Donald Trump is not an American phenomenon, solely an American phenomenon. We see Trumps emerging all across the West, all across Europe—Western Europe and Eastern Europe. And they are repeating themselves in very similar ways.
Sean Wilentz
I think there’s a great deal of naiveté about how politics actually works. And this is where either wing—the Trump wing or the Sanders wing—don’t understand how politics actually works in Washington.
Sean Wilentz on Donald Trump and the Crisis in American Democracy
in Nexus Symposium 2016: Democracy Today in the USA
I don’t think we’ve had anybody quite like Donald Trump before, in terms of the politics of celebrity, which is what I think he’s really about. It’s not simply that he’s rich. We’ve had rich people in politics before. He’s not simply a businessman. We’ve had businessmen in politics before.