Donald Trump’s presidency has been unsettling to some, often spurring controversy while testing our country’s political institutions. Some argue he is at the root of the problem while others say he is simply a symptom of an already broken system.
To unravel this a bit more and to offer possible ways out, Greg Sargent of the Washington Post’s Plum Line Blog joins this episode of Politics & Polls with Julian Zelizer and Sam Wang. Sargent has written a new book on the subject, “An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics.”
Sargent is an opinion writer covering national politics at the Washington Post. Previously, he wrote for New York magazine, the New York Observer, Talking Points Memo and numerous political websites. He lives in Maryland with his family.
ABOUT THE HOSTS
Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is also a CNN Political Analyst and columnist for the Atlantic. He is the author of several books including, most recently, "The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society," which was just awarded the DB Hardeman Prize for the Best Book on Congress. He has edited and authored 19 books on American political history and published over 700 hundred op-eds, including his popular weekly column on CNN.com.
Wang is professor of neuroscience and molecular biology at Princeton University. He is known for his books "Welcome to Your Brain" and "Welcome to Your Child's Brain" and for his founding role at the Princeton Election Consortium, a blog providing U.S. election analyses. In 2004, Wang was one of the first to aggregate U.S. presidential polls using probabilistic methods. In 2012, his statistical analysis correctly predicted the presidential vote outcome in 49 of 50 states. He has also developed new statistical standards for partisan gerrymandering. A neuroscientist, Wang's academic research focuses on the neuroscience of learning, the cerebellum, and autism.