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Bates also pointed to a killing in Plainfield, Illinois, in which Wadea Al-Fayoume, aged six, was stabbed to death in an attack his mother survived. The family’s landlord has been charged with murder and a hate crime. Prosecutors said the accused, who has pleaded not guilty, “listen[ed] to conservative talk radio on a regular basis”, “hated Muslims” and was obsessed with the Israel-Hamas war.A family friend said the attacker shouted “you Muslims have to die” and “you are killing our kids in Israel. You Palestinians don’t deserve to live.

Yes, that’s right. And the discussion was very precise about details of the verse and how it worked, and how various words interacted with one another or were opposed to one another.

Not that I was able to participate! I wish I could. I took a little Greek 110 years ago and have long since forgotten it, but it was inspiring. These people were thoroughly engaged.

So that itself is an amazing piece of evidence. One might call it a piece of testimony.It seems almost impossible.

How did you know, if it was in Greek?Oh, I could tell that much. There’s a certain kind of gesturing with respect to texts that is known to any of us who have worked with texts for a while.

It’s been my mission, notably unsuccessful, for many years to make people understand that academic work, including in your writing and in your classes, is one thing and political work is another, and that the two should not be confused nor should they be intermingled. You can have any number of political issues brought into the classroom so long as they are brought into the classroom as objects of analysis or description and not as agendas either to be embraced or rejected. That’s what I’ve been arguing, one might even say preaching, for a long time.

I don’t want my classroom, or any classroom in a college or university that I’m teaching in, to be thought of as the vehicle of some program or agenda, no matter how virtuous it might be. Virtue is not the business of the academy

You have a famously minimalist definition of academic freedom — “Academics are not free in any special sense to do anything but their jobs,” as you write in Versions of Academic Freedom. Minimalist and correct.

When I was a dean at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I helped implement and inaugurate the first Native American-studies program at the University of Illinois. And I spoke at the inaugural luncheon. What I told them was, “It is without doubt the case that activism of a variety of kinds is what brought you to this point.” There wouldn’t now be a Native American-studies program at UIC if activists of a polemical kind weren’t working toward that end. “Now I want you,” I said, “to forget the history that brought you here, because now that you’re part of a university setting, you’re no longer activists, you’re academics. If you become or continue to be activists, the academics in the university will have a derisory view of you.”

It’s implausible to me that a dissertation student studying with, say, Judith Butler or Fredric Jameson is not, by definition, imbibing methods that are politically normative but also very valuable. A lot of critical traditions, in gender studies or in Marxian literary criticism — or in say, Straussian political theory — are entwined with normative political or ideological commitments. There’s no way to expel those commitments from a vibrant department of the humanities.

Well, you don’t have to expel them. The question you have to ask is, Are they primary in the minds of those who are teaching in the classrooms? If we’re in a community that has a certain set of standards and modes of operation, what we want to do is be faithful to those standards and modes of operation. And if now and then those deeper commitments kind of seep through, well, yes, that’s inevitable. But that’s quite different from having an ideologically centered classroom.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was adopted in 1978 and amended in 2008, with the addition of new surveillance authority and procedures, which are continued by the bill approved on Friday. The 2008 law was passed after the disclosure that President George W. Bush had authorized eavesdropping inside the United States, to search for evidence of terrorist activity, without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying.

By a vote of 52 to 43, the Senate on Friday rejected a proposal by Mr. Wyden to require the national intelligence director to tell Congress if the government had collected any domestic e-mail or telephone conversations under the surveillance law. The Senate also rejected, 54 to 37, an amendment that would have required disclosure of information about significant decisions by a special federal court that reviews applications for electronic surveillance in foreign intelligence cases.

The No. 2 Senate Democrat, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, said the surveillance law “does not have adequate checks and balances to protect the constitutional rights of innocent American citizens.” “It is supposed to focus on foreign intelligence,” Mr. Durbin said, “but the reality is that this legislation permits targeting an innocent American in the United States as long as an additional purpose of the surveillance is targeting a person outside the United States.”

Mr. Merkley said the administration should provide at least unclassified summaries of major decisions by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. “An open and democratic society such as ours should not be governed by secret laws,” Mr. Merkley said, “and judicial interpretations are as much a part of the law as the words that make up our statute.”

