[Louisville, Kentucky](October 27, 2026) Dr. Terry C. Cox, Emeritus Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Eastern Kentucky University and a former municipal and railroad police officer, has published The Election of President Donald J. Trump: A Faustian Bargain and Morality Crisis, a 260-page examination of how American voters weighed a presidential candidate’s documented record against their own moral standards.
The book, released March 11, 2026, is available now at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Rakuten Kobo, Bookshop.org, and Orell Füssli.
Cox begins from an observation drawn from his own professional life. Police candidates in accredited agencies undergo background investigations, psychological screening, and polygraph examination. Applicants with felony convictions, civil findings of sexual assault, or documented histories of deception are screened out at the application stage. Cox asks how the same public that supports these standards for patrol officers applied a different measure to the presidency.
His answer draws on social cognitive theory. Working from Albert Bandura’s research on moral disengagement and Leon Festinger’s work on cognitive dissonance, Cox argues that voters retained their personal moral frameworks and selectively suspended them. He traces the specific mechanisms that make this possible: euphemistic labeling, advantageous comparison, displacement and diffusion of responsibility, attribution of blame to victims, and the denial of consequences.
“I spent forty years teaching students that individuals possess moral agency and that our justice system holds them accountable on that basis,” Cox said. “The 2024 election challenged the foundation of everything I taught. This book is my attempt to explain it with the tools of my discipline rather than the language of partisan argument.”
The manuscript reflects a career spent inside the institutions it examines. Cox served as a Baltimore and Ohio Railroad police officer in Akron, Ohio, then as a patrol officer with the Marietta, Ohio Police Department. He later spent thirty-nine years on the faculty of the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, where his research concentrated on homicide, violent predatory crime, and police use of force. He was qualified as an expert witness in federal civil rights litigation and taught in the Kentucky Department of Criminal Justice Training and the Ohio Peace Officers Training Academy.
The book moves through several areas of analysis. It reviews the criminological literature on elite and white collar offending, drawing on Edwin Sutherland’s foundational work to explain how the justice system responds differently to powerful defendants. It examines what Cox calls a perfect storm of converging pressures, including declining religious affiliation, five decades of neoliberal economic policy, and demographic anxiety. It closes with an assessment of who bears the cost of the bargain, with particular attention to child poverty and health outcomes in Kentucky and West Virginia, the regions where Cox has spent most of his life.
“A Faustian bargain requires the seller to surrender something worth more than anything received in return,” Cox said. “My argument is that the surrender was moral, that it was made knowingly, and that the people paying for it are largely the people who made it.”
The title takes its epigraph from John Prine’s 1972 song “The Great Compromise,” a reference Cox returns to in his closing pages.
The Election of President Donald J. Trump: A Faustian Bargain and Morality Crisis is available in print and ebook editions. Dr. Cox is available for interviews, podcast appearances, campus lectures, and commentary on criminology, policing, elite crime, and political psychology.


About the Author
Dr. Terry C. Cox earned a multidisciplinary Ph.D. from the University of Akron with concentrations in criminology, social psychology, and criminal justice. He served thirty-nine years on the faculty of the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University and retired as Emeritus Professor. He later taught as an adjunct professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Western Carolina University.
Before entering academia, Cox served as a police officer with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and with the Marietta, Ohio Police Department. He was drafted into the United States Army during the Vietnam War and graduated from the drill instructor academy at Fort Lewis, Washington. His father and three brothers were combat veterans.
His academic work concentrated on homicide and violent predatory criminality, police administration, and police related violence. He has published in academic journals and served as co-researcher and coauthor on two major ethnographic field research projects examining homicides in the Appalachian region of Eastern Kentucky.