In the thicket of daily news, it’s often hard to place events within a broad historical context. Indeed, during periods of rapid change the present can feel like it is perpetually erasing the past. We fixate on the now and the what next? and rather than becoming illuminated, get sucked into a black hole of actions stripped of meaning.

For this reason, the perspective of a scholar such as Sean Wilentz, the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University, is both informative and all the more disturbing.

Wilentz says:

This is a guy [Trump] who comes out of an entire culture, an entire world which is based upon this kind of degradation, this kind of sexual degradation, because that’s what it’s about. It’s not about it’s not about sex. It’s about degradation fundamentally, it seems to me… As Michael [Wolff] was saying, these are things that would have disqualified anybody from becoming president. But but it’s more serious than that because it indicts our entire culture, our entire world, the entire politics we are living in right now. It’s not that he is worse or better or what have you than others. No, it’s that we have elected, we have put into power, a culture, a world, a class, if you will, of people for whom this is, as Michael said, it’s sadistic. It is degraded and it runs the country and indeed I think it runs the world right now, or it’s on the brink of running the world, because I think you see these kinds of characters elsewhere. This is not simply an American phenomena.