OPINION
GUEST ESSAY
What Trump Looks Like to Historians
May 22,
2024
A person with the number 45 shaved into his hair on
the back of his head, in front of a red curtain.
Thomas B.
Edsall
By Thomas
B. Edsall
Mr. Edsall
contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics
and inequality.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/opinion/trump-history-transformative-president.html
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When
historians and political scientists rank presidents from best to worst, Donald
Trump invariably comes out at the bottom.
This year,
to give one example, the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project released the
results of a survey of 154 current and former members of the presidents and
executive politics section of the American Political Science Association.
The highest
ranked included no surprises: on a scale of 0 to 100, Abraham Lincoln (95.03),
Franklin Roosevelt (90.83), George Washington (90.32), Teddy Roosevelt (78.58)
and Thomas Jefferson (77.53).
Dead last:
Donald Trump (10.92), substantially below James Buchanan (16.71), Andrew
Johnson (21.56), Franklin Pierce (24.6) and William Henry Harrison (26.01).
There are
other ways to rank American presidents, however: How consequential were they?
By these
standards, Trump no longer falls at the bottom of the pack. That’s not
necessarily a good thing. My view is that Trump is a consequential president
for all the wrong reasons.
After the
nation rejected the presidential bids of George Wallace, Pat Buchanan and David
Duke, Trump demonstrated that the contemporary American electorate would put a
candidate who appeals to voters’ worst instincts in the White House.
Trump has
capitalized on the anger, fears and resentments of a besieged but fundamentally
decent working class to exacerbate ethnonationalist hostility to immigrants and
minorities, creating a right-wing populist antidemocratic movement.
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In the
process of building this MAGA coalition, Trump has made explicit the racist,
anti-immigrant themes that have underpinned the Republican Party for the past
half-century.
Persistently,
insistently repeating election lies, subverting election norms, raising doubts
about election integrity and refusing to commit to accepting the 2020 — or 2024
— vote count, Trump is focused on transforming the Republican Party into a cult
with adherents willing to support a nominee who openly plans to undermine —
indeed ravage — American democracy.
In that
sense, Trump ranks high as a transformative president.
A 2022
paper, “Donald Trump and the Lie,” by Kevin Arceneaux and Rory Truex, political
scientists at Sciences Po Paris and Princeton, provides a case study of Trump’s
impact on American politics. The authors studied “the evolution of public
opinion about Donald Trump’s ‘big lie’ using a rolling cross-sectional daily
tracking survey” from Oct. 27, 2020, through Jan. 29, 2021. They found:
The number
of Republicans and independents saying that they believe the 2020 election was
fraudulent is substantial, and this proportion did not change appreciably over
time or shift after important political developments. Belief in the lie may
have buoyed some of Trump supporters’ self-esteem.
“Republican
voters reward politicians who perpetuate the lie,” Arceneaux and Truex
concluded, “giving Republican candidates an incentive to continue to do so in
the next electoral cycle.”
I asked a
range of experts on the American presidency to evaluate Trump in terms of
impact. Their answers varied in terms of substance, tone and the level of
harshness of their assessment of Trump’s policies, rhetoric and initiatives.
For a
number of presidential scholars, Trump represents not an innovative force but
rather a revival of — and capitalization on — the darker strains in this
country’s history.
Marjorie R.
Hershey, a political scientist at Indiana University, Bloomington, wrote in an
email:
I’d rate
Trump as a significant president. Not a great president or even a good one, but
significant in that he has pushed a movement to reverse many of the gains in
acceptance of diversity that have been so hard-fought in recent decades.
“That’s not
new,” Hershey declared, adding:
In some
ways, Trump is a modern-day version of the grisly race baiters of the Old South
in that he’s understood that whipping up fears and hatred and stimulating chaos
allows those with real power to accumulate more profits while the rest of the
public is busy hating and fearing one another.
Nor,
Hershey contended, is Trump a political genius:
It’s not
that Trump is a brilliant politician. He’s just met his time. So many people’s
anxiety level has been increased by 9/11 and other terrorism and Covid and,
especially, rapid sociodemographic change. Nativism has long shadowed U.S.
politics, but the speed of this particular change, in which the population has
dropped from about 85 percent non-Hispanic white to less than 70 percent in
just a few decades, has raised some pretty base fears.
Along
similar but not parallel lines, Lori Cox Han, a political scientist at Chapman
University, where she directs the presidential studies program, wrote to say
that “Trump could definitely be called transformational, but in a negative
way.”
The nation,
she added, has
never
experienced a president (or ex-president) who has been this disrespectful of
the Constitution, the rule of law, the norms of the office or just basic
decency. So yes, I would say that he has shifted the common understanding of
what is good and sensible and that he has gravely damaged principles and values
within the Republican Party on issues such as foreign policy and immigration,
transforming it into something unrecognizable to where the party stood during
the Reagan years.
Clearly,
Han concluded, “Trump is still a significant presence in American politics, but
he has turned much of the traditional discussion about presidential leadership
on its head.”
