Narrative in the Time of Trump: Is the Narrative Policy Framework good enough to be relevant?

Abstract Narratives are the primary way by which people both understand themselves and how they communicate with others. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), a framework intended to help researchers make sense of the policy process, empirically studies the capacity for narratives to shape public policy at multiple levels of analyses. After what has now been a decade of empirical hypotheses testing, the NPF is employed in this article as a theoretical tool to engage the postmodern threat of President Donald Trump. While Trump’s misbehaviors are many, here we focus on his propensity to invent facts and engage in activities that seek to obscure truth. We argue these activities are an existential threat to democratic and scientific institutions, that these institutions require defending, and that the NPF can be deployed to that end. To make our case we first articulate the postmodern threat that Trump presents. We then leverage the NPF to provide ideas and strategies that we would expect to help us better understand Trump’s narrative tactics. The article concludes with some prescriptions flowing from the NPF, which are aimed at firmly anchoring the NPF to the normative assumptions and presuppositions of democracy and science.