Century Foundation Fellow Asks If Trump's Victory the Jump-Start Civics Education Needed
The 2016 campaign produced the unthinkable: the election of a presidential candidate whom members of his own party described as a classic authoritarian. How is it possible that tens of millions of Americans supported a presidential candidate who consistently rejected basic constitutional principles that previously had been accepted across the political spectrum? Donald Trump won despite trampling on cherished American ideals, including freedom of religion (proposing a ban on Muslim immigrants), freedom of the press (calling for opening up libel laws to go after critics), the rule of law (endorsing the murder of the families of terrorists), and the independence of the judiciary (questioning the bias of a judge based on ethnicity).
What set Donald Trump apart, wrote the University of Texas historian Jeffrey Tulis to The New York Times, is that “no other previous major party presidential candidate has felt so unconstrained by … constitutional norms.” A former top aide to President George W. Bush wrote that in the Republican nominee, “we have reached the culmination of the founders’ fears: Democracy is producing a genuine threat to the American form of self-government...”