Even though the Trump presidency is now some distance in the past, many political scientists are still struggling to make sense of it and its impact. A new edited volume by Michael Nelson and Barbara A. Perry might help. In The Presidency: Facing Constitutional Crossroads, Nelson and Perry seek to better understand Trump and the contemporary presidency by contextualizing it. As Nelson explains, “This book is designed to provide the sort of historical and constitutional coverage of the office that can help us put the Trump presidency—and those of his successors—into proper context” (p. 1). The volume consists of 11 chapters by a dozen well-known scholars. Many of the contributors are affiliated with the Miller Center of the University of Virginia, which hosted a lecture series that led to the book.

The book’s premise is that at certain junctures presidents face important choices, and the decisions that they make at those crossroads then determine the nature of the institution of the presidency going forward. In other words, the presidency is not set in stone. Instead, it is a living and evolving institution, and it is often open to the possibility of significant change, as Trump’s presidency demonstrated. As Sidney M. Milkis puts it in his chapter, Trump’s “disruptive” presidency has “aroused hope and fear that America is once again at a crossroads” (p. 200).

Several of the book’s chapters consider the growth of presidential power. For example, Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash notes how the presidency has grown in power, and he lays out a handful of nonconstitutional “fixes” that could enable Congress to check the president more effectively, but he concedes that “Congress will never cease to let us down” (p. 24). Similarly, Sidney Milkis considers the rise of executive power and prominence, and he wonders whether “the rancorous conflict that roiled Trump’s presidency…might represent a reckoning for long-term developments that have evolved into a plebiscitary form of politics” (p. 223). Milkis does not make a clear prediction, but he articulates some hope that principled institutional concerns, forbearance, and responsibility—qualities that were in short supply during Trump’s presidency—might lead to a presidency that better comports with the constitutional order. And Russell R. Riley examines the phenomenon of Americans accepting stronger presidential leadership in times of crisis and asks whether afterward the political system can ever really get back to regular checks and balances. He briefly considers examples throughout American history, which provide mixed evidence of a return to the status quo ante, yet he concludes that Trump’s excesses are unlikely to persist or to become a new norm because “the national devotion to equal, separated institutions has been much more robust than is usually recognized” (p. 132).

Apart from the growth of presidential power, other chapters consider different aspects of presidential development. Michael Nelson examines the ways in which the presidency has changed, and he maintains that although several formal amendments have undeniably altered the presidential office, it has been transformed more by certain presidential actions that led to informal yet lasting and significant changes, and he discusses 10 such actions that led to transformations in “the small-c constitutional presidency” (p. 45). Richard J. Ellis analyzes the criticism that Trump was “unpresidential” and Trump’s rejoinder that such criticisms were out of date because he was actually “modern day presidential.” Ellis contends that “arguments about what qualifies as presidential or unpresidential are as old as the republic” (p. 51). Echoing Stephen Skowronek, he also claims that sometimes unusual or disruptive presidential behavior can usher in a new norm. Ellis considers parallels between the criticisms of Trump as being “impulsive and undignified” (p. 63) and similar criticisms raised against Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt. He argues that ultimately those presidents were able to transform the office because the public endorsed their changes—something that he is not sure is true for Trump. And Barbara A. Perry and Stefanie Georgakis Abbott seek to understand Trump’s presidency in terms of developments in what Jeffrey Tulis called the “rhetorical presidency” and Theodore Lowi called the “personal presidency.” They contend that Trump can be seen as a populist and a demagogue who has “utterly perverted both the constitutional presidency of the founding era and the rhetorical presidency of the Wilsonian period,” and they voice concern about “how much disruption the American constitutional system can absorb” (p. 151).

Two chapters focus less on changes under Trump, or even the presidency in general, and more on broader institutional changes. Bradley R. Dewees examines the evolution of civil-military relations and claims that presidents increasingly lack the military expertise to effectively direct national security policy. And Joel K. Goldstein considers the evolution of the vice-presidency and the variety of factors that have led to its enhanced stature.

Perhaps surprisingly, some chapters discern little lasting change from Trump’s presidency. For example, Jennifer L. Lawless and Sean M. Theriault empirically assess Trump’s impact on political polarization in the electorate and in Congress, and they find that he had none: Trump was “a complete wild card” (p. 73) and for a while seemed poised to upend the political status quo, yet he failed to alter the nation’s persistent political polarization, which was not improved, worsened, or changed. Impeachment might be another area in which Trump actually had little impact. Andrew Rudalevige notes that “the actual use of impeachment in American history has been limited” (p. 87), so Trump’s two impeachments might well be expected to have had a lasting impact on the vagaries of impeachment (although Trump’s second impeachment receives only brief mention here, due to the publication date). For example, Trump’s impeachment for offenses that were not strictly illegal might constitute an important and lasting precedent. But Rudalevige suggests that impeachment remains a fundamentally ambiguous tool post-Trump, contingent less on what particular presidential actions might warrant it than on pragmatic politics and Congress’s degree of inclination to assert its “institutional relevance” (p. 110).

As with most edited volumes, the individual chapters differ in their focus and approach, and some fit together better than others. But for the most part they are united by the volume’s idea of presidential crossroads—or the presidency as an institution being the cumulative result of the significant choices and acts of individual presidents. However, the authors might have said more about how exactly the crossroads metaphor works. For example, how free is a president—even one as unrestrained as Trump—to remake the office? Is presidential development always contingent on presidential acts? How do we know when a presidential practice sticks and becomes constitutive? And how does this all relate to notions of punctuated equilibria or opportunity cost? Also, maybe some crossroads do not require a momentous decision: as Nelson says of the chapter on polarization, “not every crossroad leads to a change in direction. Sometimes the journey continues along its previous course” (p. 3).

Those quibbles notwithstanding, this is a very interesting book and a welcome addition to the literature on the development of the presidency. It should appeal to scholars of the presidency, American political development, and American politics in general. Although the book’s primary audience is academics and students, it is sufficiently accessible for a lay audience.