Mr. Wyden said these writs reminded him of the “general warrants that so upset the colonists” more than 200 years ago. “The founding fathers could never have envisioned tweeting and Twitter and the Internet,” Mr. Wyden said. “Advances in technology gave government officials the power to invade individual privacy in a host of new ways.”

what should surprise and disturb all Americans is that our political institutions, and above all the Republican party, are so vulnerable to Russian interference. The Republican party, traditionally associated with a hawkish stance toward Moscow, threw its support behind a presidential candidate who openly called on Russia to hack his opponent’s campaign.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell told Obama and leading Democrats that he would regard any effort to release evidence of Russian interference before the election as partisan. In other words, he put his own party’s interest in electing Trump and gutting the welfare state ahead of the national interest.

Neither he, nor House speaker Paul Ryan, nor any other leading Republican seems the slightest bit apologetic about the Republican party’s all but open alliance with Putin.

Besides the Republican party, America’s weakness can be seen in what appears to be an escalating war between our domestic intelligence agency, the FBI and our foreign intelligence agency, the CIA. The FBI released damaging information about Hillary Clinton shortly before the election, which may have swung the outcome in key states and allowed for the election of Trump on a law and order platform. Meanwhile, the CIA is belatedly undermining Trump by releasing information about his foreign ties. This is not the sign of a healthy democracy.

America’s political system is as broken as that of 18th-century Poland. Our territory may not be under threat, but our ability to govern ourselves without outside interference is

Our antiquated electoral system has yielded a president-elect who is unqualified and temperamentally unstable, and who is openly building a kleptocratic state closely modeled on Putin’s

In an 1838 speech in Illinois, a young Abraham Lincoln considered how the United States might fall, asking: “Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never!” Instead, he warned, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

defend two of their own seats

$10 million in air time to target the state's open Senate seat in Florida

$10 million in Ohio

$8 million in the race to unseat GOP Sen. Kelly Ayotte.

Democrats believe that swing voters in purple states will end up voting for their candidates down-the-ticket and help them take back the Senate

$4 million in the race for the Nevada seat

air time will be reserved later in other states where there are major Senate races, like Illinois, but unlikely to be contested in a presidential race.

declined to comment.

10 seats to defend compared to 24 for the Republicans.

$5 million to defend two seats -- Colorado

Katie McGinty, has benefited from $1.1 million in advertising by the committee

Carla King, writing for PBS Media Shift, cited the case of Brittany Geragotelis, who started sharing her work as a free serial e-book on the WattPad community for young adults and "attracted 13 million readers" before offering the book as a print-on-demand paperback through Amazon's CreateSpace. Eventually, she signed with Simon & Schuster to re-launch the book Life's a Witch, along with a sequel and prequel in three e-book installments.

He cited a University of Illinois expert who estimates that one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake (not just for books). So be warned that not all positive reviews are legitimate.

Proud realists, neither man put much stock in the “democratic tsunami” that, in the fantasy of neoconservative true believers like Wolfowitz, the Iraq war would send sweeping out of Baghdad to engulf the Middle East. Instead they put their faith in “American leadership” and the restoration of American power through a decisive demonstration of American strength.

Rumsfeld is first and foremost a patriotic midwesterner, a politician who nourishes in his soul a primordial and undying belief in the manifest need for, and rightness of, American power. To him this truth is self-evident, imbibed at an Illinois breakfast table. Who do we want to lead in the world? Somebody else? The idea is plainly inconceivable.

As for the occupation—well, if democracy were to come to Iraq it would be the Iraqis themselves who must build it. There would be no occupation, and thus no planning for it. Rumsfeld’s troops would be in and out in four months. As he told a then adoring press corps, “I don’t do quagmires.”

He was smart, brash, ambitious, experienced, skeptical of received wisdom, jealous of civilian control, self-searching, analytical, domineering, and he aimed at nothing less than to transform the American military. The parallels with McNamara are stunning.

month after month in his arrogance and tenacity he would deny an insurgency had taken root. Month after month, as the shortcomings of the army he had sent into Iraq—too small, too conventional, not configured or equipped or trained to fight an insurgency and thus fated in its impotent bludgeoning to make it ever worse—became impossible to deny, he would go on denying them, digging in his heels and resisting the change he had to know was necessary.

In all but a handful of instances, the shooter was male. Boys also accounted for more than 80 percent of the victims.

