Ruth Graham is a journalist in New Hampshire.

The presidency of Donald Trump is many things, depending on your point of view: an inspiration, a threat to democracy, a gold-plated boondoggle. But the one thing Trump’s fans and his critics can agree on is that it is unprecedented.

For scholars of American politics, history and even psychology, that makes it fertile ground. “From a purely academic and intellectual standpoint, it’s like an experiment,” says Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. “Here’s what people thought about the presidency for a very long time, and suddenly there’s something radically new.”


After 16 months of campaigning and seven months of the Trump presidency, it has become clear: We didn’t understand America that well at all. Parties ultimately have control over their primaries? Trump ran away with the Republican nomination with almost no early institutional support. Republicans support limited government? The winning candidate promised to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure and offered “insurance for everybody.” Politicians can’t violate major social norms and still get elected?

Trump appeared to make fun of a disabled reporter onstage, bragged about how his followers wouldn’t care if he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and was caught on tape talking about how fame gave him carte blanche to grab women’s genitals.

It’s the job of academics like Posner to figure out what’s really going on, and the pop-up field of “Trump studies” has quickly arrived to help explain how so many could be so wrong about so much. Posner, for example, published a working paper in January that branded Trump’s political style as “personalism” and suggested it would run into trouble when it came time to actually govern. Trump has already been the subject of scholarship on an unusually wide variety of topics: the moral psychology of his voters; whether he is susceptible to impeachment; and how the president’s tweets affect the stock prices of the companies he mentions. While “Trump studies” in general is still in its infancy, it is already revealing that the stories we have long told ourselves about America might be idealistic fictions.

Christopher Parker, a political scientist at the University of Washington, was one of the few academics who saw President Trump coming, with the candidate’s support driven by racial resentment rather than “economic anxieties,” according to Parker. He coauthored a book in 2013 arguing that the recent emergence of the Tea Party was driven not by economic principles but by anxiety that America was being stolen from “real Americans.” When candidate Trump arrived on the scene, Parker went back to his Tea Party data and found a significant overlap between that constituency and Trump’s fans. “Do not be surprised if Trump wins the nomination,” he wrote in a September 2015 column in The Conversation, a website for academic news and thought. Later, Parker predicted Trump could very plausibly become president. In early September, the American Political Science Association’s annual conference was to feature several Trump-themed public discussions, including one with Parker. “I’m going to say I did, but no one else did,” he says with a laugh. “Most black people had a feeling this was going to happen. I’m only different because I’m a social scientist, and I was able to figure it out with evidence.”

Maria Guadalupe, an economics and political science professor at INSEAD, a business school in France, thought the campaign taught us something about gender, but she ended up discovering an insight about the power of emotion in politics. In January, she staged a role-reversal version of the presidential debates for the public in New York, in which Donald Trump was a woman and Hillary Clinton was a man but everything else about the candidates stayed the same. Guadalupe expected that audiences would recoil at Trump’s aggression and interruptions if they came from a woman, but audiences found the loose, brash female-Trump character appealing and her opponent, a male actor with Clinton’s mannerisms, stiff and smiley. It wasn’t the candidates’ gender, Guadalupe concluded, that influenced the divergent reactions, so much as Trump’s pure ability to connect emotionally with an audience. “Clinton was not as effective at that,” she says. “It was depressing to see how successful one can be just going for the emotions.”

Most academic work about Trump the man is really about the Trump phenomenon; experts who have ventured into analyzing him too closely have found themselves in more controversial territory. Bandy Lee, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine, organized a town hall in April at which psychiatrists and psychologists publicly discussed concerns about the president’s mental health. The event was a deliberate challenge to the “Goldwater rule,” an ethical code that forbids psychologists and psychiatrists from diagnosing public figures they haven’t examined in person. Yale dropped out as a sponsor beforehand, and the event wound up being sparsely attended. James Gilligan, a professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine, argued at the town hall that no wild speculations about Trump’s potential mental illness(es) would be necessary to assess him as a threat. Lee’s book following up on the town hall, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, will be published this fall.

Now, academics are beginning to shift their attention from Trump the candidate to Trump the president. They are analyzing the media—a Harvard Kennedy School report found that Trump received three times the coverage of previous presidents in his first 100 days in office—and reading the tea leaves of his administration’s early approach to human rights (the outlook, the authors conclude, is not good). So far, however, scholars of Trump have come to few satisfying major conclusions. After all, it can take years—even decades—for serious research to bear fruit, and it’s still less than 12 months since the election. As academics sift through what happened in November, and scrutinize the fallout in 2017 and beyond, in some ways they are still operating as blindly as the rest of us. If they knew exactly how this would turn out, after all, it wouldn’t be much of an experiment.