The Ahistorical Donald Trump
If I got into movie reviewing late in life after achieving substantial success in other fields and angrily began insisting that I was the greatest film critic of all time, better than Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Andrew Sarris and James Agee I have a pretty good idea what the response would be.
My professional colleagues, readers and bosses would be quick to inform me that I had wildly overrated my talent, abilities and place in the pantheon of professional film critics.
My angry assertion of all-time greatness would also be seen as profoundly disrespectful to my fellow critics, the critics that came before me and the art of film criticism as a whole. I would rightfully be seen as an arrogant idiot, a crazed narcissist.
The same would of course hold true if I picked up a guitar and starting writing songs in my late sixties and, upon releasing my first album, proclaimed myself the greatest musician of all time.
The universe would tell me to go fuck myself if I thought I was any damn good at all, let alone a greater artist than The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson or Joni Mitchell.
If I insisted my raggedy-ass chords and off-key crooning made me better than Django Reinhart, musicians with actual talent would rightly think I was a colossal piece of shit with no respect for either my fellow musicians or music as an art form and tradition.
Yet when Donald Trump decided to get into politics in his late sixties by running for President in 2016 and asserted, as he often did, that despite his complete lack of experience or relevant expertise he was not only a good president but literally the best president American has ever had his obnoxious assertions of all-time greatness were invariably met with glee by cultists taking to social media to aggressively agree with Trump’s assessment of himself as the Michael Jordan of the American presidency.
Trump’s claim to being the greatest president in American history was not, of course, rooted in an extensive, objective study of the American presidency through the centuries but rather in Trump’s narcissism and ego.
Trump was our most ahistorical of Presidents. He lived forever in the present-tense, never looking back or wasting a moment on sober self-reflection.
Trump is a showman and an entertainer rather than a politician so his claims of all-time greatness were performative in the same way a boxer or wrestler or rappers’ boasts would be. They’re shtick on some level, playing into Trump’s brash persona as a relentless, tireless self-promoter as well as his weakness for breathless hyperbole but they’re both more and less than that.
Trump repeated the claim that he was the greatest president of all time so often, and so insistently, that it damn near forced people to ask and answer the ridiculous question, “Is Donald Trump objectively a better president than George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and FDR?”
One of Trump’s trademark rhetorical tics is to repeat a flattering fiction so often that it acquires an air of truth no matter how transparently ridiculous and false it might be.
There was also always an aspirational quality to Trump’s insistence of all-time greatness, a sense that he thought that he was doing such an amazing job in the moment that when historians eventually analyzed his presidency some time in the distant future, they would have no choice but to concede that it soared above all others.
It’s foolish to underestimate Trump or the unsettling devotion of his followers so I would honestly not be surprised if he pulled a Grover Cleveland and was re-elected in 2024.
But for the moment at least Trump is thankfully an ex-President. His presidency is no longer a work in progress. It’s over. Thank God above it’s over.
Trump’s presidency is now history. Something tells me that history and historians will be much less kind to Trump’s stubborn conviction that he belongs at number one on the list of all-time great presidents than the insanely indulgent present.
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