The backlash presidency

How unique is Donald Trump’s trajectory as a president born of backlash? What should we make of Trump following Barack Obama? Julia Azari finds that backlash presidents like Trump tend to follow transformative presidents like Barack Obama who represent changes to the American racial order. And the backlash presidents commonly face impeachment as they are seen as transgressive figures. She finds parallels in the previous pairings of Andrew Johnson after Abraham Lincoln and Richard Nixon after Lyndon Johnson. It puts Trump, the American presidency, and our racial politics in useful historical context.

Transcript

Matt Grossmann: The backlash presidency. This week on The Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossman. How unique is Donald Trump’s trajectory as a president born of backlash? What should we make of Trump following Barack Obama? And are there parallels with the previous pairings of Andrew Johnson after Abraham Lincoln and Richard Nixon after Lyndon Johnson?

This week, I talk to Julia Azari about her new Princeton book Backlash Presidents. She finds that backlash presidents like Donald Trump tend to follow transformative presidents like Barack Obama, who represent changes to the American racial order. And the backlash presidents commonly face impeachment as they are seen as transgressive figures. It puts Trump in useful historical context, and illustrates more continuities in the American presidency, and our racial politics.

So, tell us about the new book Backlash Presidents. What did you find?

Julia Azari: So, this book began as an idea, a little bit prematurely, I should admit. In 2017, after the firing of James Comey as FBI director, and the summer of the Russia investigation, there were a lot of think pieces online comparing Trump to Richard Nixon, and drawing comparisons with the Saturday Night Massacre.

And for the more deeply historical folks, there were also some comparisons drawn between Trump and Andrew Johnson, and the temperament that they both had, the impeachment over issues in the executive branch, and I was in a coffee shop noodling about this, and trying to figure out a memo I had to write for some mini conference. And it occurred to me that there was another similarity that those three presidents share that isn’t just their temperament, or their behavior in office, or even their own personal race, attitudes, and statements.

It’s that their predecessors were all presidents who transformed the racial status quo, Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson as the signer of major civil rights legislation, Barack Obama as the first African American president, and from there, I spent about two years fumbling around thinking about what the connection might be, and during that time Trump actually did get impeached.

And I started really thinking about what is this connection? Why is it that when you have a president who upends the racial status quo, something that presidents are loathe to do, and there’s a small literature on that fact, and I had been playing with that idea in class a little bit … What is it that makes it … They don’t get impeached. Their successors get impeached. And that connection led me to write this book.

And so, what this book does is it explores three sets of presidents, those who try to uphold the status quo and work in the racial norm, or racial normal period, those who upset those norms, and then the impeachments of their successors.

And really makes the argument uncovering some I think really compelling similarities across the three impeachment cases, it makes the argument that impeachment is much more rooted in race and racialized institutions than most accounts would suggest.

Matt Grossmann: So, what are the main similarities in those three pairs? If we take Obama and Trump, Johnson and Lincoln, and Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, other than the baseline, they all got impeached and they all had some important racial changes preceding the backlash, what holds them together?

Julia Azari: Yeah. So, there are a couple things. I think with each of the transformative presidents, with Lincoln and emancipation and the Civil War, with Johnson and civil rights, and with Obama being the first African American president, something interesting you see that I think does drive the politics is that none of them want to be racially transformative as much as they are.

And they all start to back away from the implications of what they’ve done. With Lincoln, you have a very conciliatory approach to readmitting the south after the war’s end. With Lyndon Johnson, it’s the disappointment at the emergence of urban unrest, wiretapping his own phone conversations with Martin Luther King Jr., and civil rights leaders. It’s the falling out with civil rights leaders over the Vietnam War.

With Obama, it’s very clear from the outset. He doesn’t want to be known as the first Black president. He has things he wants to do. He wants to be known as racially transcendent. But you also see his approach to this matter shifts over the course of his presidency.

What all of their successors have in common, even though, their paths to the presidency are quite different is that they come about in this disrupted politics, that what happens when a president puts the power of the office, the rhetorical, the legal, the military power of that office, the legislative influence of that office behind altering the way that, particularly, Black/white relations operate in this country, that that creates a politics that is very distinct from what has happened before.

And it’s in that politics that these figures become president, and they have really an improvisational situation where they come to office, their political project is linked to racial backlash.

But racial backlash isn’t something you can really achieve in policy. You can’t really roll back the clock. And they find that in each of these situations that something has fundamentally changed. There are people pushing for even further change.

