How Did We End Up With Donald Trump?
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- How Did We End Up With Donald Trump?
Hillary Clinton was likely in an upbeat mood on September 9, 2016. Earlier that day, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur had pledged $20 million to Democratic groups backing her presidential candidacy. Later that evening, she spoke at an LGBT fundraiser in Manhattan, before a large crowd that had just been warmed up by Barbra Streisand. Naturally, Clinton's remarks were recorded.1 When she quipped that you could fit "half" of Donald Trump's supporters into a "basket of deplorables," her supporters responded with laughter, cheers, and applause. Clinton was seemingly so pleased by the crowd's laudations that she extemporized her next sentence, which also was about Trump supporters: "They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it."2
Trump pounced on her statement via Twitter, and Clinton apologized the next day. But her gaffe was not soon forgotten. It did not help Clinton's cause when a group of celebrated left-of-center columnists amplified her remarks. Armed with polling and research data, Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Atlantic), Jamelle Bouie (Slate), Charles Blow (the New York Times), Jonathan Chait (New York), and German Lopez (Vox) argued that Clinton had no reason to apologize. A few of them went further. If Clinton had erred at all, they said, it was only because she had downplayed the portion of Trump supporters who were, indeed, hateful bigots.3
There was no gainsaying that the GOP had taken a dark turn. The 2016 presidential campaign should have made clear that Trump was not fit for the Oval Office. He was vain, vicious, and vulgar. No one had ever seen a candidate so childish, so eager to put his base motives and epic resentments on proud display. Trump was picking at the sores of a wounded nation, and he seemed delighted to do so.
Still, the situation required deeper understanding. Scholars, analysts, and political professionals weighed in on the big questions of the day: What foul forces were feeding Trumpism? What knowledge from the past could shed light on our current problems? In June of 2016, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a syllabus for a course titled, "Trump 101."4 This was a collaborative [End Page 310] project involving twenty accomplished scholars from a range of disciplines, but most of them were historians.
The syllabus's authors left no doubt that they regarded Trumpism as a baleful phenomenon. Among the classic works they recommended were Theodor Adorno's (et al.'s) The Authoritarian Personality (1950), Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), and Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1966). Harvey Mansfield, the conservative political philosopher, urged readers to turn attention to such ancient thinkers as Plato, Thucydides, and Aristotle, who warned that when demagogues attain power in democracies, the demagogue is not chiefly to blame; the blame rests with those who elect him.
None of the arguments or ideas embedded in the "Trump 101" syllabus are controversial in academic circles. Still, "Trump 101" was not well received. The problem, according to 349 humanities scholars who signed an open letter that appeared on the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) website, was that the syllabus did not recommend any works by "scholars of color" or "LGBTQ people."
That was true. Although numerous books on the syllabus examined the perniciousness of racism and ethnocentrism, those books were written by white authors. The oversight led the letter's signatories to conclude that Trump 101's authors were "committed to presenting a 'whites only' portrayal of American political history." The letter's 349 signatories took the lack of nonwhite authors on "Trump 101" as evidence that the syllabus was "inappropriate," "highly offensive," "intellectually dishonest," "irresponsible," "racially illiterate," and "an artifact of racism."5
Within a week, two historians who critiqued "Trump 101"—N.D.B. Connolly, of Johns Hopkins University, and Keisha N. Blain, of the University of Pittsburgh—had crowd-sourced an alternative document, "Trump Syllabus 2.0." This new syllabus was five times larger than its predecessor, partly...
