Maxwell School News and Commentary

“The party didn’t coalesce around one alternative to Trump, and that’s what the skeptics needed,” says Shana Gadarian, associate dean for research and professor of political science.

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.

With little indication that the U.S. will attempt to assert leverage over Israel, Blinken’s latest trip to the Middle East is fundamentally “performative,” says Osamah Khalil, professor of history. “There is a face-saving domestic consumption element for [the Biden administration] and a separate face-saving element to allow Israel to claim some kind of victory,” he says.

"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."

“As this continues over the next few weeks, you’re going to see even greater distance between the U.S. and its allies, and the U.S. and Israel increasingly isolated,” says Osamah Khalil, professor of history and chair of the International Relations Undergraduate Program.

“There is a big thumb on the scale in favor of the president’s interpretation of whether the order is lawful,” says William Banks, professor emeritus of public administration and international affairs. “You’d have a really big row to hoe and you would have a big fuss inside the military if you chose not to follow a presidential order.”

“Cutting off aid to Ukraine, as some in Congress propose, would undermine the immediate war effort in Europe and diminish the deterrent power of U.S. military force globally,” says Michael John Williams, associate professor of public administration and international affairs.

“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.”

David Popp, professor of public administration and international affairs, notes that while new factories will be needed to build electric vehicle batteries, the vehicles will require fewer suppliers producing parts. Many assembly workers will also need to be retrained. “We may also need fewer workers,” Popp says. But, he says, “there doesn’t seem to be a consensus yet on whether that is the case.”

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.