Zooming with the historians
Trump has been trying to tell historians what to say about him.
As an academic historian, I never expected to find myself in a videoconference with Donald Trump. But one afternoon last summer—a day after C-SPAN released a poll of historians who ranked him just above Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan, our country’s worst chief executives—he popped up in a Zoom box and told me and some of my colleagues about the 45th presidency from his point of view. He spoke calmly. “We’ve had some great people; we’ve had some people that weren’t so great. That’s understandable,” he told us. “That’s true with, I guess, every administration. But overall, we had tremendous, tremendous success.”
Point missed. He was “not so great.” He hired the not so great people. He was the record-breakingly bad president.
I am the editor of a scholarly history of Trump’s term in the White House, the third book in a series about the most recent presidents. A few days after The New York Times reported on the project, Trump’s then-aide Jason Miller contacted me to say that the former president wanted to talk to my co-authors and me—something that neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama had done. For someone who claimed indifference about how people in our world viewed him, Trump was spending an inordinate amount of time—more than any other ex-president that we know of—trying to influence the narratives being written about him. My co-authors and I weren’t the only people he reached out to. According to Axios, Trump conducted conversations with more than 22 authors, primarily journalists, who were working on books chronicling his presidency.
Of course he did. He’s a narcissist, and he’s clueless. Put the two together and you get this absurdity.
But if anything, our conversation with the former president underscored common criticisms: that he construed the presidency as a forum to prove his dealmaking prowess; that he sought flattery and believed too much of his own spin; that he dismissed substantive criticism as misinformed, politically motivated, ethically compromised, or otherwise cynical. He demonstrated a limited historical worldview: When praising the virtues of press releases over tweets—because the former are more elegant and lengthier—he sounded as if he himself had discovered that old form of presidential communication. He showed little interest in exploring, or even acknowledging, some of the contradictions and tensions in his record.
He’s both evil and stupid. There’s nothing covert about it.
He seemed to measure American politicians primarily by how they treated him. Even many of those elected officials who criticized him in public sang a different tune, he insisted, when the television cameras were off. Trump vented about governors who continually expressed during private meetings how impressed they were with his COVID policies (“I hope you can get the tapes,” Trump said) yet proceeded to “knock the hell out of me” in public: “So unfair.”
It occurs to me to wonder how this plays out in real life. I’ve known some vain self-centered people, as we all have, but I can’t say I’ve ever experienced anyone who carried on as grotesquely as Trump does as a matter of course. It’s just so odd. It’s as if he has the tiniest amount of awareness of other minds of anyone in human history – just no idea that everybody doesn’t love him the way he loves himself. Person woman man camera tv.
I’m surprised that Andrew Jackson is not one of the presidents considered worse than Trump. But this article is not surprising to anyone familiar with “John Barron”.
Yes, and I could help humanity by discovering a cheap, inexhaustible, clean source of energy.
Which do you think is more likely?
At the risk of causing a spike in demand for brain bleach, the world would have been a much better place had Trump been trained, as a young man, to develop sufficient spinal flexibility that he could have spent the rest of his life fellating himself. It would have saved all of us from his seeking this service from every other human being on Earth.
We could select politicians the way we select those other important decision-makers, jurors. An initial group selected by drawing random names out of a barrel could be refined further by popular vote after public discussion of views, philosophies etc. That way, we might avoid the self-nominated preening egotists who turn up so regularly as candidates in democratic elections.
If I was in the habit of hanging around courthouses’ buttonholing all and sundry and proclaiming my eagerness to ‘serve’ the populace at large in the capacity of a juror, I would probably finish up being arrested as a public nuisance. But politicians get away with it all the time.
OR we could try the Inca method. Set up an absolute dictator, give him or her everything asked for, but for one year only; followed by a public execution at the end of that year as the next dictator is being crowned or otherwise confirmed in office.
Perhaps worth a try. It would probably rid us of the self-nominating drongoes who routinely turn up.
Omar, that’s an idea, but I think we should do it like they hire professors – a search committee, with only qualified applicants being interviewed. Of course, that would require a set of qualifications more than just being born in the US 35 or more years earlier. I personally think that would be good; the idea that absolutely anyone can be president is actually horrifying, and for those who have never agreed with me in the past, I offer exhibit A: Donald J. Trump, POTUS 45. (I used to use the specter of my brother becoming president, but that only works for those who know him – a misogynist racist asshole who is a pathological liar and a braggart – wait, that sort of sounds familiar, right? Donald Trump without any money.)
A bipartisan hiring committee, a list of qualified candidates, and no piles of cash allowed to exchange hands. We might not get perfect presidents, but I’d like my chances better than now, when all we get are old white men (with the exception of one) who are either incompetent or ineffective. And we would retain the right to fire them if they went rogue.