The Trump Presidency and the Structure of Modern American Politics

Abstract

How much of politics is specific to its actors and how much is the reflection of an established structure is a perennial concern of political analysts, one that becomes especially intense with the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump. In order to have a template for assigning the outcomes of politics to structure rather than idiosyncrasy, we begin with party balance, ideological polarization, substantive content, and a resulting process of policy-making drawn from the immediate postwar period. The analysis then jumps forward with that same template to the modern world, dropping first the Trump candidacy and then the Trump presidency into this framework. What emerges is a modern electoral world with increased prospects for what might be called off-diagonal candidacies and a policy-making process that gathers Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump together as the modern presidents.

Comparative Historical Analysis

“…There were, unfortunately, no articles submitted in this time frame in the American political development tradition. Over the course of our editorship, however, we have published several articles in this vein that would have fit nicely in this section, such as Skowronek and Orren (2020), Shafer andWagner (2019), Jacobs, King, andMilkis (2019), Lieberman et al (2019), and Weir and Schirmer (2018).…”

Race and Politics in America

“…The difference between democracy and autocracy will hinge on factors like whether our economy goes into recession under a Democratic president. The failure of democracy itself may be even more academic, because the last time a party has held the presidency for three consecutive terms was Reagan–Bush I, which is more than 30 years ago (Shafer and Wagner 2019). The question remains whether we have enough time to break this impasse.…”

Party Domination and Base Mobilization: Donald Trump and Republican Party Building in a Polarized Era

“…87 Partisan polarization has also been described as a cause of Trump's rise to power in the first placewhich may help to explain why his strategy seems such a natural "fit" with his political environment. 88 Relatedly, the consolidation of the two parties' geographical bases of supportwhere votes for presidential, Senate, and House candidates have become increasingly aligned in recent years 89 and the imperatives of the Electoral College may well recommend a strategy focused on reassembling Trump's 2016 electoral coalition and boosting the turnout of groups that supported him in his first election. 90 It is certainly not an irrational or implausible path to victory: Republicanleaning geographic areas now constitute a sufficient base to win control of government.…”