Donald Trump’s political journey to the top of the Republican presidential ticket is often described as “without precedent.” And, yet, Trump’s campaign reworked familiar themes in US history: nativism, populism, the politics of nostalgia, politics as spectacle, and the recurrent efforts to rejuvenate or remasculinize America. The seminar revisits these themes in some detail as it critically examines the different perspectives available for understanding the Trump phenomenon through a historical lens. Reading material includes PT Barnum on humbug, De Tocqueville on democracy and demagoguery, Richard Hofstadter on American paranoia, Michael Rogin on Ronald Reagan the Movie, Mae Ngai on Illegal Immigrants, and Philip Roth on the “Plot Against America."