The fifty-odd members who listened to Professor Tony Badger's lecture The Lessons of the New Deal: Did President Obama Learn the Right Ones? in January 2016 may remember with pleasure a well-crafted and persuasive comparison of the US presidencies of Franklin D Roosevelt and Barack Obama. We could not have known then that Tony would return to Bath less than three years later as national President of the Historical Association.
Tony Badger has chosen as his title this time The 2016 Election and Donald Trump in Historical Perspective. Few would deny that the presidential election of 2016 produced an extraordinary president. One of the election's more bizarre features was that the losing candidate, Hillary Clinton, gained 2.87 million more votes than the winner.
Has there ever been such an election - such issues, such candidates, such a campaign, such a result? Tony Badger, whose own education includes Cotham Grammar School in Bristol, was Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge from 1992 until 2014 and also Master of Clare College. He chairs the Kennedy Memorial Trust, which enables British postgraduate students to study at either Harvard University or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this month's HA Bath lecture Tony Badger will seek to explain whether the 2016 US presidential election was as much of a deviation from the norm as many might think.
Mike Short
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