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New Perspectives on the American Presidency

Trump vs. BidenPresidential Leadership and Legacy Rollback

By Clodagh Harrington and Alex Waddan

Format

£95.00

About this book

Explores the presidential legacy of Trump’s first term in the Biden era

  • Discusses the domestic policy legacy of Trump’s first term, asking whether he was just a typical Republican or whether he represented something new
  • Looks at how Trump rewrote the rules for acceptable presidential behaviour
  • Asks whether Trump did effectively ‘put America first’ on the world stage
  • Discusses how Biden struggled to put his imprint on the political environment, haunted by the continuing presence of the former president
  • Argues that Trump’s 2024 victory and return to the White House means that his legacy will be a lasting one

After four years of a presidency unbound, President Biden consciously moved to a calmer style of leadership. Yet, the political environment remained ferociously partisan and former President Trump continued to wield influence on the Republican Party. Against this backdrop, Trump vs Biden examines the durability of the Trump regime, focusing on the extent to which the political footprint of the forty-fifth president remains after his dramatic departure from office.

Clodagh Harrington and Alex Waddan analyse meaningful priority shifts, policy changes and the imprint of presidential leadership, providing a framework for assessing Trump’s legacy. In turn, this provides context to the Biden administration’s efforts to reverse course and steer the US back to a more established form of politics and policy.

Looking beyond the noise and hyperbole, the book also reflects on areas where Biden in fact reinforced elements of Trumpism. In an epilogue, the authors discuss the 2024 election and the opening six months of Trump’s 2nd term.

Reviews

Donald Trump’s legacy is of course still being written – but this book provides a crucial early guide to understanding its trajectory. Harrington and Waddan have done an eloquent and rather heroic job in synthesising the political and cultural developments of Trump’s first term and how they became embedded in American politics: why Trump v Biden turned out not to be a fair fight.
Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Understanding the Trump Years
Chapter 1: Presidents, Power and Legacy Making
Chapter 2: A Legacy Array
Chapter 3: Foreign Policy: From ‘America First’ to ‘America’s Back’
Chapter 4: The Use of Presidential Power: Supreme Court appointments and Deep State dismantling
Chapter 5: (Abuse of) Presidential Power: Testing the Boundaries
Chapter 6: Public Communication and Vision
Epilogue: Trump 2.0: Polarization, Populism and the Presidency

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About the contributors

Clodagh Harrington

Clodagh Harrington is Lecturer in History at University College Cork. Prior to that, she was Associate Professor of American Politics at De Montfort University, Leicester where she worked since 2006. Her monograph, co-authored with Alex Waddan (University of Leicester) entitled Obama V Trump: the Politics of Presidential Legacy and Rollback was published in 2021 by Edinburgh University Press. The follow-up, Trump V Biden is due for publication by EUP in 2026.

Alex Waddan

Dr Alex Waddan is Associate Professor in American Politics and American Foreign Policy in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Leicester. He is the co-author of Obamacare Wars: Federalism, State Politics, and the Affordable Care Act (with Daniel Beland and Philip Rocco, University Press of Kansas, 2016) and he has published in journals including Political Studies, Social Policy and Administration and Political Quarterly. He previously contributed to Assessing The George W. Bush Presidency: A Tale of Two Terms (Wroe & Herbert (eds), EUP, 2009).

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