Nicole
Hemmer, a historian at Vanderbilt and the director of the Center for the
American Presidency, argued in an email, “I consider Trump a transformative, or
at least pivotal, president for his impact on the policy preferences of
Republican voters, his role in supercharging polarization and his part in the
Jan. 6 insurrection.”
Hemmer
continued:
He did not
innovate on the policy front: Many of his policy preferences were either
longstanding Republican preferences, like budget-busting tax cuts and
appointing judges to overturn Roe v. Wade, or had been prefigured by
politicians like Pat Buchanan a generation earlier.
Nor would I
consider his presidency world-historical in any real sense. He may have
foregrounded different issues in the debate over foreign policy, breaking
through bipartisan consensus, but he did not remake the role of the U.S. in the
world in any meaningful or lasting way. He certainly elevated harsh rhetoric on
immigration and attempted to institute restrictionist and nativist policies,
but nothing he did restructured the immigration system like the 1921 and 1924
quota systems or the 1965 Immigration Act.
The most
consequential act of Trump’s presidency, according to Hemmer,
was his
rejection of the peaceful transfer of power. While I’m not sure that is a
world-historical event — not enough time has passed to fully evaluate the long
tail of Jan. 6 — it marks a pivotal moment in the history of the United States,
and it is enough to single him out in the history books. How transformative the
insurrection, and thus his presidency, was will depend on how well U.S.
democratic systems survive the next few decades.
Elaborating
on this point, Corey Brettschneider, a political scientist at Brown University,
argued in an email that other presidents, including John Adams and Richard
Nixon, have challenged democratic principles only to see their successors
restore these traditions. Trump, in contrast, poses a more serious challenge:
What makes
Trump’s threat different from previous ones is that in the past the nation
recovered. Future presidents followed those who threatened democracy and, at
the behest of citizens, sought to bolster the institutions and norms that had
been trampled on. Also, none of those previous presidents who threatened
democracy recaptured office.
This moment
is different. Despite various attempts at legal accountability and to challenge
him politically, the fact is Trump will be the nominee of one of the two major
parties for office, and he is in a dead heat with the incumbent in the polls.
If he wins,
unlike even the most dangerous of our former presidents, Trump is explicit in
his desire for dictatorship and the destruction of current checks on
presidential power. Trump has learned from his previous term where choke points
of American democracy lie. He knows, for instance, that by installing a
loyalist attorney general, he can avoid even the limited accountability he
faced in his previous term. And like Adams, he promises to prosecute political
opponents. Past presidents have threatened democracy. But Trump might succeed
where they failed.
If so,
could he conceivably qualify as a world historical figure?
Jeffrey
Engel, the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern
Methodist University, replied by email to my inquiry, concentrating his
attention on the fact that if Trump wins again in November, he would be serving
his second term. Such a second Trump term, Engel argued,
would
indeed prove structural and foundational, affecting our diplomacy, our sense of
the rule of law and frankly our faith in elections and the democratic process
writ large. I used to think such a sentence impossible, unreasonable or at
least the product of over-agitation. Now I think it may be understating the
case.
Alan
Taylor, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, argued in an
email that Trump has already had a significant impact on American politics:
He
certainly has transformed the Republican Party and eliminated almost all
previous norms of civility and bipartisanship in foreign policy.
Trump has
tapped into and mobilized a vast following of discontented people — so the
transformation is at least as much about them rather than his leadership (which
is chaotic and has accomplished little save for the big thing of mobilizing and
inflaming discontent).
Taylor
noted that the evaluation of Trump crucially depends on your vantage point:
If I am
ranking in terms of transforming a major party and roiling our public
discourse, then I can’t think of anyone more transformative, with the possible
exception of F.D.R. If ranking the ability to accomplish things legislatively
and diplomatically, then Trump is one of the least effective presidents, down
there with James Buchanan.
Of those I
contacted, Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, was the most
skeptical of the significance and consequence of Trump’s presidency. In Cain’s
view, the problem with describing Trump as politically transformative is the
fact that Trump has already so scrambled the allegiance, the sense of purpose
and the respect for history that once characterized the Republican Party that
it is now completely adrift.
Cain made
the point that “it is questionable whether Trump’s charismatic hold on MAGA
will have staying power without him, especially since it has not translated
into significant legislative achievements other than usual Republican stuff of
tax cuts and regulatory relief.”
Importantly,
in terms of the longevity of Trump’s impact, Cain argued that “the
congressional party is currently in complete disarray, the party seems to be
unwilling to offer a party platform and could not revise health policy even
when it had trifecta control.”
Similarly
skeptical — but for very different reasons — Marc Landy, a political scientist
at Boston College, wrote by email:
A political
transformation is indeed taking place in the United States, Western and Eastern
Europe, but I resist giving Trump too much credit. What we used to think of as
“conservatism” has changed its spots, but this is due as much to a new version
of liberalism that is unable to control immigration, that lionizes “victims,”
belittles religion and patriotism, as it is to Trump or any other individual.
Trump,
Landy added, “is far from world historical, a term that should be reserved for
the most important founders — Washington, Napoleon, Lenin and Mao.”