But then there are also these supporters that really want to see things be different. And those supporters, it’s in that support, that they have this populist claim, they make these populist claims to behave lawlessly. And we see real similarities across the types of issues and behaviors that inform each of these three impeachment crises.

Matt Grossmann: So, yeah. Talk a little bit more about that connection, because it’s, obviously, an important similarity across them, but how do we get from changes in the racial order to exertions of executive power to impeachment. Do those naturally go together or did they just go together in these sequences?

Julia Azari: Yeah. I think that what you see here is you see … One thing that happens is the delegitimation of the opposition, the political opposition. We could call this a politics polarizes in a more intense way. We could call it a lot of different things. But that’s really what happens at that point is that each of these presidents has a project of really vilifying their opponents and undermining them.

And each one uses the power of the office in different ways to do that. This is most famous probably with Nixon using the power of the state, using the IRS to go after his enemies, having his enemies list, this abuse of power. But that’s also, essentially, what Trump’s first impeachment was about was using the power of the state to undermine his political opponent.

And there’s a racial component to both of those as well. One of the big things I really want to emphasize in this book is that Watergate is much more about race than virtually any existing account would suggest. For Nixon, when we’re thinking about who are these political opponents that he is going after and his administration is thinking about it is African Americans, it is civil rights leaders, it is Puerto Rican rights activists. It’s people who want to change the social status quo. That is Nixon’s set of political enemies, and that is what is really driving a lot of Watergate.

Same thing with Trump, and I think it’s not a coincidence that his main opponent in 2020, and this Ukraine phone call to undermine Biden, Biden is the choice of African Americans in the party. This is very much a race story.

But it’s also an election interference story. And we see that also with the impeachment of Andrew Johnson where one of the counts is related to his improper rhetoric in 1866 in the midterm elections. And there’s a sense that by going around and denouncing in what were very norm violating terms in his famous swing around the circle, his speaking tour, that that was interfering in some sense with the midterm elections. We wouldn’t think of that activity in those terms today, but that is very much how people at the time were thinking about it.

So, there’s election interference. There was vilifying your political opponents. And there is encroaching on the institutional prerogatives of the other branches to do so. And that’s, essentially, what Lyndon Johnson’s firing of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was was … It wasn’t just this quibble over who gets to do what, but it was really encroaching on Congress’ ability to have a hand in the executive branch in the patronage system, and that was, again, really … Now we wouldn’t think a lot of that, but at the time was really a disruption of how things were done.

With Nixon, obviously, all sorts of encroachment on other institutions, particularly, the FBI, and with Trump, it’s the first impeachment, it’s the obstruction of Congress. So, it’s institutional election interference delegitimizing one’s political opponents.

Matt Grossmann: So, let’s talk about each of the pairings individually, because they all, obviously, have some unique traits, but also some lessons to-

Julia Azari: Sure.

Matt Grossmann: … offer us. So, first, on Andrew Johnson, we have a curious case of the selection for vice president being the underminer. So, how did we get … Remind us how we got Andrew Johnson and the political dynamics of that, and what he did in office, and how inevitable that was given the initial choice.

Julia Azari: Yeah. So, Andrew Johnson is really a curious case. And this is where you write a 19th Century book and every day you’re confronted with the fact that you’re not a 19th Century historian. So, the basic story is Andrew Johnson was selected as Abraham Lincoln’s vice president when he was running for reelection in 1864. And the two of them formed this Union ticket intended to keep … So, Johnson was a loyal southerner from Tennessee. It was intended to keep different regions together, and appeal to loyalists in the border states, and to broaden the appeal of the ticket and move it away from this more radical Republican viewpoint.

And there was this sense in 1864, there was a sense among Republicans that Lincoln really might lose. And Lincoln really wrote letters to indicate that he thought he might lose. And so, there was very much this election imperative, and this set of thoughts about the north was losing its zest for the war. It had gone on for a long time, it was really costly in money and lives, and this idea of keeping up support for saving the union, Johnson was the idea there.

Something we don’t know is exactly how Johnson ended up on the ticket. In the sense that there’s not a historical consensus about whether this was a Lincoln … Lincoln was the primary driver of this, or whether the party was. But that’s how Johnson ended up on the ticket. So, he’s this electoral choice, this idea of broadening out the appeal of the ticket. He’s the 21st Century pundit dream, the multi-party ticket. He had been a Democrat.

And so, he joins Lincoln on this ticket, and very shortly after their inauguration, Lincoln is assassinated and Johnson becomes president. And there Johnson’s full political project becomes apparent over the course of Reconstruction.

