One of the consequences of moderate longevity is the chance to bear witness not only to history, which is always ongoing, but to witness events considered historic. For good and for bad, 9/11, for example, bad. The presidency of Donald Trump represents another one of those potentially historic moments: his election, for bad; and for good, his electoral defeat and eventually peaceful evacuation. He was, with little question, the most incompetent, the most corrupt, the most ignorant, the most divisive, simply the worst president in the history of the United States. Which is not to say that his was the worst presidency, it wasn’t—thank God, for his laziness and incompetence. (Compelling cases could be made for that of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush in my lifetime, but I would digress.) Rather, I hope and trust that he will be forgotten for the vacuous media phenomenon that he genuinely was, and that in time he will languish in relative chief executive obscurity with James Buchanan, heretofore historically recognized as the worst.
The historian Henry Adams once identified Ulysses S. Grant as the nadir of presidential performance and satirized him in the novel Democracy—though the true villain of that fiction was a senator, Ratcliffe, who stole an election! My point being, that we do not remember President Grant, but General Grant. His political reputation, slightly burnished by recent scholarship, remains superseded by his military and even his literary reputation. However bad historian Adams found Grant politically and administratively, Grant’s historic place is not lost, while his presidency has been largely forgotten. And more importantly, the Republic survived. And survives yet, in spite of the worst president I’m likely to see in my lifetime and in my long study of history. President Trump deserves to be forgotten; however, we should remember the lessons of his presidency.
