How will history judge the Trump years?
“Well, that was some weird shit…”
Four years on and has there been any better summary of the Trump years than George W. Bush’s assessment of the now notorious “American carnage” speech from the 2016 inauguration? It has indeed been a weird ride and for those of us lost at sea for 1,674 days it might take some adjustment before we learn to walk on dry land again.
The Trump ship rocked some wild waters and we should be forgiven if we now return to shore with our bearings briefly lost. Jim Acosta, CNN’s White House correspondent famously banned (albeit briefly, once a court ruled) from Trump’s press conference, had already announced his intention to move on. He’ll anchor his own show on the network and work as their domestic correspondent. Others will no doubt follow him. Once you’ve sailed S.S. Trumpitania, it does feel like you’re done with the open sea.
As political hacks leave the scene, their places will be filled by historians who begin the harder forensic work of assessing the past four years. For the moment, we can only judge how low the craft sits in the water. As for assessing whether Donald J. Trump was the worst president in history: it is no more than a party game. Was George Best better than Pele? Were The Beatles that much better than (waves vaguely towards the charts) “Little Mix”? Who the hell knows what kind of metrics we should use? Grab some wine and let us argue about it until dawn.
Donald Trump was certainly the first president to be impeached in his first term but also the first to be impeached twice. Supporters will claim both were political hits, but they will find it increasingly difficult to move beyond the talk of insurrection. History tends to foreshorten. It contracts the dimensionality of an era, reducing it to its most pronounced features. Injecting bleach. Spanked by Stormy Daniels. Telephone calls to Ukraine. That guy in the bison hat sitting in the Speaker’s chair… That there was your presidency.
Such moments will undoubtedly remain Donald Trump’s legacy until more sober judgements can be formed. Whilst there’s little chance there will be any last-minute revisionism, making Trump resemble a Sunkist Lincoln, there is a whole lot of contextualising that needs to be done first.
This happens to every president, of course, where contemporary judgements come to sit somewhat at odds against the larger view afforded by history. Ronald Reagan left office basking in the collapse of the USSR. At the time, we were caught up in the story of the “great liberator” and history’s arc seemed to be bending towards justice. As it turns out, that plot had a twist and it is now impossible to consider the collapse of the Soviet superpower without also talking about the rise of the Russian kleptocracy. Even Iran-Contra, just another partisan turf war at the time, now feels tonally quite different given the prominence that the drug wars came to have upon our culture.
George H.W. Bush was a one-term president, initially popular but eventually considered something of a damp squib. His “read my lips, no new taxes” condemned him to defeat but, with hindsight, his moderate conservatism (and honest admission on taxes) seems quaint and, indeed, the last of its kind. He was defeated by Bill Clinton whose solos on the saxophone signalled a younger kind of politics, as did Monika Lewinsky’s solos on a different kind of instrument. How we all chucked at the wonderful vulgarity of it all! This was politics as soap opera, where the cartoonish morality seemed so self-contained yet, twenty years later, “The Clintons” have gone from being the chief villains in the Tea Party movement to the Epstein-befriending Satan-worshipping devils found in the literature of Q-Anon. Nothing sits in isolation. Nothing is quite so innocent.
As for Trump, his true legacy will be unclear until we can contextualise him through whatever comes next. Was this the moment when American politics broke into sectarian civil war or the point at which America recognised the dangers of tribalism and pulled back from the brink? What might those 20,000 troops currently stationed in Washington D.C. mean for the future of the Republic? Tune in next week to find out. The answer will directly impact how Trump is viewed in history.
Hagiography written around a president’s departure is often a peculiar beast, as likely to get as much wrong as it does right. “The oldest man to lead the nation exudes the same buoyant confidence as he heads for retirement as when he arrived in Washington eight years ago,” wrote Michael Binyon in The Times in 1989 about the departing Ronald Reagan. Reagan, he said, was “unaffected by the strains and burdens of an office that has overwhelmed younger men.” The assessment seems generous in light of Reagan’s subsequent diagnosis, four years later, of Alzheimer’s and the rumours of decline whilst in office that persist to this day.
Yet such is the nature of the business. We all make assumptions about details that might simply be less or more relevant given a little perspective. Will the “insurrection” of 6 January 2021 even stick in the public’s consciousness as a true insurrection? If it does, is America even willing to address the white supremacism that has been tolerated for as long as it has been hiding in open sight in the guise of the far-right militia movement? Does Trump then go down as the lowest point of American democracy or the outlier whose stratospheric incompetence was a fortunate test of a system that could have proved more vulnerable to a more malign actor?
These are big questions for which answers are still pending. We don’t even know if Trump’s policies were the last vengeful acts of a diminishing Republican Party (The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman has been all over the media this past week, predicting/advocating for a split in the GOP) or a restatement of class and ethnic resentments that will still define politics for the next generation? Rarely at the podium or during an interview did the President seem in control of his facts or seem to understand the issues at hand but that does not discount the possibility that his actions fit into a coherent historical narrative.
Trump himself offered us few clues and his administration’s reluctance to leave much in the way of a written record will make this job even harder for historians. Sometimes his reactionary behaviour in terms of the environment and healthcare felt contrarian (he was against anything that Obama was for) yet the way he leaned into China expansionism and Mexico immigration felt an inevitable restatement of American nationalism that is rarely far from the surface. He undermined old alliances in a way that appeared wilfully negligent yet pushed partners to reassess their relationship with the U.S. Those changes will be felt for decades and understood in contexts much larger than one man’s somewhat limited psychology.
Trump departs, then, with many people feeling like a bullet was dodged yet nobody knows the trajectory of the next incoming shot. There’s still time for his presidency to serve as a premonition of what comes next. He rose to power on the indifference of a voting public who had grown cavalier in the way they spoke about democracy. He leaves power with 160 million people rediscovering the importance of their vote. Does America learn that lesson or does politics get swamped again by popular culture and prove susceptible to the next media star with megalomaniacal ambitions?
That is the point or, rather, lack of a point, here at the end of this very singular presidency. Trump’s election can variously feel like a quirk or bad mistake but historically it might also be indicative of a direction of travel for America. He remains the president who claimed to know all the answers until the time came to deny responsibility when the going got tough. Trump might be the most consequential president in modern American history. He might also be a blip that meant so very little.