In 1969, eight years into his career as a Maxwell School history professor, David H. Bennett began teaching two back-to-back survey courses which, together, covered American history from roughly 1900 to the present.

The first class drew 50 students. Then word got around. The courses, though not required by any major, began to attract students from across the University, and Bennett’s two-semester sequence was moved to Maxwell Auditorium.

“For several decades, those classes filled the auditorium, and oftentimes I had students sitting on the steps,” Bennett recalls.

For half a century, it was a near-constant of life at Maxwell that, at 11:30 every Tuesday and Thursday morning, Bennett stood in “Max Aud” before an audience of 200 or so undergraduates and taught History 307/308, as the two courses are catalogued. He attempted to make sense of the American Century—and as time went on, the two decades that followed. Retired since 2013, Bennett nonetheless has continued to alternate teaching History 308 (Modern History, 1960 to the Present) and a military history course (The World at War) each fall.

He’ll do so once more. This fall Bennett will teach HST 308 for the last time. He’s doing so partly to close out his career with 60 full years of teaching. But he’s doing it also because this time the content will coincide with the November 2020 election, which, at 85, he views as the most significant political election of his lifetime.

“In my judgment, it’s likely to be seen as the most important election in American history since 1860 and 1864,” he says. In 1860 Republican Abraham Lincoln defeated Democrat John C. Breckinridge, triggering the Civil War; and in 1864 Lincoln won a close reelection effort, which saved the Union.

As Bennett sees it there’s partisanship in every election. And with every election, there are people who believe it to be the most important in history. But this one, he believes, is actually different. And that’s because of Donald J. Trump.

As an historian and astute observer of the presidency throughout American history, David Bennett views President Trump as a product of recent trends.

But he also sees Trump as an American leader who has handled his role in a way no American president, conservative or liberal, ever has—attacking the free press, attempting to redefine the judiciary, dismantling the norms of global trade, and seemingly inviting foreign nations to interfere in American elections. “He’s an outlier,” says Bennett.

But not without a fight. The economic collapse of the 1970s (along with the social upheavals of the 1960s) fueled the Reagan revolution and a return—for the first real time since the 1920s, Bennett says—to deep-dyed conservatism. “That’s where getting the government off our backs and out of our pockets came from,” says Bennett.

Trump, though considered by many not a true conservative, promotes economic policies consistent with traditional Republican goals—to deregulate industry, downsize government, and cut taxes, with the intended effect of stimulating jobs and the economy.

This, Bennett says, was the beginning of efforts to purge the Republican Party of moderates. He sees parallels within the Democratic Party, where increasing numbers—particularly on the left—believe you can no longer achieve compromise with Republicans.

Those who appreciate the dynamics of American government, Bennett says, should view this as a dangerous trend. “Compromise is essential,” he says. “Given the nature of the Constitution, we can’t run government in the United States without it.”

Viewing the opposing party as the enemy has led us to Donald Trump, Bennett maintains. In ways no one anticipated when he took office, Trump fully captured the Republican Party by adopting the attitude of the politically righteous and demonizing any opposition.

In the process, he is changing the way many view a presidential administration. The “Partisan-in-Chief,” while championing his party’s views with little (or no) permissible dissent, is also attempting to reshape the very office from which he speaks. This, says Bennett, creates a tension that, among voters, proves complicated. Even those who favor Trump’s traditional Republican policies sometimes blanch at his approach to executive power.

While the Constitution was built with many checks and balances, Bennett says Trump has attempted to use executive power in ways that no executive before ever thought to do. “With the complicity of GOP senators and house members, many intimidated by his popularity, with a Republican base responding to Trump’s nativist and populist rhetoric, he was able to stonewall Congress about the impeachment inquiry. He’s had federal judges slow-walk the Democrats in Congressional lawsuits,” Bennett says. “Nothing has been done to check his power.”

And ultimately, that’s what makes this election so important—at least in the eyes of an historian who has watched the pendulums swing for eight decades, and who understands the tensions built into the American system. If you favor Trump’s policies, are you also comfortable with his approach to executive power?

“There are many who believe that Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to both political conservatism and to Democratic institutions in the United States,” says Bennett. “That’s not just academics and journalists and liberals, but among conservatives themselves. There’s widespread fear that if there’s four more years of Donald J. Trump in the White House, we might not recognize the America we all grew up in.”