A second-order preference is a preference over preferences. This paper addresses the role that second-order preferences play in a theory of instrumental rationality. I argue that second-order preferences have no role to play in the prescription or evaluation of actions aimed at ordinary ends. Instead, second-order preferences are relevant to prescribing or evaluating actions only insofar as those actions have a role in changing or maintaining first-order preferences. I establish these claims by examining and rejecting the view that second-order preferences (...) trump first-order preferences. I also examine and reject the view that second-order preferences give additional normative force to an agent’s preferred first-order preferences. I conclude by arguing that second-order preferences should be integrated into an agent’s object-level preference ordering, and by explaining how best to make sense of this integration. (shrink)

By revisiting late-Weimar debates between Carl Schmitt and two left-wing critics, Otto Kirchheimer and Franz L Neumann, we can shed light on the surprising alliance of populist politics with key tenets of economic liberalism, an alliance that vividly manifests itself in the political figure and retrograde policies of Donald Trump. In the process, we can begin to fill a striking lacuna in recent scholarly literature on populism, namely its failure to pay proper attention to matters of political economy. We (...) can also perhaps begin to make sense of the roots of Trump’s assault on the US federal state: formal law and its organizational basis, modern bureaucracy, represent potential restraints on the alliance of populism with neoliberalism. (shrink)

Donald Trump has been a godsend for those of us who teach critical thinking. For he is a fount of manipulative rhetoric, glaring fallacies, conspiracy theories, fake news, and bullshit. In this paper I draw on my own recent teaching experience in order to discuss both the usefulness and the limits of using Trump examples in teaching critical thinking. In Section One I give the framework of the course; in Section Two I indicate Trump’s relevance to many important concepts (...) in the course; and in Section Three I argue that critical thinking instructors should restrain themselves from overreliance on Trump-examples. (shrink)

This article explores the appeal of President Donald Trump’s persona in North American society, appeal that enabled the formation of a fan-base-like loyal and passionate constituency. The analysis...

The article shows that Donald Trump used three distinct but mutually supportive strategies to ascent to power in the 2016 elections. It argues that sovereignty in general uses these three strategies to justify its power. But it is only one of them, the one linked to a biopolitical conception of sovereignty, that allows for lack of authority. Trump used this strategy to great effect in 2016, but the article argues that it will be hard to pursue the same strategy (...) from the Oval Office. (shrink)

This essay critically analyzes two dominant narratives that explain and lament the rise of Donald Trump in the United States. First, I extend Jill Locke’s (2016) concept of “The Lament that Shame is Dead" to show the limitations of criticizing Trump in terms of the “death of shame.” I then turn my attention to the problems inerent in recent characterizations of Trump as a petulant child. Drawing from Locke (2016) on shame and Freud (1914) and Lee Edelman (2004) on (...) the politics of “the child,” I argue that characterizing Trump as shameless, childish, or as a shameless child only affirms, rather than deposes, Trump’s right-wing populist strategy and keeps the focus on him as a personality rather than on the broader social and political context in which he emerged. I argue this has implications for the rise of right-wing populism in the West, more broadly. (shrink)

The text describes main US missile defence efforts in the first years of D. Trump’s administration. The analysis of current aspects of BMD (Ballistic Missile Defence) deployments is enhanced by probability analysis examining missile defence reliability. Donald Trump took office in the time of increased military competition between the West and Russia and a dangerous regional crisis related to North Korean nuclear arsenal and its ballistic tests. BMD appeared to bring additional chances to US deterrence options in regional scale, (...) allowing more successful first strike or active defence posture. Notably, D. Trump’s administration managed to raise defence expenditures including BMD spending. (shrink)

Questions of ethics and politics have a long tradition in the classroom as well as the political world. Those who act in the political realm¿including the media, political strategists and consultants, educators, and religious leaders¿are in professions for which a clear code of conduct or an accepted set of ethical norms exists. By contrast, Donald J. Trump, as candidate and as President, has upended the political and ethical context in which he and others operate. This book explores emerging ethical (...) questions that face professionals interacting with a new executive order. Some say the age of Trump is unique and that the norms of ethical professional behavior must be bent to meet this challenge. Others maintain that responding to someone like Trump is precisely why their profession has ethical norms, and that they must put their judgments on hold and respond in what has always been deemed the appropriate professional manner. Each chapter opens with an introduction setting the framework of ethical analysis for a particular profession, is followed by original contributions by notable practitioners, and concludes with a set of questions for students and other readers to ponder and discuss. (shrink)

