The Fight Over How Trump Fits in With the Other 44 Presidents

It didn’t take long after President Trump took office for conflicting views about the strength and duration of his legacy to surface.

A “regime” theory of the presidency — developed in “The Politics Presidents Make” by Stephen Skowronek, a political scientist at Yale — provides the theoretical basis for the view that despite his victory in 2016, Trump represents the final collapse of Reagan-era conservatism. Skowronek described his overall project as a “study of presidents as agents of political change” that produced a framework of “four types of political leadership,” each of which I will explore in more detail below, with and without reference to the seeming anomaly of Trump. CONT.

Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times