Celebrating Cornell’s Newest Politics Institute, Pundits Explore How Trump has Changed America

Has Trump really changed everything? This is the question that three professors and a former member of the Congress tried to answer at a panel celebrating the launch of Cornell’s new Institute of Politics and Global Affairs. Speaking in Klarman Hall on Wednesday, the four panelists discussed political polarization, the dwindling of trust in institutions and the need to bridge gaps to find common ground. Rising economic inequality, changing demographics and echo chambers in online communication “created a large group of people who feel left out and unheard,” according to one of the panelists, Prof. Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue, developmental sociology. By the time the 2016 election rolled around, those people, he said, “were in need of a champion, and here comes Trump.”

Eloundou-Enyegue said that people on the political left often turn to the law, courts and the press to address their grievances.