This short video essay was presented at Glasgow Buzzcut Symposium 'Side Burns' on Wednesday 5th April 2017. It is called The Weird World of Donald Trump. It argues how America’s current encounter with the world of Donald Trump is akin to the weird realism of H.P Lovecraft, drawing upon Mark Fisher’s account of the weird - defined by Lovecraft’s fiction - as an encounter that can encompass grotesque sensations of fear when experiencing an object or being that shape (...) shifts and transforms itself. The weird, in this sense challenges and creeps into the perceived safety and certainty of everyday life to frightening political effect. The essay presents a short reading of Trump’s world against the philosophy of Lovecraft’s weird as a way of thinking about how the encounter with it might be understood and challenged. If a community can find a language to describe the sensation of what they are experiencing then there is hope that it can be collectively overcome, claiming a space within the weird, facing up to the thing on the doorstep. (shrink)

ResumenLa descortesía de Donald Trump ha causado preocupación en su país y en casi todo el planeta por los efectos geopolíticos que su discurso racista, xenofóbico y misógino podría tener en la política mundial (Wodak y Krzyżanowski, 2017). En América Latina, México ha sido blanco de su discurso ofensivo y esto ha generado respuestas de diferentes sectores de la sociedad. En este trabajo, nos concentramos en la respuesta que el diario La Jornada ha dado a los insultos y amenazas (...) contra los migrantes mexicanos y de otras nacionalidades desde su campaña electoral para presidente cuando amenazó con construir un muro entre Estados Unidos y México. Planteamos que aquí la descortesía es una práctica política de (auto)legitimación ideológica que amerita un estudio más allá de la construcción de la imagen social de los interlocutores individualmente porque, en este caso, se trata de una descortesía con implicaciones sociales, económicas y políticas para el diálogo internacional. Desde una perspectiva lingüística, interaccional y crítica (Bolívar, 2018, 2019) analizamos la situación, analizamos la situación entre México y EUA a través de los editoriales de La Jornada, concebidos como un espacio para el diálogo mediado por la prensa. Analizamos un corpus de editoriales que comprende de 2016 a 2020. El estudio revela cómo funciona la descortesía en la práctica política de Trump y la forma en que La Jornada responde en su rol de actor social. (shrink)

When Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States in November 2016, many observers in the U.S. and international environmental communities began voicing concerns about the range...

Opinion: the current inhabitant of the White House may be displaying some surrealist touches but politics is no place for ambiguity.

The rise to power of Donald Trump has been shocking in many ways. One of these was that it disrupted the preexisting consensus that overt racism would be death to a national political campaign. In this paper, I argue that Trump made use of what I call “racial figleaves”—additional utterances that provide just enough cover to give reassurance to voters who are racially resentful but don’t wish to see themselves as racist. These figleaves also, I argue, play a key (...) role in shifting our norms about what counts as racist: they bring it about that something which would previously have been seen as revealing obvious racism is now seen as the sort of thing that a nonracist might say. This gives them tremendous power to corrupt not just our political discourse but our culture more broadly. (shrink)

In the 2016 American presidential election, 81% of White evangelicals voted for Donald Trump despite the obvious fact that he had little knowledge or interest in Christianity. This has continued to puzzle many commentators, as well as conservative Christian leaders. This paper argues that Theodor W. Adorno’s 1943 analysis of the radio broadcasts of Martin Luther Thomas provides insight into Trump’s popularity among evangelicals. Adorno compares the fascist-style broadcasts of Thomas to a pagan religious sect. He describes this practice (...) as “racketeering in religion,” which effectively results in the “liquidation of religion.” The article demonstrates ways in which this analysis is relevant for understanding the relationship between Trump and American Evangelicals. (shrink)

This paper uses a social semiotic perspective to analyze Donald Trump’s domination of media coverage of the US presidential campaign from 16 June 2015, when he announced his candidacy for nomination as the Republican candidate until 8 November 2016, when he was elected as President of the United States. The paper argues that one of the keys to Donald Trump’s domination of media coverage was that, in presenting himself and his agenda, he foregrounded interpersonal meaning by making himself (...) the focus of attention of the campaign through strategies that invaded various semiotic spaces to form a “sub-semiosphere” of Trump dogma. The effects of this were that what he did and what he said captured the majority of media attention at the expense of his opponents, enabling him to win the election, despite his complete lack of background experience as a politician. (shrink)

