The Eternal Sunshine of Trump's Spotless Mind
There's a reason Donald Trump hates history.
By the time the president completes his typical Sunday rage-tweeting, it is often difficult to pick what was risible and separate it from what was laughable, especially since, in the Venn diagram of Trumpism, those circles are converging. But last Sundayās show featured a claim that should be remembered precisely because it is so easy to forget. Reacting to a story about his pandemic work habits that appeared in the New York Timesāa newspaper he has made a public display of saying he does not read but to which he responds with suspicious frequencyāTrump tweeted:
Never mind the āpeople sayā device, or the fact that the only thing more unpalatable to Trumpās critics than him binge-watching Fox & Friends might be what he would actually do if he spent more time in the office.
The real problem is his rush to the superlative: He is eager to measure his actions in historical terms. (The least plausible of Trumpās claims are often made with the most rhetorical force. See āgenius, stable.ā) The issue is not the fabulism itselfātall tales are part of politics, even if Trump tells, to use his dialect, the tallest everābut rather the nature of it. Trump operates outside of time in an argot that dissolves the shared memories on which a republic depends. He lives in an eternal now. This may be fine for individualsāor at least for adolescents who have not yet grasped the fleeting nature of manās existence. But it is an insufficient foundation for constitutional government.
The illustrations are legion. In late December, after Christianity Today endorsed Trumpās impeachment and removal, he tweeted that āno President has ever done what I have done for Evangelicals, or religion itself!ā Two of his recent predecessors, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, actually are evangelicals. Two of his other predecessors, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, authored, respectively, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and the text that became the First Amendment.
Trumpās presidential bearing, he says, ranks second in history only to Abraham Lincoln. Not George Washington?āNo president has been able to do anything likeā what Trump claims to have done for African-Americans. Not Lincoln?
āNo president accomplished more in the first 90 days,ā Trump said as he approached the 100-day mark of his administration. Not Franklin Roosevelt, whose blizzard of efforts to combat the Great Depression is the reason presidents are still measured on that timeline?
Trumpās madcap, year-end tweeting last December included sharing a photo montage calling him āthe best president of all timeā as well as a claim that āno president will ever be as great as President Trump is today.ā Trumpās campaign manager, Brad Parscale, appeared in an advertisement asserting that Trump had āachieved more during his time in office than any president in history.ā This feat, which entailed outpacing not only every prior president but also every future one, did not even require a full term.
People can reasonably disagree about exactly how much Donald Trump has achieved. But the notion that it is so much not only that no previous president has matched it but also that no future president possibly could exceed it is absurd. Not even recent history is spared this ahistorical treatment. Kayleigh McEnany, then the campaign spokeswoman and now performing the same function on the public dime as White House press secretary, suggested that Trump won the 2016 Republican nomination unopposed.
In Trumpās America, three years is a long time agoālong enough, apparently, to obliterate memories of the carnival of Republican challengers to Trump who slipped into his shadow exactly because there were so many of them. When Nathaniel Hawthorneās short story āEarthās Holocaustā imagined a world stripped of memory, the first things on the fire were āyesterdayās newspapers.ā
Trump is not alone in living in the present without reference to the past. Democrats frequently invoke the adjective āunprecedentedā to describe actions by Trump that probably do have historical antecedents. His harshest critics have loosely thrown around words like āfascismā that have real historical meanings that overuse will erode.
Trump is, however, the only one who is president of the United States.
Historical awareness matters because a nation ādedicated to a proposition,ā as Lincoln said, also needs the āmystic chords of memoryā to bind it. The proposition to which Lincoln referred was the Declaration of Independenceās assertion of a āself-evident truthā that āall men are created equal.ā Yet while that self-evidence may animate philosopher-poets like Jefferson, even a nation based on an intellectual proposition demands more to give it life.
One reason is that the people participating in the anonymity of mass politics tend not to utilize pure reason. Madison recognized that fact in Federalist 49, which argued that tradition rather than philosophical assent would be necessary to cement the new Constitution in citizensā minds. The Constitution, he wrote, would need āthat veneration which time bestows on every thing, and without which perhaps the wisest and freest governments would not possess the requisite stability.ā
Similarly, in his Farewell Address, Washington advised the country to unify as Americans rather than as partisans of their respective states not only because they shared principles with each other but also because they shared memories of fighting for them. Even Lincoln, an axiomatic thinker who applied Euclid to politics, invoked āevery battlefield and patriot graveā in pleading with the union to stay together. His characterization of these āchords of memoryā as āmysticā suggests Lincolnās acknowledgement that reason alone was an inadequate foundation for politics.
It is significant that Americaās Founders appealed to philosophy when in revolutionary mode, but to historical experience when governing. John Dickinson, for example, said at the constitutional convention that āexperience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.ā The Federalist is rife with historical references ranging from ancient Greece to medieval Europe.
History served two purposes for the founding generation. One was to seal popular commitment to the country and its principles with the emotional attachment of shared memories. The secondāwhich Trumpās disregard for the past also underminesāwas that history was a better guide to governing than abstract philosophy alone. Philosophers make mistakes. So, of course, do statesmen, but history provides a better classroom for statecraft.
The issue is the burden of trust we place on abstract reason or the intelligence of any one statesman at any one time. Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw the risk. Americans, he wrote, comprised the nation least likely to study the French philosopher RenĆ© Descartesāfamous for concluding that āI think, therefore I amāābut likeliest to follow his individualist precepts. What Tocqueville called āthe philosophical method of the Americansā included utilizing ātradition only as informationā rather than as authority.
Yet reverence for customāwhich evolves, but slowlyāis a compelling alternative to the impulses of the moment that so often entrap Trump, while a shared historical memory is likelier than philosophical argumentation to unite a divided country and provide a stable link to the past and future.
Lincoln understood the importance of this intergenerational authority. In his 1860 Cooper Union Address, he proved that the founding generation had opposed slavery. That did not mean we were bound to whatever they had done. Significantly, however, Lincoln counseled a spirit of deference to historical forebears: āWhat I do say is, that if we would supplant the opinions and policy of our fathers in any case, we should do so upon evidence so conclusive, and argument so clear, that even their great authority, fairly considered and weighed, cannot standā¦.ā
In scripted remarks, Trump has paid lip-service to this general idea. In appointing judges, has appealed to the authority of the Founders. In State of the Union addresses, he has evoked national memories ranging from D-Day to the civil rights movement. But in daily practice and spontaneous speechāwhen he is unshackled to words written for him by othersāhe lives in a never-ending now devoid of any context beyond himself.
In a sense, Trumpās much-mocked bungling of history is less troubling than his wholesale disregard for it. Knowing that they sit where Washington and Lincoln did might induce humility in presidents. It might also encourage arrogance. But either is preferable to treating the office as though it had been created for, and unoccupied until, Donald Trump.
