Half-way through his second term, it seems impossible to deny that Donald Trump has been a seismic force—a bulldozer in the china shop of our public life. He has smashed norms, overturned conventions, cast away shibboleths, and ground precedents to dust. Whether this tumult represents incipient despotism haltingly contained or a long overdue cleansing of our Augean stables depends—to quote the shrewd chiasmus coined during Trump’s first term—on whether you take the president seriously but not literally, or literally but not seriously.

Lee Harris is an independent author who made a name for himself after 9/11 with his political commentary and with his books Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History (2004) and The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West (2007). More recently, he’s focused on the culture war at home with The Next American Civil War: The Populist Revolt Against the Liberal Elite (2010) and What’s Wrong with the Right Side of History: Exposing the Roots of Progressive Pathology (2025). Now, in Lincoln, Roosevelt, Trump: Three Profiles in World-Historical Leadership, he asks whether the 45th and 47th president stands beside the 16th and 32nd in significance. Although Harris is right to draw the comparison, by adopting the term “world-historical,” weltgeschichtlich,