With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, the discourse of an authoritarianism and the echoes of a fascist past have moved from the margins to the center of American politics. A culture of war buttressed by the forces of white supremacy and militarization has been unleashed in a series of policies designed to return the United States to a history in which the public sphere was largely white and Christian, and the economy and (...) the state were governed by a ruling corporate elite. Militarization and a war culture have become normalized in the United States and this article explores the ways in which a neo-fascism has emerged that furthers war not only abroad but also at home, especially with regards to the ongoing assaults waged by the state against Muslims, immigrants, women’s reproductive rights, and poor minorities of class and color. Against the rise of neo--fascism, this article advances the idea that education is central to any viable notion of politics, that progressives... (shrink)

This article revisits Jeffrey Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency in the age of Trump, discussing the debates to which it originally responded, its core thesis and empirical evidence, as well as its impact on political science in the last three decades. The article’s second half turns to a recent critique of Tulis’s thesis by Ann C. Pluta, which manifests many of the misunderstandings that have persisted since The Rhetorical Presidency’s original publication. Habits of thought revealed in Pluta’s misunderstandings, I argue, are (...) emblematic of the political culture that is amenable to the simplistic yet politically effective appeals characteristic of rhetorical presidents like Donald Trump. Elements of the broader political-science world that are on display in Pluta’s article are symptomatic of political pathologies sustained and aggravated by the culture of the polity that political scientists inhabit and purport to study—the culture of the rhetorical presidency. (shrink)

The election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States reminded us that climate deniers are anything but endangered species. In this short paper, we discuss President Trump’s position on climate change in the wider context of climate controversies and denial. In particular, we put it into perspective with other notorious contrarian leaders and their influence on national and international climate politics. Finally, we provide a brief analysis of President Trump discourses on climate change and (...) discuss them in light of reflections about post-truth politics. (shrink)

Drawing on the distinction between dominance and prestige as two evolutionarily grounded strategies for attaining status in human groups, this essay examines an underappreciated feature of Donald Trump's appeal to the millions of American voters who elected him president in 2016—his uncanny ability to channel primal dominance. Like the alpha male of a chimpanzee colony, Trump leads through intimidation, bluster, and threat, and through the establishment of short-term, opportunistic relationships with other high-status agents. Whereas domain-specific expertise confers status in (...) the prestige paradigm, dominant leaders derogate expertise in order to establish a direct, authoritarian connection to their constituency. Trump's leadership style derives readily from his personality makeup, which entails a combustible temperament mixture of high extraversion and low agreeableness, a motivational agenda centered on extreme narcissism, and an internalized life story that tracks the exploits of an intrepid warrior who must forever fight to win in a Hobbesian world of carnage. (shrink)

When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential elections with the help of 81 percent of self-identified white evangelicals, liberal commentators, relying on folk-conceptions of religion that privileged concepts like morality and belief, struggled to understand how someone who seemed to lack both could garner such support. Since then scholars have provided various explanations, relating to Christian nationalism evangelical appeals to authoritarianism, and straightforward racism. This article aims to expand this discussion by analyzing the way that evangelical Christian Zionists have (...) supported Trump by rhetorically identifying him as God’s instrument on account of his support for Israel and withdrawal of the United States from the Iran Nuclear Deal. In addition to analyzing the process by which Trump is constituted as God’s instrument, the article also demonstrates more generally how religious discourse functions as a legitimating discourse for those who seek to gain, or maintain, positions of power. (shrink)

The article analyzes the process of modification of Japan’s foreign policy after Donald Trump’s election as US president. As short- and middle-range aims of Japan’s diplomatic strategy were outlined with expectation of victory of Hillary Clinton, Tokyo was forced to abruptly change its policy. Relying on the neoclassical realist theory, the article examines the complex interaction between the external factors, such as security threats from North Korea or China, and domestic factors both in Japan and the US, that is (...) personal, institutional, societal and economic determinants. It is argued that while it was strategic convergence between Tokyo and Washington that enabled relatively smooth cooperation between Prime Minister Abe and President Trump, internal factors, such as right-wing credentials of both decision makers, distorted and to some extent facilitated this process. (shrink)

