The end of days for a presidency mired in chaos
Scholars predict Donald Trump’s four-year White House reign is destined to see him ranked among America’s worst leaders
MORE than 30,000 falsehoods and lies. Nearly 400,000 coronavirus deaths. Rising white nationalism. Financial self-dealing. A social media ban. Two impeachments. A deadly attack on the US Capitol.
President Donald Trump’s four years in office come to a close tomorrow after a reign defined by chaos, corruption and scandal, a tenure that scholars predict is destined to rank him among America’s worst presidents.
Trump’s claims of policy victories — including a raft of conservative judges and steps toward Middle East peace — will be vastly overshadowed by his mismanagement of the pandemic and his unprecedented assault on the election results, they said.
“You never want to be ranked below William Henry Harrison, who was only president for one month. If you rank below him, it means you’ve harmed the country,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley of Rice University said. “Now you’re getting into James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson territory. Trump will automatically be in that category.”
Yet as Trump departs the White House — and the daily controversies and social media warfare he provoked begin to subside — the historians preparing to reckon with his legacy said it is not just Trump who will be examined under the harsh reflection of history’s mirror, but also American society and the nation’s commitment to democracy.
Trump’s relentless attacks on civic institutions, provoking of racial and social divisions, trampling of political norms, broadsides against the free press and impugning of America’s international allies have raised profound questions about the nature of American governance and the endurance of the values the United States has long professed to cherish, scholars said.
“Trump and Trumpism have brought those flaws into sharp relief,” said Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “The fact that 74m people could vote for someone who is a conspiracy theorist and a perpetual liar and encouraged violence and the Proud Boys and white supremacy — in that sense, the Trump presidency will be important for those reckoning with ‘What does it mean to be an American?’ And also what does it mean to live in what a lot of people thought was the world’s greatest experiment in democracy, when it turns out that experiment is incredibly fragile?”
The Trump years have been something of a boon for political historians and scholars who were vaulted into slots as cable television analysts and newspaper pundits to assess his presidency in real time. Now, the more traditional work begins, as they gain distance from the day-to-day political combat and wade through historical records of the past four years to make broader judgments about his place in history.
It is here that some raised concerns over the volume and reliability of the records that can help guide them. Before his Twitter account was shut down in the wake of the US Capitol siege on January 6, Trump had posted nearly 60,000 tweets and retweets to more than 88m followers — a moment-to-moment reflection of his mind-set.
Yet scholars said other records, such as memos and interviews with aides, are more tenuous. Some worried that Trump and his associates will destroy documents despite laws meant to preserve them, while others voiced concerns that White House aides, who like their boss have a record of misleading the public, will be unreliable narrators of his presidency.
“I wonder if there will be the same documentation of Trump’s own decision-making and processes that we have with other presidents,” said Joseph Crespino, a history professor at Emory University in Atlanta. “He’s not a reader or a note taker or a memo writer. That will be a challenge.”
In many ways, Trump’s presidency was so aberrant — a real estate promoter and reality television star with no political or military experience winning the highest elected office with a minority share of the popular vote — that it is difficult to place him within the continuum of his peers, historians said.
Yet they also emphasised that Trump did not come out of nowhere — that his rise to political prominence behind a false birther conspiracy seeking to delegitimise his predecessor, President Barack Obama, is rooted in the Republican Party’s history of racial grievance politics and its leaders’ increasing willingness to embrace the far-right wing.
Likewise, they said, Trump’s use of new social media tools to spread disinformation was made possible by rapidly changing technologies, but the rhetoric he employed to radicalise his base is steeped in language of American demagogues — from Joseph Mccarthy to Father Charles E Coughlin to George Wallace.
Historians said Trump’s tenure is virtually certain to be defined by the tumultuous events of the past year, during which he has actively sought to play down the risks of the global pandemic, used government force to clear protesters from a park just beyond the White House gates last June, falsely claimed victory over President-elect Joe Biden and helped incite a pro-trump mob that stormed the Capitol, resulting in the deaths of five people.
To Leah Wright-rigueur, associate professor of American history at Brandeis University, Trump’s presidency has been a case study in the “naked, unadulterated pursuit of power and self-interest, at the cost of 400,000 lives and at the cost of the American union.”
The storming of the Capitol “will be the moment everybody remembers about Trump’s presidency,” she said. “It tells the story about the failures of American democracy — not just about Trump, but also the centuries-old lies we tell ourselves about who we are.”
‘This has been a case study in the naked pursuit of power and self-interest, at the cost of 400,000 lives and the American union’