A Way Forward: Reflections on the Presidency and Presidential Campaigns

The 2016 presidential election campaign continues to be as vehemently debated and divisive as its outcome, the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States. The ramifications of Donald Trump's election and the hotly contested Republican and Democratic nominating campaigns continue to reverberate through the United States and, indeed, the rest of the world. Even in 2020, many of the issues debated on the campaign trail in 2015 and 2016, such as Russian interference, white nationalism, Iran, and health care, continue to dominate news cycles and the collective consciousness of America. Democratic presidential candidates for the 2020 election are expected to speak to their electability against Trump. News media outlets continue to call attention to the thousands of lies and half-truths issued by President Trump and his administration while simultaneously broadcasting and distributing these lies into every household in America.

My approach in this review is to put several political analyses from leading political communication scholars in conversation with one another. Each book provides a discrete reflection on contemporary politics in America, explaining or theorizing different aspects of the voter–reporter–candidate triumvirate. I will explain the arguments and overall foci of these books while assessing the degree to which they illuminate and expand our understanding of contemporary political life.

Ultimately, my assessment of these analyses leads me to call for a renewed focus on the ways in which our scholarship can provide a path forward for denizens of the United States of America. To do this, more of our scholarship should be legible to a broad audience, should provide actionable solutions, and should be intentionally self-reflective. In focusing on public scholarship that conveys knowledge gleaned from archives, surveys, speech texts, and interviews, we can expand the reach of our scholarship and help improve civic life in the United States.

Each of these books approaches different aspects of U.S. presidential elections and politics. There is an overarching focus on news coverage of the political happenings surrounding elections and on various elites, from candidates, to academics, to pollsters, to political pundits. Each book considers the future of political life in America, and each offers a path forward for the electorate. As Americans ready themselves for another contentious election in 2020, with the divisiveness of 2016 still looming as large as ever, these conclusions could not be more timely.

Trials in Short-Form Scholarship

Donald J. Trump and his supporters continue to dominate the media, long after the final votes for election 2016 were tallied. Each of the works under review focuses, to some extent, on Trump and his supporters. While Votes That Count and The Reinvention of Populist Rhetoric in the Digital Age both touch on the historic 2016 presidential campaign, Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us about Donald J. Trump focuses less on explaining Trump's rise to office and more on what it means to live in a world with Trump as president of the United States.

Ryan Skinnell's edited volume Faking the News seeks to help readers "make sense of how the world works in the wake of Donald J. Trump's election as the 45th President of the United States of America" (4). It features chapters from "eleven well-respected rhetoricians from around the US" and "is written for readers who may or may not know anything about the study of rhetoric" (5). These rhetoricians are largely successful in explaining different aspects of...