The Times sought to identify every accidental firearm death of a child age 14 and under in Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina and Ohio dating to 1999, and in California to 2007. Records were also obtained from several county medical examiners’ offices in Florida, Illinois and Texas.

Even in accidental shootings where criminals were in some way involved, they usually were not the ones pulling the trigger. Rather, they — like many law-abiding adults in these cases — simply left a gun unsecured.

Another important aspect of firearm accidents is that a vast majority of victims do not die. Tracking these injuries nationally, however, is arguably just as problematic as tallying fatalities, according to public health researchers. In fact, national figures often cited from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web site are an estimate, projected from a sampling taken from hospital emergency departments. Nevertheless, in 2011, the most recent year with available data, the agency estimated that there were 847 unintentional nonfatal firearm injuries among children 14 and under.

More concrete are actual counts of emergency department visits, which are available in a small number of states. In North Carolina, for instance, there were more than 120 such visits for nonfatal gun accidents among children 17 and under in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available.

While about 60 percent of the accidental firearm deaths identified by The Times involved handguns as opposed to long guns, that number was much higher — more than 85 percent — when the victims were very young, under the age of 6. In fact, the average handgun victim was several years younger than long gun victims: between 7 and 8, compared with almost 11.

Over all, the largest number of deaths came at the upper end of the age range, with ages 13 and 14 being most common — not necessarily surprising, given that parents generally allow adolescents greater access to guns. But the third-most common age was 3 (tied with 12), a particularly vulnerable age, when children are curious and old enough to manipulate a firearm but ignorant of the dangers.

About half of the accidents took place inside the child’s home. A third, however, occurred at the house of a friend or a relative, pointing to a potential vulnerability if safe-storage laws apply only to households with children, as in North Carolina.

In four of the five states — California, Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio — The Times identified roughly twice as many accidental killings as were tallied in the corresponding federal data.

But Taurus backed out within a few months, citing competing priorities, and the project fell apart. Charles Vehlow, Metal Storm’s chief executive at the time, said that while he did not know exactly what pressures Taurus faced, there was a general wariness of smart-gun efforts among manufacturers and pro-gun groups. “There was no question that the N.R.A. was very sensitive and was aware of what we were doing,” he said.

Under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures, in fact, gun accidents were the ninth-leading cause of unintentional deaths among children ages 1 to 14 in 2010. (The agency reported 62 such killings that year.) If the actual numbers are, in fact, roughly double, however, gun accidents would rise into the top five or six.

The rifle association and its allies also often note that studies on the impact of safe-storage laws have found mixed results. But those studies are based on the flawed government statistics. “When we’re evaluating child access laws, we’re using total trash data,

A safe-storage bill was introduced in the Ohio legislature in February, prompted by a shooting that killed three students at a high school in suburban Cleveland. But the measure, which would prohibit storing a firearm in a residence in a place readily accessible to a child, has encountered skepticism from the Republicans who control the legislature. “The tenor was, somebody breaks in, do I have time enough to get to my gun?” said State Representative Bill Patmon, a Democrat who introduced the bill.

The N.R.A. has long argued that better education is the key to preventing gun accidents, citing its Eddie Eagle GunSafe program, which teaches children as young as 3 that if they see a gun, they should “stop, don’t touch, leave the area and tell an adult.” The association, which did not respond to a request for comment, says its program has reached more than 26 million children in all 50 states and should be credited for the deep decline in accidental gun deaths shown in federal statistics dating to the mid-1980s.

Beyond the unreliability of the federal data, public health experts have disputed the N.R.A.’s claims, pointing to other potential explanations for the decline, including improvements in emergency medical care, along with data showing fewer households with firearms. They also highlight research indicating that admonishing children to stay away from guns is often ineffective.

As part of Dr. Kellermann’s study, researchers watched through a one-way mirror as pairs of boys ages 8 to 12 were left alone in an examination room at a clinic in Atlanta. Unknown to the children, an inoperative .38-caliber handgun was concealed in a cabinet drawer.

Playing and exploring over the next 15 minutes, one boy after another — three-quarters of the 64 children — found the gun. Two-thirds handled it, and one-third actually pulled the trigger. Just one child went to tell an adult about the gun, and he was teased by his peers for it. More than 90 percent of the boys said they had had some gun safety instruction.

