Is it possible we’re wrong about Trump?
Is it possible that we’re wrong about Donald Trump?
Is it possible that he’s not a crude, unhinged, dangerously unqualified, ignorant president of the United States?
I ask because when there’s a stampede of critics headed in one direction, maybe it’s time to stand back from the herd. When an overwhelming consensus builds in serious academic, media, and political circles, and when comedians can make a good living mocking the man in the Oval Office, it makes sense to wonder if perhaps everyone is wrong. Because it wouldn’t be the first time people have been wrong about a president.
In South Dakota, there are four presidents forever immortalized on Mount Rushmore. It is recognition, by Americans at least, that the four were outstanding presidents who made profound and lasting contributions to their country.
George Washington. Thomas Jefferson. Abraham Lincoln. Theodore Roosevelt. They are literally presidential giants.
But it wasn’t always so. Each of them was criticized in their time, with words that could be used today by those who criticize Donald Trump. Thomas Paine, who managed to communicate the sense of the American Revolution to ordinary people, once wrote of Washington, “The world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.”
In 1808, Thomas Jefferson got a letter from a citizen that said, “You have set aside and trampled on our most dearest rights, bought by the blood of our ancestors.”
During the American Civil War, the governor of Missouri, Hamilton Gamble, was exasperated with Abraham Lincoln. In a letter to Lincoln’s attorney general, Edward Bates, Gamble called the 16th president “a mere intriguing, pettifogging, piddling, politician.”
After Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, the Chicago Times wrote, “The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the filly, flat, and dishwatery utterances of a man who had to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.”
It was a British diplomat, Cecil SpringRice, who wrote to a friend about Theodore Roosevelt: “You must always remember that the president is about six.” The Mount Rushmore memorial was completed in 1941. So the longest-serving president is not represented. That would be Franklin Roosevelt. He’s the man who led the United States out of the Great Depression and through the Second World War. Yet the renowned journalist H.L. Mencken once called FDR “somewhat shallow and futile.”
The point is made, then. Contemporary critics of American presidents can be dead wrong. We should remember that when today’s president is routinely buried under scathing commentary about everything from his policies, to his vocabulary, to the way he wears his tie.
I don’t think we are wrong about Donald Trump. He is no Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln or Roosevelt. He makes George W. Bush look good. And Bush had not a dash of either eloquence or strategic brilliance. I’m pretty sure Trump is in way over his head. I have no confidence he can solve any of the problems he says he will solve because I don’t believe he even understands the problems. He is a childish, boorish, egomaniacal man without even the slightest self-awareness.
Still, all that name-calling amounts to nothing. We can take smug satisfaction in it, but the criticism we should pay attention to is the criticism that uses evidence to make its point. Don’t just make jokes about Donald Trump. Don’t just tell me he’s inept and unworthy. Prove it.
Mark Bulgutch is a former senior executive producer of CBC News. He teaches journalism at Ryerson University and is the author of That’s Why I’m a Journalist.
George Washington. Thomas Jefferson. Abraham Lincoln. Theodore Roosevelt. They are presidential giants. But it wasn’t always so