In late February, a group of historians gathered at Princeton to embark on a project: “The Presidency of Joseph R. Biden: A First Historical Assessment,” a first pass at evaluating the legacy of the Biden presidency. But rather than stop at an analysis of Biden, these scholars seek to understand how the upheaval of the Trump presidency has changed both public and intellectual conceptions of political power.
Their interrogation of power is the type of intellectual endeavor that the current administration arguably seeks to chill in its attacks on higher education. In this project, they take a critical lens not just towards Trump but towards power itself, creating a historical analysis with the capacity to teach a reader exactly how the metrics of leadership are shifting. In essence, this retrospective can better teach us how our reality came to be and how it works: the same mission of much of the research that is suffering from the National Institutes of Health cuts of the Trump administration.
The destructive force of the Trump presidency is fueled by polarization and its resulting hopelessness. In this darkness, Trump casts himself as the strongman, the only possible savior for a country he claims as being failed by its previous leaders. Yet when we include historical scholarship in our conceptions of our present, dangerous political reality, we may prevent Trump from standing alone, as a sovereign, in a helpless America detached from its own past.
The contributors to the project hail from a variety of universities and backgrounds of political and historical scholarship, from Joel Goldstein’s exploration of Harris’s vice presidency to John Witt’s analysis of Biden’s relationship with the Supreme Court. Projects like the Biden retrospective are valuable not solely for their analysis of Biden, but also because they remind us that present instability can bind us more closely to our history rather than stranding us. Julian Zelizer, Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton, says that the power of Trumpism lies in how it “forces us to think about how to even measure political success and failures.”
Looking back on the past will allow us to confront and better reckon with the present reconstruction of political power, and it will prevent Trump from further endangering intellectualism by estranging students and citizens from the American political narrative beyond himself.
Trump isn’t just limiting the literal progress of research and the capacity for scientists and scholars to generate tangible change in spheres such as health and the climate. By undermining the very nature of truth, rewriting history as best suits him, and attacking institutions’ capacity to choose where they direct their intellectual focus, he attacks the ability to be critical and informed about the political reality of the present and its enormous and dangerous upheaval.
As Trump attacks both universities and intellectualism, this endeavor shows us that we can utilize the very academic scholarship he seeks to undermine as a tool to respond, to develop a nuanced historical understanding of the redefinition of power that brought us to where we are today, and to combat the feeling that we are powerless to comprehend or resist it. Turning back to our history, examining the elections and previous presidencies — not to point fingers, but to better confront the causes of Trump’s ascension — is the first step to demystifying his power and deconstructing his pedestal.
Intellectually confronting not simply the aftermath, but the rise of Trumpism, will allow us to more sharply assess the direction in which we are moving. Students cannot push forward and generate change if we allow the gravity of the present to stop us from analyzing the road that led to where we are today, to estrange us from our own intellectual resources and power. To eschew critical understanding of the past is to let authoritarians and anti-intellectuals like Trump win.
Lily Halbert-Alexander is an assistant Opinion editor and prospective English major from San Francisco. She can be reached by email at lh1157@princeton.edu.
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