Other research has found that simply having a firearm in the household is correlated with an increased risk of accidental shooting death. In one study, published in 2003 in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention, the risk was more than three times as high for one gun, and almost four times as high for more than one.

requiring, or even encouraging, efforts to introduce “smart gun” technology remains unpopular with the gun lobby, which has worked to undermine such research and attempts to regulate firearms as a dangerous consumer product.

In state after state and often with considerable success, gun rights groups have cited the federal numbers as proof that the problem is nearly inconsequential and that storage laws are unnecessary. Gun Owners of America says on its Web site that children are “130 percent more likely to die from choking on their dinner” than from accidental shootings.

The Colt’s Manufacturing Company and Smith & Wesson experienced a backlash against their own smart-gun programs, which were abandoned amid financial problems caused, in part, by boycotts from gun groups and others in the industry. So unpopular was the whole smart-gun concept that Colt’s Manufacturing later could not even find a buyer for its patents, said Carlton Chen, a former lawyer for the company.

Gun rights lobbyists have also helped keep firearms and ammunition beyond the reach of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which has the power to regulate other products that are dangerous to children. The N.R.A. argues that the commission would provide a back door for gun control advocates to restrict the manufacture of firearms. Proponents of regulation say guns pose too great a hazard to exclude them from scrutiny.

The teenagers in the control group participated in neither part of the program.

There was a big difference, though, in the violent crime arrest data between the teenagers who got jobs and those who did not:

Heller, in fact, found that most of the decline came a few months later:

A lot of things could be going on here. Teenagers who might have committed crime to get money would no longer need to when they have a job.

If their added income allowed parents to work less, they may also have gotten more adult supervision.

It's also possible that students who were busy working simply didn't have idle time over the summer to commit crime — but that theory doesn't explain the long-term declines in violent arrests that occurred well after the summer program was over.

Some of the students were given part-time jobs through the program, working 25 hours a week at minimum wage ($8.25 in Illinois) with government or non-profit employers

That long-term benefit suggests that students who had access to jobs may have then found crime a less attractive alternative to work. Or perhaps their time on the job taught them how the labor market values education. Or maybe the work experience may have given them skills that enabled them to be more successful — and less prone to getting in trouble — back in school.

The results echo a common conclusion in education and health research: that public programs might do more with less by shifting from remediation to prevention.

The findings make clear that such programs need not be hugely costly to improve outcomes for disadvantaged youth; well-targeted, low-cost employment policies can make a substantial difference, even for a problem as destructive and complex as youth violence.

Yet, at the same time, most of us know that provocateurs and other outlandish figures serve useful public roles. Satirists and ridiculers expose our weakness and vanity when we are feeling proud. They puncture the self-puffery of the successful. They level social inequality by bringing the mighty low. When they are effective they help us address our foibles communally, since laughter is one of the ultimate bonding experiences.

If you try to pull off this delicate balance with law, speech codes and banned speakers, you’ll end up with crude censorship and a strangled conversation.

Healthy societies, in other words, don’t suppress speech, but they do grant different standing to different sorts of people.

Wise and considerate scholars are heard with high respect. Satirists are heard with bemused semirespect. Racists and anti-Semites are heard through a filter of opprobrium and disrespect. People who want to be heard attentively have to earn it through their conduct.

The massacre at Charlie Hebdo should be an occasion to end speech codes. And it should remind us to be legally tolerant toward offensive voices, even as we are socially discriminating.

She created two sets of rules for her game: an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents. Her dualistic approach was a teaching tool meant to demonstrate that the first set of rules was morally superior.

Elizabeth Magie was born in Macomb, Ill., in 1866, the year after the Civil War ended and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Her father, James Magie, was a newspaper publisher and an abolitionist who accompanied Lincoln as he traveled around Illinois in the late 1850s debating politics with Stephen Douglas.

On some level, Lizzie understood that the game provided a context — it was just a game, after all — in which players could lash out at friends and family in a way that they often couldn’t in daily life. She understood the power of drama and the potency of assuming roles outside of one’s everyday identity. Her game spread, becoming a folk favorite among left-wing intellectuals, particularly in the Northeast.

As an anti-monopolist, James Magie drew from the theories of George, a charismatic politician and economist who believed that individuals should own 100 percent of what they made or created, but that everything found in nature, particularly land, should belong to everyone. George was a proponent of the “land value tax,” also known as the “single tax.” The general idea was to tax land, and only land, shifting the tax burden to wealthy landlords. His message resonated with many Americans in the late 1800s, when poverty and squalor were on full display in the country’s urban centers.