Johnson had been a hater of slavery as an economic institution. He had populist reasons for not liking slavery. He felt like the slave power, people with a lot of slaves were wielding excessive economic power. He did not oppose slavery on the grounds that he was a racial egalitarian. He wasn’t.

And the degree to which that was true became more and more apparent over the course of his presidency. And so, there are a lot of different pieces of this, but some of the key things that Johnson did involved vetoing legislation aimed at helping freed people-

… legislation aimed at helping freed people, promising not to enforce bills that were passed or that were passed over his veto. He was not committed to this project of reconstruction as Congress saw it. Again, it would very much have been seen as in the purview of Congress to do this, or at least certainly they thought. So instead, Johnson goes about reconstruction the way he wants to do it, which is to allow states to reinstate a lot of former Confederates in their state leadership to allow states a lot of freedom to rebuild racial hierarchy. So it’s not slavery, but it is very close in terms of what the rights and the lives of African-Americans are like. There’s a lot of violence in the South toward formerly enslaved people. And what Johnson does there is mostly nothing, and allows that violence to continue.

So there is this sort of sense, and Annette Gordon-Reed’s biography of Johnson is really informative on this. There’s this sort of sense that Johnson is not carrying out his responsibilities, that he’s not carrying out his duties to protect the whole country, to protect all citizens equally, that he’s not executing the laws. That leads up to several attempts to find concrete impeachable offenses. This is another feature that carries across all three, is that there’s this sense that this person’s not right, this person isn’t fulfilling the presidency as they are. This sense comes first from African-Americans and their allies, and then it leads into a search for more concrete impeachable offenses.

Matt Grossmann: So Nixon is also a curious case in lots of ways. He certainly does come to power in a backlash election, but he goes along with a lot of congressional liberalism and doesn’t do a full-throated response in policy. Then he sort of overreacts in elections. He a chance to win the next… He ends up winning the next election by 23 percentage points, and yet the whole series of interference is really out of some sort of misplaced fear of election. So explain how we get that Nixon from this backlash.

Julia Azari: Nixon is also a really curious case and there’s a lot of debate about even his very civil rights record, because he did go along with a lot of things and he didn’t enforce a lot of civil rights policies as he was supposed to. So here is a basic way of thinking about this story. Nixon very much wins a backlash election. He wins it a little bit differently than what we might think about Trump in 2016. He positions himself as a moderate in a lot of ways. He runs in the primary in between Ronald Reagan, who’s taking a much stronger state’s rights stance, and Nelson Rockefeller, more liberal.

Part of the way that he gets delegate votes at the RNC is to have a meeting with southern Republicans. And at that meeting, the story goes, he has promised to kind of slow walk civil rights. That becomes the first moment at which black Republicans, of which there were quite a few at that time, start to view Nixon with some suspicion. And that trajectory sends him… That is what creates this sort of path to racialized Watergate, this initial suspicion, this person is not going to uphold the law. And then he wins. Also positioning himself in between the Democrat, Hubert Humphrey, and far more backlash candidacy of George Wallace.

But ultimately as president, I mean Nixon in some ways is really caught in this dilemma where you can’t really use policy to turn back the clock. Or maybe now in 2025 you can, but Nixon was quite constrained in his ability to do this. He was sort of flailing around in a lot of ways between all these different countervailing political political pressures. But what we kind of see moving into, like you said, the ’72 election, Nixon’s very paranoid and it comes to light that there’s this cover up. So along with the Saturday Night Massacre, this sets off deep investigation into Nixon and his corruption.

And what I uncovered just poking around, poking around in the black press, poking around in the, quote unquote, mainstream press, poking around in some documents online in the Howard University Archives, is that some of the people who were first calling for Nixon’s impeachment and were connecting the corruption and the scandal and the, for lack of a better word, distraction of that, to link it to Nixon’s failure to serve African-Americans and failure to improve the lives of African-Americans. This is a very live topic at the time, coming out of the Civil Rights Revolution was kind of like, “What are the next steps? How do we go from these laws on paper to truly better lives for black citizens in the United States?” And of course, this doesn’t really happen.

So some of the early calls for impeaching Nixon and connecting these things come from members of the NAACP that doesn’t go anywhere in 1973, an NAACP meeting. But then it comes up again as the Watergate hearings continue and some of the kind of key players, there are new members of the Congressional Black Caucus who draw this connection, and Barbara Jordan, who really brings the story of the constitution and race history into her famous speech about impeaching Nixon. So you can see that there’s this linkage between a president who isn’t committed to the foundations of the role and the impeachment process.

