Historians will long debate Trump’s transformative legacy
He changed America’s approach to trade. He transformed the nation’s relationship with China. He altered the country’s role in international institutions. He remolded the nation’s alliances. He reshaped American views about immigration. He modified decades-old customs of politics. He weaponized social media.
He recast ancient notions of how leaders behave, speak and relate to one another. He spawned a debate about whether he endangered democratic values, undermined the Constitution and stirred racial tensions.
But most significant of all: He remade two of the three branches of government.
As a result, Donald J. Trump may be pilloried by contemporary scholars even as he is remembered in history as the most consequential president in three-quarters of a century and the most significant one-term president in nearly 175 years.
Not since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has an American president so changed the institution of the presidency — and Mr. Trump served only a third of the time FDR spent in the White House.
Trump was an orange tornado rampaging through American politics, diplomatic relations, global institutions and the volumes of American etiquette from Emily Post to Miss Manners. He repealed George H.W. Bush’s approach of “the outstretched hand” and rescinded Franklin Roosevelt’s dictum that the presidency “is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.”
But the next sentence in Gov. Roosevelt’s 1932 interview in The New York Times before he defeated Herbert Hoover is less often quoted. He said significant presidents “were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.”
Historians for years will wrestle over whether Trump clarified or muddled historic ideas. They will evaluate whether Trump permanently recast long-established principles in the presidency. They will argue over whether he was a plutocrat, populist — or poseur.
“Outside of Trump, it’s hard to think of a president who has upended and then taken over a major American party in such short order,” said William Howell, a University of Chicago political scientist.
The principal historical question: Is Trump an aberration in the parade of presidents, or he is a precedent for future presidents?
Either way, his size-12 footprints on the beige and navy blue carpeting with floral medallions installed in Mr. Trump’s first months in the West Wing will not soon fade.
“He’s been transformative if for no other reason than he radicalized a very sizable percentage of the electorate to reject the very fundamental tenets of democracy and the rule of law,” said Jon D. Michaels, a UCLA School of Law expert on presidential power. “He’s helped normalize a politics of hate, violence and corruption. And he’s helped debase and delegitimize the admittedly small number of things we’ve (for better or worse) elevated above the partisan fray — science, public health, national security, prosecutorial decisions and judicial determinations.”
There is no question that the changes he has wrought in the judicial branch are transformative. In installing three Supreme Court justices in one term, he set the high court on a new conservative path.
Earlier one-term presidents left behind party upheaval (William Howard Taft, Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter) or economic upheaval (Herbert Hoover, the elder Bush). Trump departs with a strong stock market but high unemployment — and a virus still raging.
Despite promising a dramatic contrast with Trump, Presidentelect Joseph R. Biden Jr. likely will continue some of his policies, maintaining an aggressive posture toward China, insisting America’s NATO allies increase their defense spending, expressing skepticism about trade agreements, and building on brightening prospects in the Middle East.
The debate about Trump’s historical legacy already is underway and it will simmer for decades.