Over the past two years, several political commentators have drawn on Plato’s Republic to shed light on our last presidential election. Many of these authors emphasize the features of democracy that make it especially susceptible to demagoguery, which heralds the arrival of tyranny, and then go on to relate this to Donald Trump’s political ascension. The problem with these analyses is that they tend to unquestioningly adopt Plato’s pessimistic view of democracy. While Plato’s criticisms do have the virtue of (...) making us aware of democracy’s weaknesses, we would argue that our present political circumstances did not issue from these flaws. This makes these criticisms irrelevant. Other commentators come closer to the mark when they talk about Plato’s passages addressing the person of the tyrant in Book IX, but what is lacking in these accounts is a context that more fully explains why the tyrant is what he is, in Platonic terms. In this essay we argue that other parts of the Republic, particularly Book IV, can tell us much more about Trump and his presidency. This part of the dialogue deals with Plato’s conception of human nature, which he presents in his discussion of the soul or psyche [ψυχή]. An examination of these passages will grant us insight into the Trump’s actions and utterances and show that the president is not only intellectually but also temperamentally unqualified for his office, which should give citizens good cause for worry. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to analyze the relationship between Singapore and the People’s Republic of China in the light of the current policy of the President of the United States Donald Trump. The point of reference for the presented analysis is the foreign policy of the former President Barack Obama, based on the strategy known as “pivot to Asia” – the strategic turnabout of the United States to the Asia-Pacific region. One of its main objectives was the (...) signing of a multilateral agreement on the establishment of a free trade zone, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), bringing together 12 countries. The main subject of the present analysis is to examine the impact of Donald Trump’s decision of January 2017 to withdraw from the TPP trade agreement on the relations between the remaining signatories of the agreement, as well as to examine Beijing’s actions, which may seek to increase its sphere of influence in Asia through the breakdown of TPP. The main part of the research is focused on the triangle politics concept in international politics, which will include China, Singapore and the United States. Besides the two largest economic powers, Singapore is included because of its membership in the TPP and ASEAN, and due to its strong economy and its population (predominantly) of Chinese origin it can be viewed as the “fifth column” or may otherwise play a role in the Greater China concept. (shrink)

Throughout the 2016 US presidential election, pundits repeatedly described Donald Trump as a performance artist and his campaign as performance art. Meanwhile, his alt-right supporters were mounting performance art shows, debating the meaning of Marina Abramović’s work, and developing their own theories of political performance. For experts in performance theory, such punditry and provocation is like the image in a funhouse mirror. It’s hard to make sense of such bizarre, distorted images—let alone to recognize ourselves in them. This article (...) insists that, nonetheless, we should try. Trump and his movement pose special challenges to American political culture—and also to academic performance theory. His rise has revealed the limitations of a politics (and performance theory) based on norms and their transgression. It has also given the lie to politicians’ false belief that they (and only they) are not performing their politics. The challenge now—for academics, activists, citizens, and journalists alike—is to articulate how performance works, how it provides models of cultural power. (shrink)

This study investigates how the explicitly anti-prosocial and anti-pro-environmental speech by political elites affects firms’ environmental and social (E&S) performance. Using the case of the Donald J. Trump (DJT) campaign for president in the United States when he gave out controversial and inflammatory remarks, including those regarding E&S issues, we find that local firms’ E&S performance decreased significantly in the year following DJT’s presidential campaign rally compared with firms in other geographic areas where there was no DJT’s presidential campaign (...) event. A further test indicates that the change in firms’ E&S performance can be driven by DJT remarks’ influence on local social norms shift. Furthermore, we show that the post-rally decrease of local firms’ E&S performance is more pronounced for local firms that operate primarily locally or local firms that are more sensitive to political uncertainty. Taken together, these findings indicate that political events such as political elites giving remarks can affect firms’ E&S performance. (shrink)

At a recent rally, Donald Trump resumed a habit he had developed during his election-rallies and read out the lyrics to a song. It tells the Aesopian fable of The Farmer and the Snake: A half frozen snake is taken in by a kind-hearted person but bites them the moment it is revived. Trump tells the fable to make a point about Islamic immigrants and undocumented immigrants from Southern and Central America: He claims the immigrants will cause problems and (...) much stricter immigration-policies are needed. I assume that Trump treats the fable as an argumentative device for supporting his stance on immigration. He uses it as a source-analogue both for the conclusion that immigrants will cause problems and for changing the frame in which immigrants and those willing to let them enter are seen. This gives me opportunity to examine the effect fables have as argumentative devices. Fables are a popular and effective choice for political argumentation. They are slimmed down, semi-abstract narratives, well suited for directing the audience's attention to a few properties of an otherwise complex situation. However, this also makes it easy to use them for manipulating an audience into oversimplifying complex contexts and stereotyping human beings. (shrink)

