Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the U.S. presidential election this week has left many analysts reaching for precedents in the past. The last time an American won a non-consecutive second term as president was when Grover Cleveland defeated the incumbent Republican Benjamin Harrison. If Trump goes on to win the popular vote, it would be the first time a Republican leader has done so since 2004, when George W. Bush defeated John Kerry. And while it’s hard to remember a time when the U.S. electorate was as divided and polarized as it is, the United States has certainly been through moments of extreme division and instability.
How do we place this week’s results in historical terms? To find out if the past has any lessons for the future, I spoke with two great American historians: Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton University and the author or editor of 26 books including Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974; and Joanne Freeman, a professor of history at Yale University, whose most recent book is The Field of Blood: Congressional Violence in Antebellum America.
What follows here is a condensed and edited transcript of our discussion; the full, live version is available on the video box atop this page, or on the FP Live podcast.
Ravi Agrawal: One big question about Trump’s first term was whether it was a blip in the trajectory of America’s politics. And now the question has to be asked if Biden’s term was the blip.
Julian Zelizer: It might have been. I didn’t think of Trump’s first term as a blip. I think it came out of changes that had happened both in Republican politics and in American politics more broadly. I think this election is shaping up to be a little bit like 1984, where a certain vision of politics was legitimated. President-elect Trump has been very transparent about what he believes in, how he’ll govern. And he just won. He might have won the popular vote as well. So, I think if we look back, Biden might have been an anomaly in the ways that the 2020 election took place. Or, as Ezra Klein recently argued, it might have been the last gasp of the Obama coalition.
RA: Joanne, how do you imagine the Founding Fathers would interpret this week’s news?
Joanne Freeman: Well, they might say “I told you so.” If you read the personal letters, anything that they were writing in the founding era, it’s hard to say that the founders agreed on a lot, but they did agree that the greatest threat to any republic, but particularly a democratic republic, was a demagogue. The world was monarchies at the time and a democratic republic grounded on public opinion was experimental. What made these largely elitist founders nervous was that “the public” would be easily persuaded, warped, led astray by someone who could get their emotions riled up. That’s the vulnerability of anything democratic, that the people and their emotions can lead them astray. And historically speaking—going back to ancient Greece, ancient Rome—when they looked at republics, what they saw were demagogues saying anything that they possibly could to get the public’s emotions flowing, to woo the public, and then once they got power, doing whatever they wanted and becoming tyrants. They talked about that throughout the entire founding period when trying to evaluate politics in the first decade of the republic. That was what was on their mind. So, in a way, this is an easy question to answer because that would be the absolute first thing that they would say—“We told you. We told you that demagogue tendencies are the vulnerability, and now here you are.”
RA: Julian, there’s also the inverse here. Trump routinely invokes U.S. history. There’s “Make America Great Again,” rooted in the past. I’m struck by the fact that the very first law passed by the very first Congress was the 1789 Tariff Act; Trump keeps talking about how tariffs are beautiful. He says he wants to be a “dictator on day one”; the founders created a strong executive branch. How does Trump think about his place in history?
JZ: I think he has grandiose feelings about himself. He’s someone who feels that he has the capacity to test every institution and every norm, and then break or ignore them and get away with it. It always has been his disposition. He is someone with a huge appetite for power. He’s also a showman. All of us who have followed his history understand that he believes he can sell almost anything. And he combines those two elements into who he is. In the first term, he was already more serious in many ways about certain goals than people understood.
But the second term is a whole other ballgame. I think he has a set of issues that he very much wants to pursue, to put his imprint on this period in American history. The tariff is one. Economically, we don’t know what exactly that means. I do think him going after opponents should be taken seriously. He’s been very clear that a purge will be part of his mark.You can imagine Senator McCarthy back in the 1950s having presidential power and then trying to put his imprint by going against everyone, and that will include weakening the walls between the Department of Justice and the Oval Office. Then on foreign policy, we’ll see. I assume he will continue to pursue this more nationalist slash isolationist agenda, which he seems committed to. And if he can do that and kind of advance it, including in areas such as the Russia-Ukraine war, that would be a big turn against the liberal internationalism and the alliances that came out of World War II. So, he has big visions, and now he’s surrounded by people who might be more “amateur” in terms of governing experience, but are very clear and deliberate in what they want to achieve. Obviously, I would add, he would have an even harsher turn against immigration—possibly ramping up deportations, continuing with the border wall, making citizenship even more difficult in the existing rules that we have.
JF: Ravi, you said that he cites history a lot. And another thing you talked about was the founders creating a powerful executive. And I would say those things are linked because the founders created an anti-king.
