost during the COVID-19 pandemic. May their memory be for a blessing.

1. xi
2. Julian E. Zelizer
3. Julian E. Zelizer
4. Nicole Hemmer
5. Angus Burgin
6. Kathleen Belew
7. Geraldo Cadava
8. Leandra Zarnow
9. Mae Ngai
10. Jason Scott Smith
11. Bathsheba Demuth
12. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
13. Margaret OMara
14. Jeffrey A. Engel
15. James Mann
16. Daniel C. Kurtzer
17. Beverly Gage
18. Merlin Chowkwanyun
19. Michael Kazin
20. Gregory P. Downs

KATHLEEN BELEW is author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. She has appeared as a CNN contributor and on The Rachel Maddow Show, Frontline, Fresh Air, and All Things Considered. She is assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago.

ANGUS BURGIN is associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression, which won awards from the Organization of American Historians and the History of Economics Society, and serves as a coeditor of Modern Intellectual History.

GERALDO CADAVA is the Wender-Lewis Teaching and Research professor at Northwestern University. He has written two books: The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump and Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland.

MERLIN CHOWKWANYUN is the Donald Gemson Assistant Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia Universitys Mailman School of Health. He is the author of All Health Politics Is Local: Community Battles for Medical Care and Environmental Health. He is the principal investigator for ToxicDocs.org, a National Science Foundationfunded repository of millions of once-secret documents on industrial poisons, and he recently served on the Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era.

BATHSHEBA DEMUTH is assistant professor of history and environment and society at Brown University, where she specializes in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her multiple-prizewinning first book, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, was named a Nature Top Ten Book of 2019 and Best Book of 2019 by NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal, among others. Demuth holds a BA and MA from Brown University, and an MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in publications including the American Historical Review and the New Yorker.

GREGORY P. DOWNS is professor of history at University of California, Davis, and the author of three books about emancipation and Reconstruction, as well as a prize-winning short story collection. With Kate Masur, he authored the National Park Services Reconstruction theme study that helped lead to the creation of the first National Park site devoted to Reconstruction, at Beaufort, South Carolina. He and Masur coedit the Journal of the Civil War Era. With Scott Nesbit, he created Mapping Occupation, a digital history of Reconstruction. With Masur, Hilary Green, and Scott Hancock, he runs the #wewantmorehistory campaign for creative public history.

JEFFREY A. ENGEL is the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. He is the author or editor of thirteen books on American foreign policy and presidential politics; his latest is When the World Seemed New: George H.W. Bush and the End of the Cold War. In 2019, SMU Residential Life students named him their campus-wide HOPE Professor of the Year.

BEVERLY GAGE is professor of history and American studies at Yale University, specializing in twentieth-century U.S. political history. She is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror, which examines the history of terrorism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the 1920 Wall Street bombing. Her latest project, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the American Century, is a biography of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. In addition to her teaching and research, Gage has written for numerous journals and magazines and is currently a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine.

NICOLE HEMMER is an associate research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project at Columbia University and author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics and Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. She is the founding editor of Made by History, the historical analysis section of the Washington Post, and a columnist at CNN Opinion. She also cohosts the podcasts Past Present and This Day in Esoteric Political History.

MICHAEL KAZIN teaches history at Georgetown University and is emeritus editor of Dissent. He is the author of seven books of U.S. history on topics ranging from the language of populism and the life of William Jennings Bryan to the American left and the movement that opposed World War I. His newest book is