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Assessing Trump’s Presidency: Two Historians Reflect on the Past and Future
Thu, March 20th, 2025
Live Online
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All Presidents, Jonathan Alter wrote, are blind dates. Donald Trump may be the first who isn’t. Political analysts and historians not only have Trump’s first term to gauge his temperament and policies, but the four years preceding the 2024 elections, where he previewed his agenda for his second non-consecutive term. Even with that foreshadowing, Trump has crashed through traditional norms and conventions, aggrandized presidential power, and sought to reshape American politics in ways few would have thought possible.
What lessons does history hold for us in approaching the second Trump presidency? Is it plausible to talk about the age of Trump as historians have done for certain presidents? The American experiment in democratic self-governance has been tested in the past. How will it fare going forward? Indeed, will the traditional guardrails hold and protect against the abuse of presidential power? Join Aaron David Miller as he engages in conversation with presidential historians Nicole Hemmer and Douglas Brinkley to discuss these and other issues, on the next Carnegie Connects.
Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.
Event Speakers
Douglas Brinkley
Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University
Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University, presidential historian for the New-York Historical, trustee of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a frequent commentator on CBS News, MSNBC and CNN.
Nicole Hemmer
Associate Professor of History and Director of the Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University
Nicole Hemmer is an associate professor of history and director of the Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University. A political historian specializing in media, conservatism, and the presidency, Hemmer is author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics and Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.
Aaron David Miller
Senior Fellow, American Statecraft Program
Aaron David Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, focusing on U.S. foreign policy.