Is President Trump More Like Viktor Orban or Franklin Pierce

Abstract

Perhaps the most pressing question facing U.S. political science today is how best to understand the Donald Trump presidency. In helping us along toward this goal, I draw on two styles of contemporary political science research—historical analysis of cycles of American political development and interpretive analysis of constitutional politics—as well as my own direct participation in local grassroots organizing since November 2016. The two bodies of existing literature run far wide of the central current of mainstream political science, and drawing directly on my own first-hand experience is even more atypical, but important lessons can be gleaned from each of these three perspectives.