George C. Edwards’s Changing Their Minds? stands out as a solid academic assessment of the Trump Presidency with respect to public opinion and legislative success (or failure, in this case). Edwards draws on the multiple strands of his extant scholarship on the presidency: the contextual constraints and opportunities for success with both the public and the Congress, the permanent campaign, and presidential leadership. The long-running theme through Edwards’s scholarship is that presidents are limited in what they can do to move public opinion or Congress. Instead, the success of presidents depends largely on the context in which they act. Presidents may be able to facilitate change by recognizing their opportunities and constraints, prioritizing their wish list, and focusing their efforts on those things that can be accomplished.

The first half of Changing Their Minds? focuses on Trump’s relations with and success in moving public opinion. Edwards discusses the recent trends in public support for government, the extent and sources of partisan polarization, and the effects of motivated reasoning as constraints on a president’s ability to alter public opinion. He briefly covers Trump’s methods of communicating with the public and turns to Trump’s consistent failure to move public opinion on the various policies pursued by his administration. If anything, public opinion moved against Trump on healthcare, taxes, and immigration. Edwards provides a well-organized summary of Trump’s personal attacks and efforts to delegitimize those who opposed him, his stoking of fears and racial divisions, and his lack of substance and prevarications. Trump’s success was limited to galvanizing rank-and-file Republicans to his cause. That political base, however, was too limited to do much beyond threatening members of his own political party.

The second half of the book analyzes the constraints and opportunities for Trump’s leadership of Congress. Trump had the powerful advantage of having control of the committees and legislative agendas of both chambers, but he failed in almost every respect in delivering legislative accomplishments. His main success, the tax cuts of 2017, occurred mainly despite Trump. Edwards’s theme is that Trump’s lack of focus, his lack of interest in substance, his inconsistencies and flip-flops, and his mercurial personality worked against getting much from his strategically advantageous situation. After the 2018 Midterm election, Trump’s capacity for leadership dwindled further, relying mainly on the refusal of Senate Republicans to take up Democratic legislation to avoid further embarrassments.

The strengths of Changing Their Minds? make it useful for undergraduates and general readers who would like a theoretically structured explanation of the limited success and the myriad failures of the Trump administration. It is rich in descriptive detail, exploiting the voluminous media coverage and books on the Trump presidency. It makes excellent use of the research on political psychology and public opinion to explain the limits of presidential persuasion of a polarized public. The details of Trump’s relations with members of Congress are well chosen to leave a stark image of a president who, in most respects, was his own worst enemy in seeking change through legislative policy. His limited legislative policy accomplishments occurred despite Trump—not because of him—and belied his hyperbolized claims to being a master deal maker.

Changing Their Minds?, like most books, has limitations. The analyses of presidential communications with the public, through news media and Twitter, is largely descriptive and anecdotal. A more systematic analysis of Trump’s presidential communications, tweets, and news media coverage—compared to those of prior presidents—might have shown more clearly the magnitude of Trump’s public presence. Trump’s inability to move public opinion was not for want of attention, but Edwards could have made that case more effectively with analyses of aggregate data patterns. Similarly, Edwards’s discussion of the strategic context in Congress could have made use of the data showing how polarized the political parties in Congress are. Although this subject has been covered in many studies with data made available for academic use, the distance and rigidity of the party coalitions could have been well illustrated with these data. Readers may have benefited from an analysis of systemic patterns comparing the Congress during the Trump years to those of prior presidents to help readers understand that Trump’s challenges were not unique. Instead, Edwards uses a qualitative analysis that makes effective use of sources available online to show convincingly that Trump’s “passivity, vagueness, inconsistency, and lack of command of policy made him an unskilled, unreliable, and untrustworthy negotiator” (p. 248).

Edwards also does not address the destructiveness of the Trump administration’s illiberal, authoritarian populism. Trump did not simply double down on rousing his base. He amplified and mobilized a populist base against the government he was leading, which ultimately ended with an attempt to subvert the legitimate presidential succession provided by the Constitution. In the process, Trump did substantial damage to norms of civility, respect, and acceptance of the legitimacy of opposing politicians and institutions that facilitate the functioning of democracy. Although Edwards details Trump’s relations with Congress, there is scant attention to the unified executive theory of governance or the “administrative presidency,” in which a president seeks policy change by circumventing Congress. Even though it is mentioned inter alia in discussion of particular policies, such as the Wall, the Trump administration went further than most to accomplish policy objectives without congressional input and even despite congressional opposition. Furthermore, as an antiestablishment, antigovernment president, Donald Trump (and his appointees) also did considerable damage to the institutional infrastructure of government agencies. Most cabinet agencies, excepting Defense and Veterans Affairs, decreased in size and arguably in effectiveness during the Trump administration. The disruptive, antigovernment actions of the Trump administration could have been given more attention in this book. Perhaps Trump’s advisors recognized the slim prospects for action in Congress, opting instead to execute an antigovernment agenda through administrative channels.

Finally, we may find out eventually that the most enduring policy legacy of the Trump administration occurred through Trump’s nomination of antigovernment, culturally conservative judges to the District, Appellate, and Supreme Courts. Changing Their Minds? devotes a few pages to the failed nominations to administrative positions, but it gives limited attention to the tremendously successful nomination of highly ideological judges to the judiciary. The Trump administration, in retrospect, worked well to expedite these nominations—in part, by short-circuiting investigations and review of judicial nominees—and moved them through a Republican-controlled Senate. These nominations were by far Trump’s major successes in Congress. They are largely ignored in this book.

George Edwards effectively applies his extensive scholarship on the American presidency in an interpretation of Donald Trump’s leadership of the public and Congress. Edwards makes clear that Donald Trump did not and probably could not have moved public opinion to support more of his policies. Those policies, if anything, became less popular with more Trump-centric attention. Edwards also makes clear that Trump himself was a central problem—if not the central obstacle to legislative policy accomplishments. For Trump supporters, this book should be a reality check. For Trump detractors, it is a well-documented picture of a president whose incompetence prevented more undesirable policy outcomes.