Is it too early to begin assessing Donald John Trump’s place in U.S. presidential history?
I don’t believe it is. I believe historians already are hard at work seeking to get their arms around an individual who won an election by securing enough Electoral College votes to defeat a highly qualified, eminently more sophisticated opponent in 2016.
He then began the lying campaign from the get-go, saying out loud he won by a “historic landslide,” which of course was nothing of the sort.
It got a whole lot worse from there.
In many respects, the Trump history is still being forged. Its final form will come when all the prosecutors are done examining whether he committed crimes while inciting the assault on our government, or when he took classified documents from the White House to his Florida estate, or whether he is guilty of tax fraud in the operation of his company, or whether he bullied Georgia election officials to “find” votes that would swing that state into his favor during the 2020 election.
Then again, even those myriad probes are enough to include in Trump’s legacy as a twice-impeached president of the United States.
I keep asking myself what Trump will do with his post-presidential life. Will there ever be a Trump museum and presidential library? Will he ever devote himself to any noble cause, or will he remain as fixated on his own aggrandizement as he was before he became a politician? How will this individual ever be involved with events that include his predecessors or his successors?
It might take a future generation of historians to craft an image of Donald Trump’s time at the pinnacle of political power that matches reality. The beginning chapters, though, surely can be drafted.
No matter what the cultists who adhere to what passes as doctrine in the mind of Donald Trump might say, the first draft will be anything but glorious.