Will Donald J. Trump be America’s next president? For some, his brash, politically incorrect campaign is the panacea for the Washington and Wall Street elites that have saddled the country with endless wars, an anemic economy, and growing racial division. Trump’s boosters believe he will usher in a Reagan-like era of domestic prosperity at home, and free America from a destructive global web of counterproductive trade agreements and military entanglements abroad. Trump’s critics are having none of this. They see not a president in waiting, but a dangerously unstable and inexperienced demagogue — one who threatens U.S. democracy and global peace and security. Rather than being a harbinger of the country’s renewal, Trump’s candidacy is supposedly destroying the social fabric of America by demonizing minorities, denigrating women, and exacerbating racial differences.

To engage with the controversy of the moment, the Fall 2016 Munk Debate will move the motion: Be it resolved, Donald Trump can make America great again…

Newt Gingrich is the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, a New York Times bestselling author, and Time magazine’s 1995 Man of the Year. Called “the indispensable leader” by the Washington Times, he was the architect of the Contract with America, which led the Republican Party to victory in 1994 by capturing the majority in the U.S. House for the first time in forty years. Under his leadership, Congress passed welfare reform, the first balanced budget in a generation, and the first tax cut in sixteen years.

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As an author, Gingrich has published twenty-three books, including thirteen fiction and non-fiction New York Times bestsellers. Nonfiction books include his latest, A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters, as well as To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine. Gingrich is also chair of the Gingrich Group, a communications and consulting firm that specializes in transformational change, with offices in Atlanta and Washington, DC. In addition, he serves as a member of the Defense Policy Board and is on the Terrorism Task Force for the Council on Foreign Relations. He founded and chaired several policy think tanks, including American Solutions for Winning the Future and the Center for Health Transformation.

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Robert Reich has been hailed as one of America’s top ten thought leaders by the Wall Street Journal. He served under three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. He also served on President Barack Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory Board.

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LAURA INGRAHAM is the author of number-one New York Times bestsellers Power to the People and The Obama Diaries. Her syndicated radio talk show, The Laura Ingraham Show, airs throughout the United States and she is the most listened-to woman in political talk radio. Ingraham is a regular contributor on Fox News Channel, as well as the editor-in-chief and founder of LifeZette, a political and lifestyle website. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, and she served as a law clerk for the Supreme Court of the United States.

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JENNIFER GRANHOLM is a former two-term governor of Michigan. In 2002 she became the first woman elected as governor of Michigan, and in 2006 she was re-elected with the largest number of votes ever cast for governor in the state. Under Granholm’s leadership, Michigan led the country in the improvement of job market conditions between 2009 and 2010, according to the Gallup Job Creation Index.

Granholm is a senior research fellow at the Berkeley Energy and Climate Institute and a project scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is an honours graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School.

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