Maxwell School News and Commentary

Grant Reeher, professor of political science, tells Newsweek that Trump will continue to use his legal difficulties to rile up his MAGA base. However, Reeher adds that it remains to be seen if this will ultimately damage Trump's White House ambitions.

Simon Weschle, associate professor of political science, contributed a chapter titled "Campaign Finance" to the book "The Political Economy of Lobbying: Channels of Influence and their Regulation" (Springer, 2024).

“The independents that are part of the polling…don’t like either of them. And then, of course the Democrats in the polls are not going to give Trump any positive ratings, and Republicans are not going to give Biden any positive ratings,” says Grant Reeher, professor of political science.

"Having the turnover in the organization that he's had is nowhere near the chaos that the disrupter in chief caused both as a candidate and as president," Grant Reeher, professor of political science, says of DeSantis's aim to be a drama-free Trump. "So in that sense, then that claim is still reasonably valid. I don't know what it gets him."

“Some of these polls are really in a way approval ratings of President Biden, which we know are not great,” says Grant Reeher, director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute. “So it’s not so much people saying I’d rather have Donald Trump than Joe Biden, it’s people saying I’m not happy with where the country is going, and I want an alternative.”

"It is clear that, whatever Trump actually believed, he himself did not mean his pronouncements of election fraud to be taken as mere opinion. When Trump made such claims, he invariably portrayed them not only as true but proven conclusively, albeit by evidence he never produced," writes Dana Radcliffe, adjunct professor of public administration and international affairs.

“We are entering contentious electoral cycles on both sides of the border, with voters going to the ballot box in June 2024 in Mexico and November 2024 for the U.S. The scourge of drug trafficking and ineffective government responses to organized crime will figure prominently in stump speeches,” writes Gladys McCormick, Jay and Debe Moskowitz Endowed Chair in Mexico-U.S. Relations.

William Banks, professor emeritus of public administration and international affairs, says that once the attack on the Capitol began, Trump had options he did not use. “He should respond to his constitutional responsibilities to protect the security of the United States when there’s an assault on our democratic process,” Banks says of Trump.