It’s maybe less than with Johnson or with Trump where you have a set of critics who think something is not right and then they cast about for concrete impeachment offenses. That’s not exactly the sequence of Watergate because there are these more concrete offenses. But the early forces, the early kind of people advocating for the impeachment remedy are linking it to these racial questions.

Matt Grossmann: Listeners will of course be more familiar with the connections between Obama and Trump, but it’s still worth you laying out the very explicit ties between Obama’s racial rise and Trump’s racial change and Trump’s rise. Do that and then connect it to his behavior in office. Why coming after Obama made a difference in how strident he was in pushing executive power?

Julia Azari: In some ways it’s the easiest case to make because I think it’s all right in front of us. In other ways it’s a hard case to make, so it’s hard to get that distance. But here’s the basic idea. Obama comes to office promising a kind of form of racial transcendence and running very much with his biography front and center. And that turns out to inevitably violate this kind of colorblind consensus that I argue had been informing things from 1980 up until when Obama becomes president. And in some ways, the story really starts… The story kind of starts in 2005.

Your listeners will probably remember, after Hurricane Katrina, there’s this telethon and Mike Myers and Kanye West are doing the telethon and they’re trying to raise money for Hurricane Katrina victims. And Kanye West kind of goes off script and starts talking about the racial dimensions. He kind of ends this with, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” What happens after that is what tells us what we need to know about the of colorblind era of politics and the strength of colorblind norms. Which is Mike Myers is like a deer in the headlights and they cut away from him, and Kanye West ends up having to apologize to Bush for hurting his feelings, and Bush is so deeply hurt that he said this. It kind of becomes its own thing, but it is not about in people in New Orleans who are suffering, it becomes about whether it’s okay to say someone is racist.

I always tell my students about this, they’re usually familiar with it. But one of the things I have to say is, the whole thing seems adorable now, right? People say much more incendiary things about each other all the time, but in 2005, this is kind of a big deal. And this tells us why it was so uncomfortable when Obama comes on the political scene and so many conversations are ultimately about race, and so many conversations are about the way there’s a sort of merging of presidential power with marginalized identity that makes critiquing that power a much more complicated endeavor. We look at these tea party rallies, and of course you can rally, you can protest your leader and people in power, but then there’s this racial component and that makes the power dynamics really complicated.

I think the person that has actually made my Obama case for me the best is Ben Shapiro. A couple of weeks ago when he was talking to Ezra Klein and he said, “Obama promised that by electing him as president, we wouldn’t have to talk about this anymore, and instead we just talked about it constantly.” I think that that really actually captures the contradiction of what’s going on with Obama. However we might feel about Shapiro’s other conclusions, I think that captures the tension there. It’s in that tension that both parties are really upended and don’t know what to do in response. Because there’s clearly an element of American politics that’s unhappy with a black president and that is willing to go all in on stuff about illegal immigration. They’re willing to go all in on some pretty explicit racism. And also some more marginal kinds of dog whistle type racism. It’s all kind of mixed in.

And the Republican Party in 2016, as Obama is term-limited and leaving office, is all over the place. You have Jeb Bush and other candidates like that who would really rather go in another direction entirely. Then you have candidates who might want to embrace these sorts of ideas. Then you have Donald Trump who gives Republican leaders the perfect out. He’ll appeal to those voters and they can distance themselves from him and say, “This is not one of us.” This hybrid and complicated political identity is another thing that Nixon and Johnson both share, Andrew Johnson.

So that’s where we get Trump, the democratic field. Also, I think not sure how to address this, and I think Democrats are not sure how to position themselves in a post-Obama party and how to position themselves with regard to the conversations about race that it opened up. So we get a campaign that it’s been quite well documented that attitudes about race, attitudes about Muslims, attitudes about immigration, that all of these drove the behavior of white voters, and that that ultimately was what drove Trump’s electoral college victory in 2016. That’s the connection there.

Then immediately when Trump becomes president, you start to see his opponent draw on the race story to suggest that he’s not fulfilling his duty as president. And that spans from his comments about the travel ban against Muslim countries, and that’s a violation of the 14th Amendment. There are calls for impeachment after his comments after the Charlottesville unrest in 2017. So it’s very similar to Andrew Johnson in that there’s this deep discomfort that is very much racialized, but also lives in the space between race and lawlessness. That there’s actually this connection there in these post transformation moments that is upholding the law and accepting racial progress are the same. In violating the law law and undermining racial progress are also connected. Those two things are sort of hand in hand until they can find some clear and discreet impeachment charges to bring. And that’s really the story of Trump’s first two and a half years in office is that search for impeachment articles.

