Historians warn about the dangers of enduring a transformative Donald Trump administration
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.
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.
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 (negative) 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 October 27, 2020, through January 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 Trump 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 January 6th 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. January 6th 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, January 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?
Labels: New York The New York Times, Roe v. Wade, Thomas B. Edsall
posted by Juliana L'Heureux | 5:43 AM
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