Is Trump History? Or Even Historic?
Notwithstanding “The Big Lie” about the results of the 2020 election or the recent ascendency of Elise Stefanik to GOP stardom by embracing it, Donald J. Trump’s presidency is now history, which is not the same thing as historic.
In any event, what exactly was it? In March, a group of seventeen historians, organized by Princeton University’s Julian E. Zelizer, convened to do what The New York Times described as “taking a first cut at writing a scholarly history of the administration.” The members submitted chapters on topics including immigration, foreign policy, race, party politics, disinformation and impeachment. The book will be published next year by Princeton University Press under the title, The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment. But no matter what Zelizer and his colleagues describe in their draft of the Trump record, their conclusions will undoubtedly be revised and reconsidered many times over, long after these historians have moved on to other matters.
There have been any number of re-examinations of presidencies, upending prior views and recasting reputations. Harry Truman was deeply unpopular when he left office in 1953, but over time he came to be seen in a new light, as a consequential and successful president, in part due to Merle Miller’s 1974 “oral biography” Plain Speaking — a view solidified by David McCullough’s admiring biography two decades later. Ulysses S. Grant has similarly risen to higher regard following the publication of Ron Chernow’s biography in 2017. And looking at our country more generally, Jill Lepore’s brilliant These Truths, covering the full arc of American history, followed by The New York Times’s “1619 Project,” and all that happened in 2020 have reframed our national narrative by underscoring the record of racism, inequality, sexism and anti-immigrant bigotry that are now a recognized feature of our narrative. To revive a misleading axiom that was common in the early stages of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign that he ought to be “taken seriously but not literally,” all historical judgments can be similarly considered because they are so adaptable to the norms and prejudices of any given moment.
We are now entering the first summer of Joseph Biden’s presidency and (from where I sit) confusion abounds in how to describe its early months. “The most significant presidency since FDR”? “A return to normalcy” in politics? “Boring”? This last trope seems to have subsided.
Even as the pandemic eases, there remains an element of national PTSD as the scale of what has happened in the past four years is being absorbed. The consequences of the Trump era are still reverberating across the country, and predicting where and how they will settle is futile. As a practical matter, until we know who will control the House and Senate after the 2022 elections, we cannot truly gauge the effect of his residual grip on voters and the acceptance of his false and cynical assertions about the past, the present, and the future.
Having spent much of the last three years writing a memoir called An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen (publishing June 1) and also having worked with Trump thirty years ago on two of his early bestsellers, I have sought to judge unfolding events from a middle distance, as a journalist — which is not to say, a historian.
Probably the best book about the Trump presidency so far is Carlos Lozada’s What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era, in which the author, The Washington Post’s excellent book critic, read 150 books written during the Trump years and analyzed what their perspectives told us about the man and his time in the White House. His conclusions, and I share them, are that in essence the Trump presidency was uniquely chaotic and yet at the same time a reflection of deeply embedded characteristics of American society.
Trump’s personally bizarre and untethered stances on policy and appearance — painting his face bronze, sculpturing his hair, choosing associates on how they looked — were distinctly his own. But the broader themes of “dog whistles” and explicit racism, bigotry of all sorts, and an affinity for autocratic leaders are characteristics that have been present in our history in varying degrees from the outset.
One notable aspect of the Trump presidency — borne out by the sheer number of sources for Lozada’s book — was how active and lucrative it was for many contemporary chroniclers. There were multiple bestsellers and television star turns about the Mueller-Russia investigation and the political depredations it exposed, until the deflation of the outcome. I would not want to be a publisher with a vast inventory of unsold “Russia probe” books.
As for impeachment, this most sacred of civil punishments has been permanently devalued as it succumbed to political expediency. This process actually began with Bill Clinton, whose (let’s face it) egregious shenanigans with a twenty-one-year-old intern in an Oval Office anteroom was in retrospect no challenge to democracy. Trump’s threatening telephone call to Ukraine’s new president, himself only recently a television comedian, will be seen as an odd pretext for impeachment when the overall reality of his presidency was so much worse.
The impeachment after the January 6 insurrections at the Capitol was doubtless justified. But the process was a scramble that gave Trump’s Republican enablers more opportunities to undermine truth, a task to which they continue to devote themselves — as witnessed by their assertion that the mob that violently stormed the Capitol was little more than “a normal tourist visit.”
So, what can we now take seriously and perhaps literally? Trump, Trumpism, and the extraordinary visibility of so much of life on social media have been the accelerant of upheavals that may otherwise have been longer in coming, including many that stand in opposition to the message that Trump and his followers espoused. The events of our time have had a decisive and I believe lasting impact on attitudes toward race, gender, and the whole concept known as diversity, equity, and inclusion. These changes have been coming incrementally for decades and have now arrived in force.
How much of each tendency will endure? How much has America been transformed? This history has yet to be written
