How I'll Be Covering Trump 2.0

Thoughts on the right way to write and teach about the incoming 47th president

President-elect Donald Trump walks onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) with his wife Melania after being named TIME’s “Person of the Year” for the second time on December 12, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

I was planning on teaching an upper-level seminar at Penn in the spring semester titled “The Reactionary Mind.” We would have read Matthew Rose’s very good book on a series of reactionary thinkers (including Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, and Samuel Francis), plus dipped into several others, such as Carl Schmitt, Sayyid Qutb, Rod Dreher, Curtis Yarvin (aka Moldbug), and Costin Alamariu (aka Bronze Age Pervert). We also would have read Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, which does a good job of helping readers grasp the psychological appeal of reactionary ideas at the present moment.

Unfortunately, only three students signed up for the course, so I chose to cancel it rather than wait for it to be cancelled in mid-January for under-enrollment. (The political science department cancels any class with fewer than five students.) In its place, I’ve thrown together a new course that immediately attracted eight students, which is a much better number. (It will likely creep higher over the next month.)

This new and more popular course is titled “Trump 2.0.” Given the considerable overlap of that topic with what I’ll be writing about here over the next six months (and beyond), I figured it might be useful to reflect on how I’ll be thinking, writing, and teaching about the incoming Trump administration. My thoughts on the subject have been shaped by many things—including nine years of observing Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s reaction to him, the reaction of journalists and academics to his first administration, and Trump’s staffing choices over the past six weeks.

I will be spending much less time reacting to what Trump the man is saying
and more time analyzing what his administration
(and members of his party, in Congress and in the states) are doing.