How will Trump tenure play with future historians?
I’m looking forward to reading the post-mortem on the presidency of Donald Trump over the next number of years.
Yes, there have already been dozens of books written about Trump’s tenure — Bob Woodward wrote two while Trump was in office — but most were partisan political screeds or breathless contemporary accounts that lacked wide-angle perspective.
In the next two decades, and beyond, serious historians and political observers will get a better chance to look at various Trump papers and talk with many more insiders now that the run is over.
The books will likely represent the yin and yang of Trump’s policies vs. his character — some good policies; lots of self-destructive character.
What I’d really like to do is come back 100 years from now and see how the historians have tackled the Trump presidency — the issues and policies, two impeachments and the storming of the U.S. Capitol building by supporters as his term was in its final days. How will that play?
After he resigned from the presidency in August of 1974, Richard Nixon spent the rest of his life trying to rehabilitate his reputation. If you compartmentalize his life and tenure as the vice president from 19531961 and president from 1969-1974, he did a lot of good things. But Nixon also attempted to subvert the U.S. Constitution during the Watergate scandal, and you can’t whitewash that.
Based on previous oneterm presidents, Trump is likely to get plenty of attention.
Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce served
It’s too early to write the final chapter on Trump.
very forgettable single terms in the 1850s. And yet, Fillmore’s latest biography — he actually served less than three years after the death in office of Zachary Taylor — hit the shelves in 2011; a two-volume bio of Pierce appeared in 2007.
In other words, writers will be poring over the incendiary Trump legacy for generations.
Nixon wrote books in an effort to regain favor; it will be interesting to see what, if anything, Trump has to write in the wake of his term. Would he still falsely claim in print to have won the 2020 election?
One question historians will answer: Was Trump a “one-off ” in our Republic, or the “canary in the coal mine” that said our democratic experiment, with so much polarization, would struggle to survive?
And just as Nixon will never outrun Watergate, you have to think Trump will have a hard time outrunning the sacking of the U.S. Capitol.