{"id":94053,"date":"2016-04-22T08:34:38","date_gmt":"2016-04-22T16:34:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=94053"},"modified":"2016-04-22T08:39:35","modified_gmt":"2016-04-22T16:39:35","slug":"the-rise-of-trump-studies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=94053","title":{"rendered":"The Rise Of Trump Studies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Politico<\/a>: There\u2019s a measure of irony in that Trump\u2019s candidacy\u2014grounded in an anti-elite message and regular bashing of the political correctness \u201ccrap\u201d rooted on college campuses\u2014is such a boon to professors. Though Trump flaunts his academic bona fides\u2014the degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and an exceptional vocabulary (\u201cI know words. I have the best words.\u201d)\u2014his almost proud indifference to detail and accuracy has made him perhaps the least popular candidate among the American professoriate in recent memory. None of the two dozen professors and student researchers interviewed for this story signaled they were a Trump supporter…<\/p>\n

By research standards, the Trump phenomenon is still young, but fields are littered with the certainties it\u2019s already shaken. For political scientists, Trump\u2019s primary and caucus victories challenge the reigning belief that a strong party institution is the ultimate key to electoral success. For communications pros, his freewheeling use of social media and a penchant for saying things that alienate different segments of society shatter assumptions about what should kill a presidential campaign. Trump has even put his own imprimatur on the conspiracy theory playbook that typically targets powerful people and institutions. He has dropped the Obama birther shtick he peddled in 2012 in favor of a rhetorical dog whistle the size of a tuba that attacks far more vulnerable populations like Mexican immigrants and Muslims.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s candidacy is also a cannonball aimed straight at perhaps the most influential book on electoral politics in the past decade: The Party Decides, which argues establishment insiders ultimately determine who wins a presidential nomination, despite the primary voting process. Martin Cohen, the James Madison University political science professor who co-authored the book, has found his work the subject in recent months of an intense online debate over whether its findings hold up\u2014or whether Trump\u2019s success, in blunt defiance of his own party\u2019s elders, is undercutting the entire idea. \u201cCertainly, he\u2019s had an impact on the way we think about politics and how they are supposed to work,\u201d Cohen acknowledged, while still insisting that more study needs to be done to assess whether Trump is just an aberration who doesn\u2019t change the fundamental findings spelled out in his book\u2019s thesis…<\/p>\n

Of course, academics like MacWilliams aren\u2019t shying away from revealing some of their early findings. After all, the media beast is hungry and the opportunities for self-promotion are abundant while Trump\u2019s campaign is still at the center of the political world. And there are numerous outlets hungry for their kind of analysis, from the Washington Post\u2019s Monkey Cage blog to Vox, Huffington Post and Politico Magazine.
\n\u201cI feel like a prostitute,\u201d said Restad, the Oslo-based professor who earlier this month wrote an essay for the London School of Economics\u2019 website about how American exceptionalism has returned with a force via the Trump candidacy. \u201cIf you put Trump in a title people will click on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

…Obviously, nobody knows what will happen at the conclusion of the 2016 election, but some are already focusing on what would be the ultimate research bonanza: a Trump presidency, perhaps the strangest and least predictable political development in American history. Last month, for example, University of Virginia law professor Michael Livermore published a commentary predicting Trump \u201cwould face huge challenges in effectively overseeing the executive branch and pursuing a coherent policy agenda.\u201d
\nBut the very thing that makes Trump so interesting from a scholar\u2019s standpoint also makes him impossible to pin down conclusively: He keeps producing a steady stream of surprises.
\n\u201cThe way I like to describe it to my friends is to imagine we were astrophysicists and there\u2019s this weird blob of ectoplasm that seems to defy all laws of time and space,\u201d Oliver said. \u201cWe\u2019re desperately trying to get our instruments out to measure it while it\u2019s going on.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Politico: There\u2019s a measure of irony in that Trump\u2019s candidacy\u2014grounded in an anti-elite message and regular bashing of the political correctness \u201ccrap\u201d rooted on college campuses\u2014is such a boon to professors. Though Trump flaunts his academic bona fides\u2014the degree from … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29752],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-donald-trump"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=94053"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94058,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94053\/revisions\/94058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=94053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=94053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=94053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}