So, yes, Donald Trump cites history a lot, usually incorrectly, particularly in talking about the founders. Most people do. So that’s important to note because I think in the next four years, we’re going to get a lot of “I am following in the path of the founders,” “I am the true American,” “the founders support me.” Going in, I suspect a lot of that is not going to be true and one particular thing that’s worth noting is the executive. So, look at the debates at the Constitutional Convention, look at the concerns of that general generation of power holders, and what they were worried about was executive power. And so they felt that they were bounding in the executive in a variety of different ways that would prevent this from being too powerful an executive.
In the founding era and particularly in the 19th century, Congress was at the center of news coverage, journalism, and power. There certainly were executives that were exceptions to that rule, but before the Civil War, most people felt power was in Congress. Now we live in this moment of apparent executive immunity. It’s a fact that the men of the founding era would have been absolutely against executive immunity. There is nothing in the Constitution that justifies an immune national executive.
JZ: Trump has embraced presidential power in the most expansive way possible. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, we’ve debated how to control the executive. In the 1970s surrounding Richard Nixon and his downfall, there were discussions of the imperial presidency. Congress had an entire decade of trying to institute reforms like the War Powers Act and the Budget Reform Act that curbed presidential power. Ultimately the reforms were substantial but they eroded. Especially after 9/11, we saw a reinvigoration of presidential power. And I think the fusion of Republican politics, conservative politics, and presidential politics has been a trend line since the 1980s and accelerated after 2001. And this is really important to Trump.
But he also discovered that you can get away with a lot. You don’t just have to flex the technical rules or find loopholes and ways to undercut congressional opponents. You can just do things, and often the pushback is so much weaker than you would imagine. That was a lot of what his first term was about. He would go to places you thought you couldn’t go as president and it was okay as long as the internal norms that you’re guided by don’t check you. He’s been explicit that in the next four years, especially with Project 2025, we are going to see a significant ramping up of an already powerful presidency that tries to cut the power of Congress further, undermine the power of the courts, and demonstrate that if someone is willing to use the presidency in a robust and aggressive fashion, no one’s really going to do anything about it. They might criticize it, but the fallout won’t be as severe.
One last thing. He just was reelected four years after using presidential power to try to overturn an election. That’s a dramatic thing that just happened. And I think he understands this election as saying “all of that was fine” and he can overcome any kind of political threat or criticism.
RA: I’d like to spend a moment on Vice President Harris. Historically, her candidacy was unique in so many ways, from the way she entered the race to her position as the first woman of color to run for that office. Her slogan was, “We are not going back.” But now we quite literally are. How is history going to remember her candidacy?
JF: I think she ran an exceptional campaign. I don’t think this moment is about what she did or didn’t do. I think this moment is about where America is. It isn’t about simply Harris’s candidacy, but obviously it’s about Obama, too—we’re living in an era of blowback, where things happened that so supremely upset what a certain constituency believed to be the proper order and their entitlement to a certain kind of power. That’s where the great replacement theory plugs in, which is about deserving superiority, deserving power, and saying “you are threatening our entitlement to power.”
So Harris is part of a larger movement in which some Americans are reeling away from what felt like the possibility of change. She represented that, not necessarily in a policy means, but in a social means, in a national vision means. Given the amazingly difficult circumstances she had, and even without them, I think she did really well. And I think we all just watched what it means to be a black woman running right now.
RA: Julian, is there any historical precedent of the disconnect between the people who think the system works for them and the people who feel like structurally it is broken? I put this in the context of the last 50 years of capitalism, urbanization, and globalization, which worked well for some but didn’t work so well for everyone else. What does history tell us about how moments of great divide get resolved?
JZ: The late 1960s are the classic example of moments of tension and intense division. In 1968, there is a ferocity of the division that is different than the normal kinds of tensions. The question of Vietnam was a fundamental fault line within families and neighbors. There’s no model or pattern of how times of division get resolved. Sometimes the issue itself might fade. Vietnam came to an end, and over a generation or so it just was less pertinent. Sometimes other issues can distract attention from what was the original dividing question. In the 1970s, economic stagnation and unemployment became so big that some of those questions from the 70s were not quite as intense.
But the other division you’re talking about is a product of what we’ve been living with since Vietnam and Watergate—distrust in institutions that continues to grow. It started with those two crises. It has become more intense because of all sorts of problems like campaign finance, people hearing stories about money flooding into politics, distrust of media institutions. All of this has been a multi-decade story, and every poll will show you, other than a few exceptional moments, distrust of the president, distrust of Congress, now distrust of the Supreme Court and the media are extraordinarily high. So you have a population that is ready to be told, “don’t listen to what you’re hearing,” “ignore what you’re hearing,” or “tune it out,” because it’s “probably just more of a broken system that isn’t actually working for you.”
