Diagnosing the Blinding Effects of Trumpism: Rejoinder to Pluta

ABSTRACT Anne C. Pluta’s reply to my critique perpetuates the errors that undermined the article I criticized. Pluta dismisses out of hand my suggestion that her mistakes are the result of the particular lens through which she and much of the political science community view the American presidency. Yet this suggestion has the merit of explaining why she contends that piling up nineteenth-century instances of presidential public “speech” undermines Jeffrey Tulis’s contention that the nature of presidential speech changed decisively at the beginning of the twentieth century, such that rhetorical, often-demagogic appeals over the heads of Congress displaced public speech that affirmed the values of republican, constitutional government.