When political philosopher Hannah Arendt introduced the concept of ‘banality of evil’ she did so in reference to the actions of Germans who appropriated the doctrines of National Socialism “thoughtlessly” and without obvious intentions to do evil. But, Arendt’s description of this phenomenon entails that such banality can be found even in a democracy such as the USA. The relation of law and morality must therefore be unambiguous to defend the rule of law against the rule of men. However, a (...) legal philosophy other than positivism is essential to safeguard the Republic against the overreach of executive power. And, where the psychopathology of Donald Trump is at the core of America’s electoral discontent in 2020, as mental health professionals have argued, there is all the more reason to take Arendt’s counsel especially seriously today. It is in this context that it is argued here that the American public must beware Trump’s inducement of America’s banality of evil. (shrink)

This article frames Trump's politics through a genealogy of propaganda, going back to P.T. Barnum in the 19th century and moving through the crowd psychologist Gustave Le Bon and the public relations counsel Edward Bernays in the 20th. This genealogy shows how propaganda was developed as a tool by eager professionals who would hire themselves to the elite to control the masses. Trump’s propaganda presents a break in that he has not only removed professionals from control over his propaganda, he (...) has mobilized it as a force against them. His lower and middle class supporters may not materially gain from Trump’s politics, but they get to vent their ressentiment on the professional class and see them too become the targets of propagandistic control. Ultimately, the conflict between working class whites, those without college degrees, and professionals earns little for its participants and occludes the role that elites play in class dynamics in the United States. This article adds substance and context to the claims that Trump’s appeal is anti-professional while showing that the claims that his supporters are ‘voting against their interests’ does not reflect the real psychological benefits many Trumpists get from supporting him. (shrink)

Following the storming of the US Capitol building, Donald Trump became digitally toxic, and was deplatformed from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube—as well as a host of other social media networks. Subsequent debate has centred on the questions of whether these companies did the right thing and the possible ramifications of their actions for the future of digital societies along with their democratic organisation. This article seeks to answer this question through examining complex, and seemingly contradictory notions (legality and (...) the protection of public interest vs issues of democratic legitimacy and digital sovereignty) and argues that reform is needed to determine who, in the future, will control the infosphere—and how. (shrink)

If there is one generally acknowledged “take away” from the election of Trump, it may well be that the old divisions between right and left no longer hold. Trump supporters were seemingly moved less by traditional conservative appeals to free markets and small government than by anger against perceived condescension and indifference on the part of the cultural elite to their own deeply held moral beliefs and sense of personal dignity. Kant offers both insight into and potential remedies for the (...) dilemmas growing out of our present situation. This is particularly true in matters of economic policy and civic engagement, where “top down” solutions have often left their would-be beneficiaries feeling ever more powerless and disrespected. By addressing these concerns in the name of common citizenship, Kant’s thought helps restore the meaning of the core constitutional principles of freedom, equality, and civic dignity that Trump’s presidency increasingly puts in question. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Donald Trump’s victory depended on the defection of hundreds of longstanding Democratic communities. Trump appealed to these communities partly because he behaves like some of their most beloved politicians. Like the president, these politicians are brazen, thin skinned, nepotistic, and offer an older, boss-centered vision of politics. Trump—the anti-establishment outsider—appealed to voters in these communities because he resembles the local insiders. This appeal widens an old fault line inside the Democratic Party.

As President, Donald Trumps faces two sorts of conflict of interest. The first are conflicts of interest other Presidents also faced, though Trump’s are “writ large.” These seem—as a practical matter—unavoidable now, hard to escape, not to be much changed by disclosure, and not even much subject to management. The other sort of conflict of interest seems to be without resolution even in principle while Trump remains both President and the person he is. These conflicts of interest are the (...) product of the same life that made him President. He cannot be both chief executive of a republic (as his oath of office requires him to be) and the royal autocratic central to his business brand. (shrink)