Trump capitalizes on this. He’s fundamentally ahistorical in what he says, but at the same time, he often has a very good sense of where we are in history. He taps into some of these things. And that foundation of distrust, born in the 1960s and 70s, has been essential to him escaping some of the warnings of him being an autocrat or a dictator or abusing presidential power. It’s not just that people don’t listen or don’t hear it. I think some are just so disbelieving. It’s not a major concern to them, so they come back to the other issues: “How much does my burger cost at fast food chain X?” because that’s very real to them. That’s something they can understand and believe in because they see the numbers.
RA: Joanne, you’ve written a lot about violence and electoral transitions. History shows that it’s not uncommon. With Harris conceding as quickly as she has, does that forestall a violent reaction, or are you still worried about political violence in the coming weeks and months?
JF: When you have moments like this that are very palpably moments of flux, a, where people can tell that the fundamental direction of the United States is at play, those are moments that tend to be more violent. In the 1790s, when people were talking about democracy and how democratic the nation should be, the nation became violent. The 1850s are another moment. Obviously the civil rights era is another. And we’re in another now.
In the 1830s, 40s and 50s, you had slaveholding Southerners, particularly in Congress, who were used to being in control to a degree that they took for granted. And in the 1840s, 1850s, when slaveholding Southerners began to feel the rise of anti-slavery energy, these men in Congress turned to violence. They did not have the power to do what they wanted, so they resorted to threats and intimidation and sometimes physical violence to maintain control.
It’s worth saying American political history is violent. So violence is not an exception. But some of the violent rhetoric and actions coming from the right in recent months and years was from people who felt that the best way to maintain or get power is through threats and intimidation and violence. The system’s not working for them. Democracy might not work for them.
But now they have power, so some would think they could step back from that.. But what we just saw, particularly in this campaign, is Trump and his allies endorsing and justifying violence. And Trump denied that rhetoric along those lines matters. So we’re now in a moment when, to some degree, there has been the glorification of violence and threats, and a population of people who feel unleashed. There’s a wide spectrum of how that could play out.
RA: I’ll just point out that, of course, Trump has been the subject of two assassination attempts. So there has been violence inflicted on him as well. Julian, the entrenched polarization means that small changes in the electorate’s mood are all that’s required to swing Congress or the presidency. Now, with essentially three one-term presidents in a row, is this volatility new in historical terms? Is it something that is better explained in more global terms?
JZ: Well, the map has become very rigid. Since 1984, with the exception of 2008, we just don’t have huge landslide elections. So in addition to power swinging back and forth, we’ve been in a multi-decade era of razor thin margins and only a handful of states at play. So people become very intense over a handful of votes, which is a recipe for increasing tensions because you can’t afford to make a mistake. You don’t have huge coalitions like Reagan, Nixon, or Roosevelt did, where you can afford to lose some voters or take a risk. Trump might have a realignment taking place, but it’s still within the swing state framework, meaning he’s not going to win a massive Electoral College victory as we’ve had in the past. The rigidity and calcification of the electorate heightens the partisan tensions because too much is at stake with every word you say and decision you make. So it certainly makes it harder to build any kind of trust across the aisle.
RA: Joanne, what advice would the founding fathers have to navigate polarization, divides, and a demagogic leader?
JF: Believe it or not, Thomas Jefferson addressed this because of a fraught, almost violent presidential election in 1800. The 1800 election ended up being a tie between the two Jeffersonian Republican candidates: Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. It was thrown into the House. For the Federalists, who had been supporting John Adams for president, this was their worst nightmare. So Federalists in Congress began talking about how to overturn that election. In Pennsylvania and Virginia, governors began stockpiling arms because they didn’t know if they were going to have to take the government for Jefferson. Thousands of people came to Washington and surrounded the Capitol to see what would happen and, I assume, to act if they didn’t like the results. There did not end up being violence.
But after it was all done, someone wrote to Jefferson and essentially said, “What would you have done if it had gotten violent?” And he basically said, “We would have had a convention of some kind to fix up the Constitution and then keep going forward. Because the process, the Constitution, that’s what holds us together.” For the people who created the Constitution, it’s a framework. It’s about a process. They believed that getting a process down on paper, a pact that Americans could use and rely on, was vitally important. So part of the message of some of the founders would have been to focus on the process.
Now, people also used to write to John Adams, the most self-aware founder with a sense of humor, to ask him what the founding was like. And his answer was almost always the same. He said, “Thank you for revering the founders. Thank you for including me. But if you think we were a golden, blessed generation, it’s going to be all downhill from here. We didn’t know what we were doing. We were improvising. We made mistakes.” He talks about watching a lot of very unhappy people sign the Declaration of Independence. And if people believe there was a golden era, every government that comes after that point will suffer in comparison. And that’s not the way to make this country run.
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