Mentoring and Teaching Students in the Age of Trump: What's a Law Prof to Do?

After class last week, a student came up to me and politely asked me if I would engage in a serious discussion about Donald Trump. I said sure, and as we walked away from the busy hallway he told me that he is part of a new student organization that is to the right of the Federalist Society and full of people who support Donald Trump. 

The next 30 minutes were very, very interesting and raised a number of hard questions for me about my appropriate role as a law professor. There are no answers in this post, just a lot of (I hope) important questions.

We began with me pointing out just a subset of the undisputably immoral moments that mark Donald Trump's life and career. I began with the Central Park Five and how Trump maintained that they were guilty even after DNA evidence conclusively established that they were innocent.  We talked about his incessant and childish name-calling, and January 6, and his not returning classified documents, and his announcement that he was going to impose a Muslim ban when he ran for president in 2016, and much more.

After each incident, my student would suggest that, although there was a basic truth to what I was saying, there were elements of my recitation of these events that were exaggerated or that missed key points, but importantly, my student did not even begin to defend Trump's character.

Instead, my student said to me that I just didn't understand him and his friends. He said that he is 30 years old and believes the entire federal government is corrupt, that the system is not working, and that America is in a very dark place. He said that Trump is the only politician who is conveying that message and that it is possible that there has to be chaos and the tearing down of institutions before our country can get back on its feet again. He was clear it is the message, not the messenger, that attracted him to Trumpism.

So I listened carefully and patiently, and in the moment tried to figure out how I should respond. I said that I believe Trump is an existential threat to the United States. I believe Trump's morality is indistinguishable from that of Hitler, but of course he doesn't have the same environment to work with, and the United States in 2024 is not Germany in 1936. But in terms of morality and ethics, Trump is a generational evil like the worst leaders in history. I said that his intuitive ability to know what brings out the very worst in people is extremely dangerous and rare.

But those arguments didn't get us anywhere because my student mostly conceded what I was saying, which made me wonder whether the American left and the Democratic Party need to take more seriously the angst on the right side of the American political spectrum.  I don't have answers to why 74 million Americans voted for such a despicable, horrible person but we probably need to understand better what is driving the movement.

TO BE CLEAR, I reject out of hand the claim that "economic anxiety" explains Trump's rise. In 2016 and again in 2020, Trump lost among relatively poorer voters and won among voters earning over $100,000/year. People like my Trump-supporting student may feel like the government isn't working, but it's not because they're (on average) more down and out than their fellow Americans. Quite the contrary. Nor do I endorse the claim made by many on the right that somehow Trump's political success is simply a backlash against an overzealous "woke" left. That is not remotely what I'm saying. The right is 100% responsible for Trump.

But maybe, just maybe, we do need to think more broadly about how to bring disaffected folks like my student and his group closer to the middle of the American political spectrum. But even if I'm wrong about that, these are my students. Should I even have these discussions with them? If I do, how judgmental should I be? What about the classroom? I'll be teaching a number of Trump cases, including of course the immunity disaster. Should I take Trump's threat to democracy out of that discussion because many of my students just don't believe it or care? How do I respond, if at all, if other students raise Trump’s unique evil?  Is Trump's personality even relevant to the broader legal issues raised by so many of these cases? 

I don't have good answers to any of these questions but I am reflecting on them on a daily basis. If you have any thoughts, you know where to find me (esegall@gsu.edu, @espinsegall).