Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism - Hardcover

Jacobs, Nicholas; Milkis, Sidney M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0700638849 ISBN 13: 9780700638840

Publisher: University Press of Kansas, 2025

Synopsis

From two expert presidential scholars comes a new answer to why the Trump presidency happened: decades of partisanship and policies have centered the president as the sole focus of American government to create a treacherous system whose danger may far outlive the politics of Donald J. Trump.

The election of Donald J. Trump on November 6, 2016, changed how we understand the American presidency—but this transformation was not of his own making. His unprecedented rise to power led to an administration where Trump brazenly defied established constitutional norms and institutions. Yet, as Nicholas F. Jacobs and Sidney M. Milkis reveal, Trump’s presidency was not merely a shocking departure from tradition, but a symptom of a constitutional disease that had has long afflicted the American polity. They call this condition presidentialism, a dangerous shift towards an executive-centered politics and government that places immense power in the hands of a single individual.

While some scholars of American politics view the Trump presidency as a cult of personality, Jacobs and Milkis argue that his unsettling ascent to the White House was decades in the making, the result of numerous cultural, institutional, and constitutional changes. From aggressively redeploying the federal government’s administrative powers, to using the tools of the modern presidency to undertake a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, Trump’s presidency reveals the peril of a presidency-centered democracy that combines executive aggrandizement and polarizing struggles over the meaning of American identity. The disruptive features of the Trump presidency should not be viewed as an ephemeral phenomenon, nor does Donald Trump’s departure from the White House end the threat that presidentialism poses to American democracy.

Subverting the Republic explains why the Trump presidency happened—and why it might happen again.

About this title

About the Author

Nicholas F. Jacobs is assistant professor of government at Colby College. He is the coauthor of The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America (with Daniel M. Shea) and What Happened to the Vital Center? Presidentialism, Populist Revolt, and the Fracturing of America (with Sidney M. Milkis).

Sidney M. Milkis is the White Burkett Miller Professor of the Department of Politics and Faculty Associate at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. He is the author of many books, including Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy from the University Press of Kansas.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0700638849
• ISBN 13: 9780700638840
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 328