Matt Grossmann: So the book just came out and went via the timelines of books. You were able to get in a little afterward after the 2024 election, but not about the second term. So I wanted to get-

… about the second term. So I wanted to get your reflections on how much the second term changes the story. First, obviously he comes back, but after another presidency, which is almost entirely framed in opposition to his first term, he comes to power with a more racially diverse electoral coalition. And then in office he acts far more stridently than in the first term to expand executive power. So what are we to make of that given the story?

Julia Azari: Yeah, I mean, this is really…. It’s one of those things where I haven’t had a chance to really sit down and wrestle with all the different pieces. So in some ways I’m glad I sent this off on January 20th, I wrote the afterward and I sent it off. And in other ways I would’ve maybe written a different book if I’d really thought through the possibility of what we’re seeing now because we’re in this sort of aftermath period, and that also is covered in the book, but not at much great length.

So the analogy here is that Biden would be sort of analogous to Jimmy Carter, just an analogy we’ve heard before, but this is maybe a different lens, and also too someone maybe like Rutherford B. Hayes. And what’s notable about these presidents is they’re from the same party as the racially transformative leader, but they’re not really taking up that project. They want to do something else. And they are very much, Carter in particular, very much in response to Nixon, but not along racial lines necessarily much more in this government reform way. And it’s really notable that Carter in particular came to office without much of a civil rights plan.

So basically you see the Republicans at the end of the 19th century back away from the radicalism of the early party. You see the Democrats in the closing years of the 20th century also backing away also as those years progress, wanting to not have that much to do with a racially transformative agenda or wanting to be linked with what they call special interests, you see these as tensions between the Mondales and the Jesse Jacksons of the party. And then I actually think Biden is a little bit different. And the dynamics of political parties in the 21st century meant that Biden was not able to back away nearly as much as the analogous presidents. And I think that that helps us better understand the resurgence of Trump.

And some of this, it should be said, I think is the normal push and pull of elections and then nostalgia for past presidents. But there is this sort of, I think, sense that the Biden presidency was maybe especially racially progressive in ways that are quite visible. This is not to say that it did everything it could do on that front or was especially radical, but you had the selection of Kamala Harris as vice president, that’s obviously very visible. You had the appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson, very visible and some early executive orders overturned by courts mostly on addressing structural racism. And so that’s I think kind of early what we see with Biden.

And then with Trump, we see this very strong new backlash. So I’ve been playing around with this. I wrote a little bit about this in my Substack, Good Politics/Bad Politics, asking, is this a continuation of the Obama backlash, essentially? Is this just a long backlash where we went back to, in a lot of ways, I think some of those same racial politics of Obama and then now we’re back to Trump, is this a new backlash because maybe we might even say Biden had a little more leeway I think to push on the issue. And Trump I think is clearly in office in his rhetoric and certainly in his action has doubled down on some of this stuff in new ways. In the first term, they were touting all of their efforts for historically Black colleges and universities, and now they’re going after major players and specifically on these kind of DEI grounds and elevating figures like Pete Hegseth who’s really made this very clear. Trump says in his inaugural address, “We are going to be colorblind.” And he has carried that ideology into some very forceful and sometimes potentially lawless government actions.

So it’s like we could be in this new period of backlash. We could be in a perpetual period of backlash where now the parties are pretty racially polarized. So figures like FDR who will be more avoidant of the issue are not going to happen because who can be avoidant? Racial justice activists are a very important part of the Democratic coalition, clearly backlash forces are very important part of the Republican coalition.

One thing I think we haven’t really addressed, and maybe I’m not the person to do it, is that Trump’s 2024 electoral coalition was more diverse racially and his governance hasn’t really been what you would kind of expect given that. I think that there are two things to say about that, because I think that does loom large in the political imagination. One is that those differences, especially among Black voters are actually pretty small, and African-Americans remain a very strong democratic constituency. And Latinos potentially kind of reverted to the pre-Obama mean, voted similarly as they did in 2004 with Bush.

There’s an angle, and this is where I think this really needs someone who’s a little more sociological, there’s an angle where you could say, well, there are these ways of thinking about race that are not about who you are, there are about how you think about social structures. So I think there’s a lot of angles to be explored along those lines, and I think that that’s difficult to reconcile while we’re in the moment. But that’s how I’ve been thinking about it. And I think that the way to think about it’s to sort of analogize, how does Biden analogize to these other periods? How does Trump then analogize to Reagan? Or maybe even, the earlier period doesn’t give us an obvious analogy, but Woodrow Wilson is one to think about. So that’s how I would maybe think about that.

