Yes, every discussion eventually turned to Trump. The world really does revolve around him. The level of contempt that scholars have for him, though, is something that I haven't seen before. I have been attending conferences since 2000-- the APSA conference held that year in Washington, DC. I haven't seen or heard anything like this.
Discussions focused on questions of Trump's intelligence, questions of Trump's sanity, and questions of Trump's corruption by Russia specifically. Regarding that last set of questions, there is no question, as far as I can tell, that Trump is corrupt, but simply whether or not there is corruption by a foreign power. That remains an open question.
I have written a bunch of posts about whether or not Trump is "intelligent" (see, for example, here), but this is admittedly a difficult question because there are so many things that can cause a person with some cognitive capacity to behave in ways that don't demonstrate what we normally think of as "intelligent." Among the conversations I had was whether or not he just has certain learning disabilities. I am not convinced. I think he's a fuckin' moron who has had everything handed to him because he was born rich, and if you are born rich and act like a supreme douchebag, you stay rich. That's just the way it is. However, this is the kind of thing I debated in the Palmer House lobby. There was a qualitative difference between these conversations and those surrounding George W. Bush. This was different. Very different. As in, we're scared because this guy is so fucked in the head.
Sanity. This is what really got one of the Republicans at MPSA (I won't name names) to tell me he refused to vote. His wife is a Democrat, and they have maintained their mixed marriage for decades, but this time... he just couldn't do it. He couldn't give that kind of power to someone with mental problems. Is Trump mentally fit for office? Most of us who study American politics have some psychology training, but it is cognitive psychology, which means we aren't really fully qualified to make diagnoses, but then again, I'm not an ER doctor. If I see someone dying on the street of a knife to the gut, I'm gonna make a diagnosis. (Observe my current restraint regarding London...). Trump is batshit crazy. And we all know it. Richard Nixon had a lot of psychological issues. He was a Shakespearean figure-- brilliant, complex, and undone by his own paranoia. Trump is... just scary insane. He's a textbook sociopath, who may actually be so divorced from empirical reality that his constant untruth-telling isn't "lying," per se, because he doesn't even know what "truth" is.
Yes, this conversation happened with a bunch of people. 'Cuz we all know it. The fact that we aren't all saying it LOUDLY is a disservice to the public. This is what we were talking about at the conference.
Aaaand corruption. Is Trump under the influence of Russia? We still don't know. We have sanctions against Russia, and counter-indications, but that could be Trump constrained by circumstances. Manafort? Flynn? Those motherfuckers were in it deep. Trump truly may have been too stupid and disconnected from any general strategy to collude personally, so his crimes may have been limited to obstruction of justice. I'll leave it to lawyers to discuss what is necessary for convictions under general circumstances, even though I maintain that the probability of an impeachment is zero. However, Trump's lawyer's office was just raided, probably having something to do with hush money payments to a porn star, and associated threats, although who the fuck knows, because those motherfuckers make Richard Nixon look like our collective mythos surrounding Elliot Fucking Ness.
Like I said, the corruption is not in doubt. The challenge is how we talk about the President's possible corruption by Russia given the fact that even the possibility is such a norm violation that we are beyond normal politics. One of the denizens of the Palmer House lobby had no idea how to address this, and so chooses to remain silent. That's the wrong thing to do, but this is the problem of the Trump era. The corruption is not in doubt-- just the severity.
If you want to understand what political scientists really think of Donald Trump, HOLY FUCKING SHIT, we hate that motherfucker! I am particularly profane about it here, but... this is different from other politicians. The MPSA conference, and in particular, the Palmer House lobby, would have been a fascinating fly-on-the-wall experience to an outsider.
Which brings me to someone who was obviously a tourist in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was a family. They each had a book. The mother? A Bill O'Reilly book. She was sitting in the lobby with her family, she looked around, saw the name tags, the program books, and realized what was happening. I wonder what she thought as she undoubtedly listened in. I tried listening because I'm an eavesdropper... I didn't catch anything. Too bad...