The Presidency of Donald Trump, edited by Julian Zelizer

The Presidency of Donald Trump: A First Historical Assessment Edited by Julian E. Zelizer
Princeton University Press, 2022

“My goal,” writes presidential historian Julian Zelizer opens his new book, The Presidency of Donald Trump: A First Historical Assessment, “has always been to let professional historians do what they do best: contextualize a political leader within the long-term institutional, organizational, social, and cultural forces shaping the nation.” He’s previously done this kind of volume for George W. Bush and Barack Obama, bringing together a gallery of historians, each of whom discusses a different aspect of the administration in question and attempts to bring to that discussion as much of the balance and historical perspective they can manage, given the immediacy of events.

The value of such an approach is obvious: it helps to move the discussion away from the sensationalism of the day’s headlines. The potential weakness of the approach is equally obvious: it presents an enormous temptation to elevate some exaggeratedly academic notion of balance over the actual truth – in other words, sometimes the sensationalism of the headlines is correct right down to the last letter. 

Hence the problem with this kind of volume when it’s dedicated to the first presidential term of Donald Trump. For those four years, virtually every rung and artery of American news media went to egregious lengths to undercut and over-contextualize Trump transgressions and lies and crimes that happened right in front of their eyes, in a stretch bid to both somehow be the first draft of history and also retain the coveted viewership-traffic of Trump’s followers. So readers fed up with that kind of toadying might naturally turn to something called The Presidency of Donald Trump: A First Historical Assessment hoping for the relief that only the long view of history can provide.

They’ll be mightily disappointed. And it’ll happen promptly, with Zelizer himself writing in his Introduction an absurd line like: “Whether or not Trump was self-conscious about his sensibility of the national political culture, he understood the illiberal traditions deeply embedded in the fabric of America.” Anyone who’s watched so much as five minutes of Trump footage knows that he wouldn’t recognize an illiberal tradition if it walked up to him with a name-tag, and Zelizer certainly knows this too. Trump understood no illiberal traditions – he was just himself a bellicose racist, sexist, and proto-fascist, and he happened to find an audience. Giving him credit for reading a zeitgeist, instead of the zeitgeist reading him, sets a tone for the rest of the book that teeters depressingly between the obsequious and the condescending. 

Also enraging. When Nicole Hemmer writes: “It quickly became clear that Trump would continue to be a source of misinformation throughout the pandemic and that his misinformation would have deadly consequences,” for instance, the reading eye naturally seizes on the repetition of “misinformation.” So Trump misunderstood things and passed along those misunderstandings, a kind of helpless vector? If instead he knew precisely what the truth of the pandemic was and deliberately lied about it – as we in fact know he knew and did – then “misinformation” starts to feel very similar to the kind of reflexive excuse-making that filled Trump’s first term. 

This kind of detestable double-speak fills the book. Jason Scott Smith, for instance, at the conclusion of his utterly hopeless chapter on infrastructure, reaches the deeply ridiculous line: “The border wall stands as the signature piece of infrastructure built during the Trump presidency, a powerful example of how rhetoric successfully transformed reality.” Likewise Gregory Downs writes, “Trump has tested the limits of presidential power in ways that few, if any, predecessors had done,” and you can only marvel at the weight that “if any” is carrying.

The book contains no discussion of Hurricane Dorian, which threatened the United States in September of 2019. Trump mistakenly said the storm would strike Alabama, and when his mistake was brought to his attention, he claimed that reality was wrong and he was right. He drew on a government weather map with a Sharpie in order to show a path the storm didn’t have, and he ordered his henchmen to extract from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) a false confirmation of his claim. These are objectively the actions of a moron and a thug. They go unmentioned.

The book contains no discussion of the summit Trump attended in Helsinki in 2018 at which he publicly ignored the expert assessments of all of his own intelligence agencies in order to defend Russian dictator Vladimir Putin from charges that Russia meddled in the 2016 US presidential election. “President Putin says it’s not Russia,” Trump said at the time. “I don’t see any reason why it would be.” The following day, he issued a statement saying he’d meant to say “wouldn’t” instead of “would” – a patently fraudulent claim that deserves the scorn of historians, not the silent treatment. 

On January 6, 2020, Trump orchestrated and incited a violent insurrection to overthrow the results of the election, aim a murderous mob at his own vice president, and install himself illegally in power. The coup attempt, by ten orders of magnitude the most important thing about the presidency of Donald Trump, is only dealt with in a broader discussion of the relevance of the impeachment process. 

“How does one write about a president who uttered words appealing to white nationalists in 2020 and incited a violent insurrection against the US Congress, but do so in the analytical language that one might use to describe tax policy?” Zelizer writes (the Congress was assembled to certify an election; the violence was therefore directed against the American people, not one elected body). 

“Is that even the correct way to evaluate the period?” he asks. There might be, but this sure as Hell isn’t it. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.