The Toddler in Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us about the Modern Presidency

Daniel W. Drezner

Jul 2020 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Peter Berkrot

About this audiobook

Every president faces criticism and caricature. Donald Trump, however, is unique in that he is routinely characterized in ways more suitable for a toddler. What's more, it is not just Democrats, pundits, or protestors who compare the president to a child; Trump's staffers, subordinates, and allies on Capitol Hill also describe Trump like a small, badly behaved preschooler. In April 2017, Daniel W. Drezner began curating every example he could find of a Trump ally describing the president like a toddler. So far, he's collected more than one thousand tweets-a rate of more than one a day. In The Toddler-in-Chief, Drezner draws on these examples to take listeners through the different dimensions of Trump's infantile behavior, from temper tantrums to poor impulse control to the possibility that the President has had too much screen time. How much damage can really be done by a giant man-baby? Quite a lot, Drezner argues, due to the winnowing away of presidential checks and balances over the past fifty years. In this book, Drezner follows his theme-the specific ways in which sharing some of the traits of a toddler makes a person ill-suited to the presidency-to show the lasting, deleterious impact the Trump administration will have on American foreign policy and democracy.

About the author

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at Tufts University and a regular contributor to the Washington Post. In addition to having one of the most heavily trafficked blogs in the world of academia, he is the author of several books, including The System Worked and All Politics Is Global.

A veteran of stage and screen, Peter Berkrot's career spans four decades, and his voice can be heard on television, radio, video games, and documentaries. He has been nominated for an Audie Award and has received a number of AudioFile Earphones Awards and starred reviews.