Donald Trump, Nikki Haley should know history — because we know theirs
The 2024 presidential campaign may be an American turning point — but not only because the stakes are so high. The two Republican candidates leading at the beginning of the year seem befuddled about the past and the incumbent president is stuck in the past. And the threat is that the next president will little understand the country outside the White House walls.
As the Iowa caucuses drew near, former president Donald Trump argued that he didn’t know that his rhetoric characterizing his opponents as “vermin” and his remark that immigrants illegally entering at the US-Mexico border are “poisoning the blood of our country” were a mirror of Adolf Hitler’s language.
At the same time, former governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina stumbled over a question that every 11th-grade US history student confronts: What caused the Civil War?
Haley’s upward trajectory in New Hampshire, where she seemed on the cusp of becoming the presumptive alternative to a third Trump Republican presidential nomination, was interrupted by her apparent confusion about the origins of the Civil War, which began in her state. Surely she should have known that the founder and namesake of her alma mater, Thomas Green Clemson, enlisted in the Confederate Army.
“I never knew that Hitler said it,” said Trump, who added that he had never read “Mein Kampf,” in which Hitler set out his vision for Germany and Europe. He added that he had “no idea what Hitler said other than (what) I’ve seen on the news.” Trump was born 14 months after the end of
World War II in Europe.
Haley’s original explanation of the origins of the Civil War was a fusillade of states’ rights mumbo jumbo that would earn her a D in a Clemson University history survey course in 1990, when she entered college. Later Haley, who as governor removed the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the State House, would issue a clarification saying, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery. We know that.”
Though some Southerners have long argued that the war was about states’ rights rather than slavery, Abraham Lincoln made the cause clear when, in his 1865 Second Inaugural Address, he said of slavery, “All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.”
No one is arguing that presidential candidates should have a mastery of the details of history. But it is essential that they have a general notion of the mainstreams of history. It is not that, in the oft-quoted but oft-misapplied axiom of George Santayana, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It is instead that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to misunderstand the present.
“We cannot stay away from history,” the historian Peter N. Stearns said in a 2020 essay written for the American Historical Association, arguing history “offers the only extensive evidential base for the contemplation and analysis of how societies function, and people need to have some sense of how societies function simply to run their own lives.”
This notion applies to the war in Ukraine, where the conflict is over who rightfully controls the eastern plain of Europe and what the nature of Nazism was. It applies to the war in the Middle East, where the conflict is about who rightfully deserves to control the land precious to three faiths. It applies to US tensions about race, where there are furious conflicts about the origin and meaning of the American Revolution and the role white supremacy played in the tragedies of slavery and the destruction of Indigenous cultures.
And it applies to our contemporary debate about the Founders’ vision for the country and the guardrails it invented to preserve democratic values.
In an introduction to the “The American Heritage New Illustrated History of the United States” that he wrote just before his assassination, which was published posthumously 60 years ago this winter, John F. Kennedy argued that history is the memory of a nation.
“Just as memory enables the individual to learn, to choose goals and stick to them, to avoid making the same mistake twice — in short, to grow — so history is the means by which a nation establishes its sense of identity and purpose,” he wrote. “The future arises out of the past, and a country’s history is a statement of the values and hopes which, having forged what has gone before, will now forecast what is to come.”
That is the understanding the president of the United States requires, if for no other reason to help assure that future candidates will not be asked what were the causes of the Third World War.
The threat is that the next president will little understand the country outside the White House walls.