The Presidents and the People

Imagine an American president who imprisoned critics, spread a culture of white supremacy and tried to upend the law so that he could commit crimes with impunity. In this propulsive and eminently readable history, Corey Brettschneider provides a thoroughly researched account of assaults on democracy by not one such president but five: John Adams, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon. Brettschneider shows that these presidents didn’t have the last word; citizen movements brought the United States back from the precipice by appealing to a democratic understanding of the Constitution and pressuring subsequent reform-minded presidents to realise the promise of “We the People”. This is a book about citizens—Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Daniel Ellsberg and more—who fought back against presidential abuses of power and give hope about the possibilities of restoring democracy.