Trump’s
“great sin,” Landy wrote,
is his
disregard for the Constitution and the great republican norms and procedures it
puts in place. Jan. 6 is a day that will live in infamy. His efforts to
undermine the electoral process were reprehensible. His retention of sensitive
documents and his leaking them to others verges on treason.
Despite
these caveats, Landy acknowledged:
Trump was
an influential president. Biden has followed his lead in turning away from free
trade, instead using tariffs as a means to resuscitate American manufacturing
and protecting national security and in taking China seriously as a threat.
John Judis,
who wrote “Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age
of Extremes” with Ruy Teixeira, argued that Trump’s reversal of the Washington
consensus in favor of free trade makes him a transformative president. In an
email, Judis wrote:
His
election in 2016 and his presidency transformed American politics. He
repudiated a consensus on free trade, free markets and footloose corporations,
immigration, military adventures abroad and the need to reduce deficits by
cutting “entitlements.” Republicans had enthusiastically endorsed this
consensus since Ronald Reagan’s presidency and Democratic administrations had
either accepted it or were coerced into doing so by Republican Congresses.
Biden has
followed Trump’s lead on trade, and China and is being forced by Republicans
and public opinion to do so on immigration.
In contrast
to Cain and Landy, Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist at Stanford,
contended that Trump has permanently changed the direction of American
politics: “Given the completeness with which the Republican Party has been
transformed and how that transformation is likely to outlast Trump, the answer
to your question is definitely yes, he has transformed the U.S. political
system and perhaps politics outside the U.S.”
In
Fukuyama’s view, there is one key element lacking in Trump’s imprint: “an
intellectual framework to situate his transformation; some are trying, but I
don’t see a coherent ideology that would define the change he’s wrought.”
Of all
those I contacted, only Matthew Dickinson, a political scientist at Middlebury
College, stressed what I consider to be a crucial factor in the evaluation of
the former president: “Trump’s historical significance is mostly due to his
ability to give voice to the growing number of Americans who feel unrepresented
by the political class — Republican and Democrat — that exercises predominant
power today.”
A part of
Trump’s appeal, Dickinson wrote by email,
is likely
rooted in ethnonationalism among whites who worry that they are losing status
in an increasingly racially diverse society. But attributing Trump’s popularity
solely to “racial resentment" misses an important source of his support:
the belief among mostly working-class Americans that the economic and political
playing field, as constructed by political elites in both parties, is tilted
against them.
This
perspective, Dickinson added, “extends to working-class voters of color; recent
voting patterns suggest that some Latino and, to a lesser extent, Black voters
are shifting allegiances away from the Democratic Party — to be sure, how large
and durable a shift is not yet clear.”
On the last
full day of the Trump presidency, Jan. 19, 2021, the BBC published “U.S.
Historians on What Donald Trump’s Legacy Will Be,” a series of illuminating
interviews. Laura Belmonte, a history professor and the dean of the Virginia
Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, told the BBC:
The moment
I found jaw-dropping was the press conference Trump had with Vladimir Putin in
2018 in Helsinki, where he took Putin’s side over U.S. intelligence in regard
to Russian interference in the election. I can’t think of another episode of a
president siding full force with a nondemocratic society adversary.
She
described the incident as “very emblematic of a larger assault on any number of
multilateral institutions and treaties and frameworks that Trump has unleashed,
like the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the withdrawal of the
Iranian nuclear framework.”
In
addition, Belmonte said she was struck by “Trump’s applauding Turkish President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and meeting with
North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, really turning himself inside out to align the U.S.
with regimes that are the antithesis of values that the U.S. says it wants to
promote.”
The BBC
asked Kathryn Brownell, a professor of history at Purdue University, “What’s
Trump’s key legacy?” Her answer:
Broadly
speaking: Donald Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party and
conservative media have put American democracy to the test in an unprecedented
way. It is truly striking the ways in which he has convinced millions of people
that his fabricated version of events is true.
Just as the
Watergate impeachment inquiry “dominated historical interpretations of Richard
Nixon’s legacy for decades,” Brownell maintained, “this particular postelection
moment will be at the forefront of historical assessments of his presidency.”
What else
stands out?
Kellyanne
Conway’s first introduction of the notion of “alternative facts” just days into
the Trump administration when disputing the size of the inaugural crowds
between Trump and Barack Obama.
Presidents
across the 20th century have increasingly used sophisticated measures to spin
interpretation of policies and events in favorable ways and to control the
media narrative of their administrations. But the assertion that the
administration had a right to its own alternative facts went far beyond spin,
ultimately foreshadowing the ways in which the Trump administration would
govern by misinformation.
What do we
make of all this?
On Monday,
Andrew Prokop, a senior political correspondent at Vox, wrote that during
Trump’s four years in the White House, “the guardrails held.” The courts,
Congress, public opinion, senior aides, top officials and Trump’s own
mismanagement held him in check, preventing the adoption of some of his more
outrageous proposals.
This time
around, Trump would have a sympathetic Supreme Court majority, compliant
Republicans in the House and Senate and a staff that wouldn’t block his most
aberrant and outrageous ideas — and would even contribute their own.
What could
go wrong?
Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. He previously covered politics for The Was
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