Matt Grossmann: So you mentioned that Ben Shapiro sort of agreed with your story of the rise of Trump, but that caused him to blame Obama. And so I want to get your take on if we know that this is a inevitable backlash to racial change, how that should cause us to reevaluate these transformative presidents of Lincoln, Johnson and Obama, especially given that these are not naive people about this, they all knew what was coming in some sense and struggled with how to deal with that. So what should be our takeaways?

Julia Azari: Yeah, so I think there’s really two takeaways that I want people to have, and if there’s anything that my book prescribes, it can be found here. One is more intellectual, which is how we evaluate presidents. And I think that one of the things I wanted us to do in this book was get away from endless analysis of whether… Was Lincoln a racist? There’s so much scholarship about this, it probably, I guess maybe, right? And how do we evaluate Obama? Did he do enough? I think what you want to do instead is look at the impact of what people did on policy and politics. And this has been, it’s been kind of a main idea with American political development scholarship for a long time, but it hasn’t really taken.

What you want to do when you’re analyzing a presidency is to really look at its impact rather than the intent or what was happening in the hearts of the leader, and I think that’s especially tempting to do when it comes to racism and a topic that’s so emotional and personal to people. But what we do there is say, “All the three of these presidents had some serious flaws, and maybe a lot of flaws in their intent about what they wanted to do, but here was the impact of what they did on policy and on politics.”

The second thing is that I don’t actually think that this is exactly inevitable, and that’s where making different choices at this point in time comes in, which is that what I want to do is suggest that by the time we get to a Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson and Obama, that race has been so baked into all of people’s expectations about how politics works in a very specific way, that changing that makes things become very unstable, become very volatile. And you can make different choices in the period we’re in now where you’re sort of establishing, what is the new normal going to look like. And I suspect a lot of your listeners don’t think much of what the new normal is right now, and I think that’s a fairly widespread sentiment if you look at the polling numbers.

And so this is not to suggest that this is what our politics is now, I think it is to suggest that this is the period in which people who believe that all people are equal, who believe that we should live in a system that is equal in opportunity for everybody, everyone is equal under the law, that if we hold those values across a lot of other differences, this is a time to assert those values and not be afraid of the uncomfortable conversations they produce about what that is actually going to look like. And instead, our politics has been quite avoidant on that front, and that’s the point we’re in now. So it’s not inevitable that we have this cycle. It could actually be interrupted if we make more, I think more uncomfortable and confrontational choices, but that we can have peaceful and direct politics and discussions that address these problems and that break the cycle rather than perpetuate it.

Matt Grossmann: So you developed scholarly in this world of residential categorizations and periodization, and I know there’s always a question about the value of that, also whether it’s changed. And I think I want you to situate a little bit your categorization and periodization in that, but also kind of answer the question of, how much we should see Trump as a unique figure? Part of your analysis kind of inevitably says, “Well, this isn’t as unique as it seems, but on the other hand, there are some true departures from American history in Trump.” So how do you think about that?

Julia Azari: Yeah, I mean I think a lot about this. And so I think, to be straightforward, what you’re really talking about here is Steve Skowronek’s work, right? I mean there are other periodizations, like realignment theory. I don’t mess much with realignment theory to be honest, but certainly this in some ways is a response to the famous among political scientists and history nerds, Skowronek typology, which has some of the same cut points as this but not all, that kind of looks at presidents like Lincoln as presidents that both broke away from the past and then created something new. And then there’s FDR, and then Lyndon Johnson’s kind of in the middle of this FDR through Jimmy Carter order.

And so that was one of several bees in my bonnet when I wrote this, is that I think I obviously have learned a lot from the work and been influenced a lot by that work and cite it a lot in this book and in other things that I have written, but that I wanted to create an alternative framework that puts race at the center because I think it is the central conflict and I think that that… I think it’s underlying that periodization scheme. That when that history tells a story of splits in the Democratic Party, which is kind of what drives history along in that telling that they’re treated as, okay coalitions have splits and here is one.

And I don’t think that the race divide, whether it’s prior to the Civil War or prior to civil rights or in the post-Civil rights period that we’re still bumbling around in some ways, I don’t think it’s just another thing. I think it is the thing. And I think that we should treat it as having kind of distinct properties in the way that it pushes history along that are not the same as splits over other types of issues.

