Discussion | The Post-Trump Era: Politics and the Right in the Wake of the Midterm Elections
Are we in a post-Trump era? How will the President, his financial backers, and the right respond to the Democratic Party regaining control of both houses of Congress? What will the next two years of Trump’s presidency bring and what will happen to the movement he helped to build once they are over? Join IPK on Wednesday, December 2 (5:30-7:00) for a conversation between authors of recent books and articles on the history of American politics and the American right, which will examine the state of the conservative movement following its losses in the midterm elections. Featuring Kim Phillips-Fein, John Ganz, Hannah Gurman, Chenjerai Kumanyika. Moderated by Michael Koncewicz.
John Ganz is the New York Times best-selling author of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). He writes the Unpopular Front newsletter on Substack, and his work has appeared in The Washington Post, Harper’s Magazine, Artforum, the New Statesman, and other publications.
Hannah Gurman teaches U.S. History and American Studies at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Her new book, The Opportunists, traces the rise of the post-liberal movement and the reinvention of reactionary politics in the twenty-first century (The New Press, October 2026). She is also the author of The Dissent Papers: The Voices of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond (Columbia University Press, 2012); editor of Hearts and Minds: A People’s History of Counterinsurgency (The New Press, 2013) and co-editor (with Kaeten Mistry) of Whistleblowing Nation: The History of National Security Disclosures and the Cult of State Secrecy (Columbia University Press, 2020). Her writing has also appeared in popular outlets, including The Nation, Washington Post, Dissent, Jacobin, and The Baffler.
Michael Koncewicz is the Associate Director at the Institute for Public Knowledge, where he develops, implements, and manages programmatic and administrative operations for IPK. Koncewicz’s scholarship focuses on the culture and politics of the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. His first book, They Said ‘No’ to Nixon: Republicans Who Stood Up to the President’s Abuses of Power was published by the University of California Press in 2018. He is currently working on an authorized biography of longtime progressive activist Tom Hayden.
Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika is a journalist and organizer who teaches nonfiction audio journalism and podcasting at New York University. He is the creator and host of the podcast Empire City, an eight-part narrative series investigating the complicated and largely invisible history of the New York Police Department. He has written in scholarly venues such as Popular Music & Society and Popular Communication, as well as public venues such as The Intercept, Transom, NPR’s Code Switch, All Things Considered, Invisibilia, and VICE.
Kim Phillips-Fein is the Robert Gardiner-Kenneth T. Jackson Professor of History at Columbia University. She is the author of Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight against Equality in America (W.W. Norton, 2026), Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (Metropolitan Books, 2017) and Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (W.W. Norton, 2009). Her essays have appeared in the Nation, the Atlantic, the Journal of American History and the Baffler, among other publications. She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.