Chapter 1 introduces President Donald Trump’s all-out assaults on the validity of the law of war. It argues that his behavior differs from other Western leaders in that Trump has been willing to openly challenge international humanitarian law (IHL) not “in the shadows” but “in the daylight.” Section 1.1 explains why the topic matters for political scientists and legal scholars. Section 1.2 discusses the significance of Trump’s impunity agenda for policy and governance. Section 1.3 argues that, regardless of whether Trump has technically violated the law of war in the past, his brazen attacks on the need for IHL distinguish him from other Western leaders. Section 1.4 claims that the constraints in Western democracies that largely prevent democratic leaders from publicly flouting IHL may be more perceived than actual. Section 1.5 justifies the case selection of Trump, explaining how Trump was presented with the “means, motive, and opportunity” to overtly defy the law of war. Section 1.6 previews the puzzles and arguments that guide the rest of the book.

Chapter 10 explores three competing visions of American national religious identity: Christian nationalism, strict secularism, and pluralist civil religion. After identifying problems with Christian nationalism and strict secularism, the chapter argues that an inclusive, dynamic, and pluralist civil religion offers the best way forward for continuing the American experiment.

For its first eighteen months, the Trump administration steered a surprisingly defensible course in Afghanistan, thanks to many of Trump’s appointees who worked to preserve something of America’s interests intact within the confines of Trump’s desire to reduce American commitments overseas. They were squeezed from two sides: on the one hand, the frustrating results of the Obama administration’s various strategies – surge, drawdown, and negotiations – seemed (wrongly) to prove their futility. On the other hand, virtually no one was convinced that Trump’s demand to get out fully and immediately was a good idea. They wanted to stay, but it was unclear what kind of posture, mission, or strategy would be more effective than what Obama had tried.

Trump’s newly empowered foreign policy led to the Doha agreement with the Taliban and America’s final defeat in Afghanistan. The Taliban’s principal demand and the central element of the eventual Doha agreement was the full withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan. It was hardly something the Taliban needed to demand because Trump was demanding it too. Trump was not inclined to enforce the agreement anyway. Trump campaigned on getting out of Afghanistan and repeatedly and publicly announced his intent to withdraw, which undermined negotiations just as much as Obama’s timetable had done.

Political scientists largely agree that, today, the modern presidential nomination process favors the rise of ideologically extreme candidates who contribute to the ideological polarization that the country is experiencing. Political scientists, however, disagree about the direction in which reform should move. Most political scientists believe that the process has become too democratic and that the cure for the current ideological polarization is to return the nomination process to the control of party leaders. This prescription for reform, however, ignores the fact that, when party leaders did control the process in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they too often chose ideological extremists or populist demagogues. Rather, as the Conclusion elucidates, the problem with the current process is that it is insufficiently democratic: the rules governing the process exclude too many ideologically moderate voters, thereby encouraging the selection of more ideologically extreme candidates. The Conclusion closes with several suggestions for how the nomination process could be opened more fully in the future so as to remedy this ideological polarization.

This is the first of three biographical chapters, concentrating on one powerful politician and their record of manipulating statistics. This chapter deals with Donald Trump, who is sometimes called the ‘master manipulator’. His manipulative skills are not those of manipulating statistics, but the very different skills of manipulating people. In this chapter we deal principally with two areas: Trump’s treatment of unemployment figures and his treatment of voting figures, both of which he claims have been subject to bias. We question whether he is simply lying, because of evidence that he may be deceiving himself. We also look at his tendency for self-praise. We analyse his claims that the official unemployment figures were too low under Obama’s presidency but under his own presidency similar figures were correct. We also examine his claims that the 2020 presidential voting figures, especially for the State of Georgia, were too low. We note that he takes these claims from extremist and conspiracy sources. We also examine his threatening language when he attempted to persuade election officials to changes the votes in Georgia. Above all, Trump’s claims show his disdain for statistics.

The chapter explores co-speech gestures in spoken political discourse. It defines co-speech gesture as a fundamental feature of communication which is implicated in the discursive performance of prejudice. Gesture-speech relations are discussed and a classification of gestures is provided. It is shown how speech and gesture may interact with respect to schematisation, viewpoint, attention and metaphor. Two case studies focussed on the gestural style of right-wing populism are presented. The first considers the co-speech gestures executed by Donald Trump during a campaign rally. The analysis highlights his comedic use of gestures, the use of iconic and enactment gestures in connection with his border wall policy, and his use of points and shrugs to engage with his audience in different ways. The second focusses on co-speech gestures in the anti-immigration discourse of Nigel Farage. The analysis shows that legitimating moves characteristic of immigration discourse, including focussing, denial, authorisation, deixis, proximisation, metaphor, quantification and aspectising, when performed in spoken discourse are multimodal and involve a gestural component.

This essay suggests that the contemporary moment sees a crisis in the experience of temporality and sequentiality, that can be felt across the anglophone world. There are a set of emerging political and ecological conditions, that offer a serious challenge to the way that we have conceived of the passage of historical time.

It is difficult as a result, the essay argues, to generate clear pictures of the future, either of Europe, or of our wider planetary environment. The essay addresses this crisis, by examining the forms in which some contemporary British authors give poetic expression to the claims that the past has on our experience of time, and by suggesting how such pictures of the past yield new ways of imagining a European future.

The biggest change in the party coalitions since the 1980s has been the movement of high-education whites into the Democratic Party and the defection of low-education whites to the GOP. Drawing on evidence from opinion surveys, election returns, and demographic data, Chapter 3 documents the parties’ changing voters and geographic constituencies. These trends continued in the 2020 election despite Democratic efforts to reverse the party’s declining popularity among noncollege whites, with some signs educational divides will spread to other racial and ethnic groups. Candidates, activists, political appointees and staffers, judges, party leaders, and campaign workers all demonstrate the same increasing divisions as rank-and-file voters. Democrats may suffer electorally because the Electoral College and apportionment of the Senate grants noncollege whites disproportionate voting power, but college-educated citizens punch above their weight in other forms of influence: as thought leaders, interest group activists, educators, media figures, scientific experts, candidates, political professionals, lawyers, and financial donors.

This chapter applies the total error framework presented in Chapter 5 to a case example of preelection polling during the 2016 US presidential election. Here, the focus is on problems with a single poll.

This chapter reviews the central arguments and empirics, maps out areas for future research, and discusses the policy implications of the book’s findings. It also discusses the relevance of the theory in accounting for the events of January 6, 2021 in the United States.

Scheuerman engages with the right-wing mobilization of “Weimar lessons” in the context of the contemporary US political landscape. The chapter focuses specifically on how the political thought of German Jewish émigré political philosopher Leo Strauss was used by supporters of the Trump Administration in academic circles, based primarily at the Claremont Institute. The Weimar analogy has often been mobilized to highlight the dangers of antidemocratic political forces. The chapter, however, serves as a reminder that the redeployment of Weimar and stories about its legacy can be instrumentalized to serve authoritarian as well as anti-authoritarian purposes.