So that is sort of where I fall there. I very much draw from Skowronek this idea that we should look at the impact of what presidents do. That is really the main argument of his first book-length treatment of this, The Politics Presidents Make, is that we should look at what presidents do…

The politics presidents make is that we should look at what presidents do and how it affects those that come after. But what everyone takes from it is this for this two by two typology.

Matt Grossmann: So, you said you’re not a historian of the 19th century, but you’re about as close as we get in political science. So, I wanted you to reflect a bit on how historians look at these same patterns versus how we look at them. Maybe I think they might consider us presentist in very explicitly trying to explain more recent events by looking to the past. But I also know that since you did a deep dive, you may have just found some interesting things about these cases that maybe don’t help to explain today, but you think people should know. So, talk a little bit about your role as a historian versus a political scientist in this project.

Julia Azari: Yeah, I mean I think there’s a couple components. This is a great question. I would’ve probably had a better answer to this question when I finished the manuscript early 2024. There are a couple of things. Generally when I talk to historians and I go to interdisciplinary conferences, that’s when I realize I’m not a historian. And it’s usually because there’s sort of two things and one is really they have a real focus on having expertise in an era. And I clearly have only written books that are how many different eras can I cram into this thing? I’m going to stop doing that by the way, but we can talk about that later if you want. At least I’m going to stop doing that for my next book.

So, they are very focused on an era, and that means I know a lot of particulars about that era. It also means epistemologically there tends to be a focus on understanding the particulars and not drawing these more abstracted comparisons. And so the types of models that you and I think about where we abstract away a lot of the specific differences and then we look for patterns. A lot of historians don’t think that way. It kind of reminds me, there’s a quote in the book really dating myself here, the King, Keohane and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry that was required reading when I was in graduate school has a line in it that basically is like, yeah, model is oversimplify, but the most complex model is still so much more simple than reality. The difference between those two things is much bigger than the difference between a more complex model and a simpler model.

And they’re making the specific kind of social science argument that I don’t think really informs my book, but I do think this sort of comparative thinking does. And so epistemologically when I talk to historians, that’s where we differ. That being said, most of what I read I found very compatible with my way of thinking, and even though they don’t necessarily use the word variable, it was very much oriented around telling a story about what caused what or how different things were linked about developing conceptual categories. So, a lot of the work that I read about the Civil War era, I read a lot of Michael Holt’s work on the dynamics within the parties leading up to the Civil War and sort of growing regional conflict. I read there was a lot of wonderful Johnson scholarship including Brenda Wineapple’s book, the Impeachers that came out as I started this project that gave a lot of deep detail.

It also really helped in understanding the Johnson case because I was not taught the depths of the horrors of what happened in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War or for that matter, what happened in the early 20th century and Jim Crow. I don’t know what you learned, but when, and I think we’re about the same age, but what I learned in grade school was there were separate water fountains and there were separate water fountains, but also there was a lot of violence and lynching and people lost their lives in these grotesque ways and historians don’t shy away from presenting that. And similarly, this period after emancipation in the South, for lack of a different word, backlash and the violence against freed people, this really helped me understand I think the deeper dynamics of what I was trying to capture in the book.

But I guess the other thing I’ll say about my being a historian, this book was written, I started writing this during the pandemic and I needed to pick a project I could mostly do for my desk in case archives never opened and I never went anywhere again, just kind of how it felt in late 2020. And so I did a lot of historical newspaper work through the Marquette library. And I do think that is kind of my nod to being a historian in this book. And I did uncover things that I didn’t see in the rest of the literature. And I think it gives you a nice lens as to what people are debating and talking about at a given time. And I really do try to channel the political sensibilities of a given time in my work.

Matt Grossmann: So, in addition to spanning disciplines, you also try to be active in the real political world and in kind of the wider media commentary. And I think you view your public scholarship as not just being one way promotion of your research, but putting out there, getting things back in as to how other people are seeing it. But it strikes me that the world has changed there a lot from when you started in the heyday of pre-Elon Twitter and FiveThirtyEight and the Monkey Cage and all of ways that there was this sort of channel between political science and popular commentary. So, talk a little bit about how that channel sort of informed this project and then how you think things have changed.

Julia Azari: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, I do think it did inform this project and throughout Trump’s first term in particular, I was trying to disentangle the President’s Party’s race triangle, and I did quite a bit of that in these types of venues. It has changed a lot since most of us have lost our editorial backing. Now we’re on Substack, right? Different configurations. And I write this Substack with Jonathan Bernstein and David Bernstein where we offer a variety of different takes on American politics broadly. And so it’s freeing to be able to write what you want without an editor. It is, I don’t like not having an editor to vet my ideas and also my spelling and grammar and word repetition, all these atrocious things. But it has changed. But I feel like there’s a really rich commentary world happening. The thing where everyone and their uncle has a Substack feels a little unsustainable to me.