As President, Donald Trumps faces two sorts of conflict of interest. The first are conflicts of interest other Presidents also faced, though Trump’s are “writ large.” These seem—as a practical matter—unavoidable now, hard to escape, not to be much changed by disclosure, and not even much subject to management. The other sort of conflict of interest seems to be without resolution even in principle while Trump remains both President and the person he is. These conflicts of interest are the (...) product of the same life that made him President. He cannot be both chief executive of a republic (as his oath of office requires him to be) and the royal autocratic central to his business brand. (shrink)

This paper advances the somewhat unphilosophical thesis that “Trump is gross” to draw attention to the need to take matters of taste seriously in politics. I begin by exploring the slipperiness of distinctions between aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics, subsequently suggesting that we may need to pivot toward the aesthetic to understand and respond to the historical moment we inhabit. More specically, I suggest that, in order to understand how Donald Trump was elected President of the United States and in (...) order to stem the damage that preceded this and will ensue from it, we need to understand the power of political taste (and distaste, including disgust) as both a force of resistance and as a force of normalization. (shrink)

For the last two years journalists have asked whether Donald Trump is a Machiavellian “prince.” But a truly “Machiavellian” prince would never be suspected as such. He would follow Machiavelli’s advice always to appear to be merciful, faithful, humane, honest, and religious. Trump does not manifest any of these qualities. To prevent him from enacting dangerous policies, Machiavelli would advise us to rely on the checks and balances established by our constitution. Some critics have argued that the constitutional checks (...) are no longer effective, because the American people have become corrupt. The problem, however, is not popular corruption so much as a lack of leadership and imagination in designing remedies for the weakening of the constitutional checks that have resulted from changes in election laws and advances in modern technology. (shrink)

For years official development assistance (ODA) has been one of the most important forms of financial assistance provided to developing countries by highly developed countries. Despite the controversy over the effectiveness of assistance, it has become a permanent element of the international aid system. With the election of Donald Trump and one of the key slogans of his campaign – America first – the political climate around official development assistance is changing. The aim of the article is to analyze (...) the role of official development assistance in political declarations of the current president of the United States. (shrink)

The slogans of social movements are often put forward as simple truths, so that advocacy has consisted in changing social conditions such that these new truth claims are accepted as true: that women’s rights are human rights, that Black lives matter. Social movements critical of the political ascendance of Donald Trump, however, have been concerned not merely with this or that truth claim, but with the status—epistemological, social, and political—of truth itself. Those examining this post-truth moment have often turned (...) to Friedrich Nietzsche, who for many is synonymous with the kind of postmodern conception of truth at the center of post-truth politics. However, while it is true that Nietzsche offers valuable... (shrink)

On the fourth day of his presidency, Donald Trump reinstated and greatly expanded the “Mexico City policy,” which imposes antiabortion restrictions on U.S. foreign health aid. In general, the policy has prohibited U.S. funding of any family-planning groups that use even non-U.S. funds to perform abortions; prohibited aid recipients from lobbying for liberalization of abortion laws; prohibited nongovernment organizations from creating educational materials on abortion as a family-planning method; and prohibited health workers from referring patients for legal abortions in (...) any cases other than rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. The policy's prohibition on giving aid to any organization that performs abortions is aimed at limiting alleged indirect funding of abortions. The argument is that if U.S. money is used to fund nonabortion programs of an abortion-providing NGO, then the NGO can simply shift the money thus saved into its abortion budget. Outside the context of abortion, we do not reason this way. And the policy's remaining three prohibitions are deeply troubling. (shrink)

This book seeks to address the relation of political philosophy and Donald Trump as a political phenomenon through the notions of patriotism, cosmopolitanism, and civic virtue. Political philosophers have been prescient in explaining trends that may explain our political misgivings. Madison warned during the debates on the Constitution that democracies are vulnerable to factions based on passion for personalities and beliefs; various continental thinkers have addressed the problem of nihilism—the modern loss of faith in objective standards of truth and (...) morality—that in Max Weber’s analysis pointed to the importance of charisma, in Carl Schmitt’s to the idea that politics is essentially rooted in the definition of friends and enemies, and in early Heidegger resulted in the emphasis on the enduring significance of local, rather than cosmopolitan values. The former concerns—regarding demagoguery, charisma and nihilism—will enable an evaluation of Trump as a political character, while the latter concerns—regarding the status of universal versus local values—will enable us to evaluate the content of “Trumpism.” Taken together, these essays seek to advance the public conversation about the relationship between the rise of Trump and the ideological forces that seek to justify that rise. (shrink)