A new course at the University of Toronto (U of T) is digging deeper into the ins and outs of U.S. President Donald Trump’s leadership.
Sam Tanenhaus, an American political writer and visiting professor at the school, is teaching the course “Trump and the Media,” which, he said, looks at how the 45th president is leading the country and his relationship with media and journalists who are covering him.
He said a couple of weeks ago, the class streamed the court hearings of U.S. Supreme Court judge Brett Kavanaugh and professor Christine Blasey Ford in real time, which makes the course unusual.
Tanenhaus said studying Trump’s presidency as it unfolds is interesting since he has significantly transformed the American political sphere.
“This is the first president we’ve had who’s an active tweeter,” he said.
The professor said while the U.S. president is revolutionizing American politics, media itself is undergoing many changes as well.
“For instance, something like the #MeToo movement had an impact on the Kavanaugh hearings and also on some of the major news outlets in the U.S. that are covering the presidency,” Tanenhaus said. “It’s happening particularly in a way that a new generation which understands a lot more about the new media than old people like me.”
There are nearly 200 people enrolled in the course, and he said the students are “loving it.”
“There are some real political junkies in the group and others who are just interested in the subject generally because Trump commands so much attention,” Tanenhaus said.
Farah Ibrahim, a fourth-year journalism student at Carleton University, said she would consider taking the class.
“It would be interesting to see something that was happening right now and it’s more relevant.”
When Trump was elected, Tanenhaus recalled a discussion in one of his classes where students didn’t know if Trump’s tweets should be taken seriously.
“If he tweets about Iran, or Syria, or North Korea, is this an official White House statement?” Tanenhaus said. “As the understanding of Trump deepened, as we got a better sense how he conducts himself and the kind of White House he runs . . . Globally, journalists decided that his tweets are really important, that they have to be paid attention to.”
He said this has changed the lives of journalists, because “what he tweets is at odds with what someone else in the administration has said and sometimes they can create real confusion and chaos.”
“But . . . that’s the presidency we have, so we all have to make sense of it or try to,” Tanenhaus said.