Several years after she obtained the patent for her game, and finding it difficult to support herself on the $10 a week she was earning as a stenographer, Magie staged an audacious stunt mocking marriage as the only option for women; it made national headlines. Purchasing an advertisement, she offered herself for sale as a “young woman American slave” to the highest bidder. Her ad said that she was “not beautiful, but very attractive,” and that she had “features full of character and strength, yet truly feminine.”Continue reading the main story The ad quickly became the subject of news stories and gossip columns in newspapers around the country. The goal of the stunt, Magie told reporters, was to make a statement about the dismal position of women. “We are not machines,” Magie said. “Girls have minds, desires, hopes and ambition.”

“It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences,” Magie said of her game in a 1902 issue of The Single Tax Review. “It might well have been called the ‘Game of Life,’ as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seem to have, i.e., the accumulation of wealth.”

When she applied for a patent for her game in 1903, Magie was in her 30s. She represented the less than 1 percent of all patent applicants at the time who were women. (Magie also dabbled in engineering; in her 20s, she invented a gadget that allowed paper to pass through typewriter rollers with more ease.)

In its efforts to seize total control of Monopoly and other related games, the company struck a deal with Magie to purchase her Landlord’s Game patent and two more of her game ideas not long after it made its deal with Darrow.

Magie’s identity as Monopoly’s inventor was uncovered by accident. In 1973, Ralph Anspach, an economics professor, began a decade-long legal battle against Parker Brothers over the creation of his Anti-Monopoly game. In researching his case, he uncovered Magie’s patents and Monopoly’s folk-game roots. He became consumed with telling the truth of what he calls “the Monopoly lie.”

Roughly 40 years have passed since the truth about Monopoly began to appear publicly, yet the Darrow myth persists as an inspirational parable of American innovation. It’s hard not to wonder how many other buried histories are still out there — stories belonging to lost Lizzie Magies who quietly chip away at creating pieces of the world, their contributions so seamless that few of us ever stop to think about the person or people behind the idea.

Why is it essential to save history and libraries? The best answer to that question comes from Benjamin Franklin. He was asked to design a curriculum for the school that became the University of Pennsylvania. He proposed that at least half the time, in each year, the future students should study history Nothing else could match history when it came to creating a useful citizen.  Without a grasp of history, Franklin maintained,  we will only repeat the blunders of the past.

Abbott is joined by Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner who also announced their states would "suspend" the resettlement of Syrian refugees. The governors of Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin made similar vows following the attacks, which killed at least 129 people.

North Carolina and Idaho governors said they oppose the admittance of Syrian refugees but have not said they wouldn't accept them. Massachusetts' governor said he wants to know more before accepting them and Nevada's governor has not said either way but said he is requesting a review from the federal government.

deploy more than $10 million in new attack ads across Florida and millions more in Illinois, casting Mr. Trump as a liberal, a huckster and a draft dodger.

As his rivals have despaired over the race’s vulgar turn, Mr. Trump struck a subdued tone, by his standards, as returns came in late Saturday night

“Trump has to worry about the consistent late-voter rejection of his candidacy,”

“Donald Trump was uncharacteristically low energy,” Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee in 2012, said in an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” t

Much of Mr. Cruz’s late-breaking support on Saturday seemed to come at the expense of Mr. Rubio, not Mr. Trump. And the Cruz campaign’s message of ideological purity and religious faith is a less natural fit for many of the delegate-rich Midwestern and coastal states that remain on the map.

“Look, I’m supportive of Marco; I’m very hopeful,” said Mel Martinez, the former senator from Florida, who had supported Mr. Bush. “But it’s a great concern that time has kind of caught up with this whole thing.”

The Stop Trump forces are beginning to pour money into television ads, with a particular focus on the big states voting on March 15. Four different groups have reserved at least $10 million in airtime in Florida so far,

Mr. Trump’s breezy stage presence makes him all the more effective because he is not as off-putting as those raging men of the past, these experts say.

