Talking Trump: Bridging Campus and Community in a Time of Crisis

Even before Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016, an urgent feeling developed among scholars and teachers that Trump and what some called “Trumpism” needed to be explained. In June 2016, for example, a group of scholars published in The Chronicle Review, the “Trump Syllabus,” called “Trump 101” (2016), a set of readings and lectures on a range of topics. Shortly thereafter, “Trump Syllabus 2.0” appeared on Public Books (Connolly and Blain 2016b). That syllabus noted the nearly complete absence of nonwhite scholars and readings from the initial one (Connolly and Blain 2016a). Those were followed quickly in turn by a “revisionist” syllabus by African-American scholars posted to the African American Intellectual History website (for example, Hall 2016).

This compulsion to “teach” Trump and to define “Trumpism” bespeaks the crisis of Trump himself; history seemed to catch everyone by surprise with his rise and polarizing effect. As Trump’s voluble sexism, racism, xenophobia, and misogyny spilled over the boundaries of standard political discourse during the campaign, this feeling only deepened. It was exacerbated by signs and symptoms of real and rhetorical violence around Trump’s campaign; recall the scenes of dissenters being forcibly removed from Trump rallies escorted by hooting crowds egged on by Trump’s exhortations, “Get him the hell out of here” (“Donald Trump on Rally Protester” 2016).

Another way of interpreting this moment is the creation of a new public. Trump mobilized political opinion and political will like few other candidates in recent memory. He seemed to be creating new kinds of citizens who would be forced to contend with and evaluate a maelstrom of style tics, vulgarities, abrasions, social wedges, and brutalities of expression and form. It was never pretty, but it did demand attention.

Finally, compelling a need to understand the Trump phenomenon, as many people called it, was the dire resonance of Trump’s election with a Western electoral world lunging in many parts to the Right: in Greece, the openly fascist Golden Dawn Party had seen historic gains in elections after the 2008 financial world crisis; in France, Marine Le Pen’s National Front Party made it all the way to the final round of the most recent French presidential election; in Holland, Geerts Wilders, a strong anti-immigration candidate, came within a few points of winning that country’s general election. These events shadowed Trump’s own rise to power, eliciting open contemplation of the question “Is Trump a fascist?” Indeed, within weeks of his victory, neo-Nazi groups like American Vanguard began revived propaganda campaigns to recruit new members, including placing posters at our own campus at Purdue in late November 2016. It was in search of meaning for these events and in an attempt to fathom our own collective response to the November victory, that a group of Purdue University graduate students and professors in American studies collaborated on the production of a university extension course, “The 2016 Presidential Election: Implications, Outcomes, Conflicts, Possibilities.”¹ This essay endeavors to present the perspective of two participants in the course.

In preparing our individual lectures for the course, the authors were extremely mindful of how our own political subjectivities had, and would, shape our approach to “Teaching Trump.” Academically, our expertise ranged from migration to race relations to radical politics. We felt in very real ways that Trump’s presidency might and would heavily impact our work as scholars and our concerns as activists. Thus, teaching a course on Trump to a non-Purdue audience seemed like the best way to “bridge” those parts of ourselves.

When designing the syllabus for our discussion course, we wanted to align the content closely to our American studies training and research interests. Simultaneously, we wanted to be mindful of our target audience. Our community organization offers intellectual, social, and cultural stimulation to individuals fifty years of age and older in the local and surrounding counties. Each fall and spring, the organization offers a plethora of classes to members for the duration of four weeks. Previous interaction with this senior group...