David Chang, professor of history at the university, said that he was deeply distressed and threatened by the election results. His immediate response was, “Should I build walls to protect my children?”, a reference the construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border on the president’s orders.

Chang told students and teachers in the audience he was not sure what his responsibility was in the Trump era. He said 36 hours after the US Presidential election results, he planned a course on he planned a class on “Donald Trump and the Far Right in the American History and Society.”

The course, Chang said, aims to explain to students the “present politics and heritage from which Donald Trump emerges, which is the history of far right politics in US and globally”. The class, Chang said, will make students feel “as hopeless and as disoriented” as he does.

Chang said he wanted to “abnormalise” Trump – show that he occupies an abnormal position in the American history by tracing the history of far-right politics and showing how the US president’s politics differ. “The task in the class will be to learn more about the far right so that we can understand how Trump is and is not a part of it and how his history relates the history of the far right,” he explained. ...