The most striking hallmark was Mr. Trump’s constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery that American presidents rarely use, based on a quantitative comparison of his remarks and the news conferences of recent presidents, Democratic and Republican

He has a particular habit of saying “you” and “we” as he inveighs against a dangerous “them” or unnamed other — usually outsiders like illegal immigrants (“they’re pouring in”), Syrian migrants (“young, strong men”) and Mexicans, but also leaders of both political parties.

“You know what, darling? You’re not going to be scared anymore. They’re going to be scared. You’re not going to be scared,”

And as much as he likes the word “attack,” the Times analysis shows, he often uses it to portray himself as the victim of cable news channels and newspapers that, he says, do not show the size of his crowds.

“ ‘We vs. them’ creates a threatening dynamic, where ‘they’ are evil or crazy or ignorant and ‘we’ need a candidate who sees the threat and can alleviate it,” said Matt Motyl, a political psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who is studying how the 2016 presidential candidates speak

In another pattern, Mr. Trump tends to attack a person rather than an idea or a situation, like calling political opponents “stupid” (at least 30 times), “horrible” (14 times), “weak” (13 times) and other names, and criticizing foreign leaders, journalists and so-called anchor babies. He bragged on Thursday about psyching out Jeb Bush by repeatedly calling him “low-energy,” but he spends far less time contrasting Mr. Bush’s policies with his own proposals, which are scant.

The specter of violence looms over much of his speech, which is infused with words like kill, destroy and fight. For a man who speaks off the cuff, he always remembers to bring up the Islamic State’s “chopping off heads.”

Mr. Trump said, “Maybe he should have been roughed up.”

And Mr. Trump uses rhetoric to erode people’s trust in facts, numbers, nuance, government and the news media, according to specialists in political rhetoric. “Nobody knows,” he likes to declare, where illegal immigrants are coming from or the rate of increase of health care premiums under the Affordable Care Act, even though government agencies collect and publish this information

describing the Sept. 11 terrorists as “animals” who sent their families back to the Middle East. “We never went after them. We never did anything. We have to attack much stronger. We have to be more vigilant. We have to be much tougher. We have to be much smarter, or it’s never, ever going to end.”

This pattern of elevating emotional appeals over rational ones is a rhetorical style that historians, psychologists and political scientists placed in the tradition of political figures like Goldwater, George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy, Huey Long and Pat Buchanan, who used fiery language to try to win favor with struggling or scared Americans.

“His entire campaign is run like a demagogue’s — his language of division, his cult of personality, his manner of categorizing and maligning people with a broad brush,” said Jennifer Mercieca, an expert in American political discourse at Texas A&M University

“And then there are the winners, most especially himself, with his repeated references to his wealth and success and intelligence,” said Ms. Mercieca, noting a particular remark of Mr. Trump’s on Monday in Macon, Ga.

Historically, demagogues have flourished when they tapped into the grievances of citizens and then identified and maligned outside foes, as McCarthy did with attacking Communists, Wallace with pro-integration northerners and Mr. Buchanan with cultural liberals.

be it “segregation forever” or accusatory questions over the Communist Party — to persuade Americans to pin their anxieties about national security, jobs, racial diversity and social trends on enemy forces.

A significant difference between Mr. Trump and 20th-century American demagogues is that many of them, especially McCarthy and Wallace, were charmless public speakers.

For some historians, this only makes him more effective, because demagogy is more palatable when it is leavened with a smile and joke. Highlighting that informality, one of his most frequently used words is “guy” — which he said 91 times last week and has used to describe President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a stranger cheering him on at a rally and a celebrity friend.

In the 1980s, it was with advertisements condemning the young men, four of them black and one Latino, accused of marauding through Central Park and raping a jogger. Just over a decade ago, it was the controversy during the first season of his reality show “The Apprentice,” in which he played a boardroom billionaire who fired people.

Mr. Trump has said he will tear into anyone who tries to take him on, and he presents himself as someone who is always right in his opinions — even prophetic, a visionary.

“I said, ‘We better be careful, that’s gonna happen, it’s gonna be a big thing,’ and it certainly is a big thing,” Mr. Trump has said of what he wrote about the Al Qaeda leader in 2000.

It is the sort of trust-me-and-only-me rhetoric that, according to historians, demagogues have used to insist that they have unique qualities that can lead the country through turmoil. Mr. Trump often makes that point when he criticizes his Republican rivals, though he also pretends that he is not criticizing them.

So I refuse to say that they’re weak generally, O.K.? Some of them are fine people. But they are weak.”