The Rhetorical Presidency Made Flesh: A Political Science Classic in the Age of Donald Trump

Abstract

This article revisits Jeffrey Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency in the age of Trump, discussing the debates to which it originally responded, its core thesis and empirical evidence, as well as its subsequent impact on political science in the last three decades. The article’s second half turns to a recent critique of Tulis’s thesis by Ann C. Pluta, which manifests many of the misunderstandings that have persisted since The Rhetorical Presidency’s original publication. Habits of thought revealed in Pluta’s misunderstandings, I argue, showcase the kind of political culture that is most amenable to the simplistic yet politically effective appeals characteristic of rhetorical presidents like Donald Trump. Elements of the broader political-science world that are on display in Pluta’s article are symptomatic of political pathologies sustained and aggravated by the culture of the polity that political scientists inhabit and purport to study — the culture of the rhetorical presidency.