And at some point people are going to start combining again and then we’ll just add some new editorial form. And I couldn’t explain the business model to you, but I do know that enough of us have enough paid subscribers. It does suggest that people understand that you need to support this work. And so maybe we need different models for doing so. Obviously the challenges of being a public facing scholar for a lot of us are more political. Are about institutional pushback, are about our own safety. And in some ways moving off of these more mainstream platforms has been a relief for me in that regard. I think that I like the level of readership you get with a kind of independent blog, and that is the truth.

Those trade-offs for having a broader audience for me are not really worth it right now. So, that’s how I would think about it. But I do think that a changing economic landscape is something people are capable of negotiating is sort of changing political landscape and the prospect of threats and the prospect of just the constant psychological toll being out there, I think is something we ought to really consider as a way that limits what is out there in the public sphere and limits who is participating in the public sphere. So, that’s my commentary on that.

Matt Grossmann: Your book is about impeachment, and it is interesting that the second term so far has brought not a clear set of calls for impeachment despite presidential overriding of authority more so than the first term. Part of that is obviously control of Congress and the wider perception that impeachment is toothless in our current predicament. But you sort of show that that’s a more longer standing problem than maybe people think. So, how should we view impeachment in the current moment and what did going through these previous ones teach you?

Julia Azari: I mean, I think that this is going to be a real test if the Democrats gain control of the house in 2026, and it seems that a likely outcome is that Democrats will gain narrow control of the House of Representatives. And that will present an interesting dilemma because impeachment has been this sort of process of corralling a coalition and specifically corralling people who are more electorally cautious. I do think that there is an interesting thing where the Clinton impeachment, we could do a whole other separate podcast about how I treat that in the book. The lesson from that is, this will be bad for you in the midterms, don’t do it. This is electoral poison. And I don’t think that was a lesson of a last two Trump impeachments.

The lesson was this will go nowhere because there’s 0% chance you will get enough Republicans to vote with you against the President and there’s no … Or whatever, there’s 0% chance of enough people switching over. There’s 0% chance of 67 senators naming a post office, much less removing a co-equal branch. And so I think that’s the lesson going forward. And I’m of two minds about this, neither of which are really provable right now. I mean, I think you regularly hear this in the sort of commentary on Bluesky, which is a place I spend too much time. But it is the usual sort of commentary suspect saying any one of these would be an impeachable offense. And I think impeachment is sort of in the water. At the same time, it might be the case that a democratic majority in the house decides this is so toothless, it’s not worth it.

There’s no way that we’re going to get a conviction. Particularly if Republicans still control the Senate, there’s no way we’ll get a conviction. But you also, I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s like, well, this is the tool that we have and this is a way we can make a statement potentially gum up the works a little bit. If Democrats control the house and nothing else, they’re not going to accomplish anything else anyway. So, they might as well do this. And I wouldn’t be that surprised if they go that route. But yeah, I think that the book and just lived experience reveals that impeachment, it’s not a terribly effective remedy and it’s viewed as so politically costly that I’m not even sure that the threat of impeachment is like this quiet constraint the way that some people have theorized it might be.

Matt Grossmann: And anything we didn’t get to that you wanted to include or anything you want to tout about what you’re working on next?

Julia Azari: I think this is a pretty thorough conversation. I’ve clearly gone on and on. I’ll tell I have an edited volume with Andy Rudalevige and Bert Rockman on Trump’s first term coming out in 2026. I’m working on a book on the vice presidency with William Adler and its connection to party politics. And I think what I’ll do next is a book on the legacy of George W. Bush if for only for the reason that I want to write a book about one thing, like a 20-year historical period. And that feels very luxurious right now. So, that’s kind of where I’m going. If folks want to check out my Substack, Good Politics/Bad Politics, that would be great. And the book is Backlash Presidents.

Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available biweekly from the Niskanen Center. And I’m your host, Matt Grossman. If you like this discussion, I recommend checking these episodes out next, Racial Stereotypes in Voting for Obama and Trump, Judging Biden and Congress, The Backstory for Presidential Power Grabs, How the President Gained War Powers and The Two Sides of the Immigration Backlash. Thanks to Julia Azari for joining me. Please check out Backlash Presidents and then check in next time.