#presidential-legacy — Public Fediverse posts

Trump Allegedly Shifts Ambition from Presidential Peers to Imperial Figures

Donald Trump is reportedly aiming to be seen like Napoleon or Julius Caesar, not past US presidents. This means a focus on lasting power and changing history.

#TrumpNapoleon, #PresidentialLegacy, #HistoricalComparisons, #PoliticalAmbition, #USPolitics

https://newsletter.tf/trump-compares-himself-to-napoleon-not-us-presidents/

This new reported ambition is a shift from comparing himself to US presidents like Washington. Now, Trump is said to want to be seen alongside empire builders like Napoleon.

#TrumpNapoleon, #PresidentialLegacy, #HistoricalComparisons, #PoliticalAmbition, #USPolitics
https://newsletter.tf/trump-compares-himself-to-napoleon-not-us-presidents/

Presidential legacies aren’t fixed–they can always get worse

Joe Biden’s one term as president only ended four days ago, which may not be enough time to finish closing the financial books on his White House but is not too soon for news sites to run a flurry of think pieces that attempt to assess his legacy as the 46th occupant of that office.

The two words that come to mind for me are “tragic failure.” Biden did more with less in Congress than any other president I’ve seen since I started voting, and that part of his legacy is rising across the U.S. in the form of all of the public and private projects boosted by the funding and other incentives that he set into motion. But the man who sold his first campaign as “a battle for the soul of America” did not consign Donald Trump to political oblivion and instead saw voters return him to the White House, a worst-case outcome that seemed unimaginable four years ago.

Democratic Party strategists may never stop asking what might have happened if Biden had limited himself to a single term early enough to allow for an open competition for the next candidate.

(For a longer and well-reported version of this, see my friend Anthony Zurcher’s take for the BBC.)

Biden’s legacy could look brighter four years from now if programs like the Inflation Reduction Act survive Republican attempts to cancel them and if the other damage Trump does proves repairable. Or it could look even worse–and one thing 2024 reminded me of too well is that things can always get worse.

Either way, I’m prepared for my own assessment to change as it has for most of the presidents I’ve voted for or against.

George H.W. Bush is the leading example–33 years later, I don’t quite understand why my 21-year-old self was so eager to vote against him. Overseeing the peaceful end of the Cold War was a phenomenal achievement, and his personal decency stands out compared to much of his successor’s conduct. The country would have been under a second term for him.

On the other hand, in 1992 it was not obvious what a disaster Clarence Thomas would be on the Supreme Court–in terms of both brazen corruption and his frequent unwillingness to see abuse of government power as a risk.

As for Bill Clinton, his taking the U.S. from a budget deficit to a surplus seems even more remarkable after two-plus decades of other presidents failing to get close to that performance. But the phrase “Clintonian compromise” (see “don’t ask, don’t tell”) is not a compliment for good reasons, and his having an affair with an intern was a level of disgraceful personal conduct that would now be widely seen as grounds for resignation.

You have to wonder what might have happened if Clinton had done just that, allowing Al Gore to run as an incumbent in 2000.

Instead, we got George W. Bush. He seemed awful enough at the time just in terms of launching an unnecessary war with Iraq on false evidence and ignoring the growing financial-system fractures that led to the Great Recession, and Samuel Alito has since proven to be almost as bad of a Supreme Court pick as Thomas. But W.’s record also involves saving as many as 25 million lives around the world by distributing HIV/AIDS medication in impoverished countries.

And, well, we didn’t have Donald Trump as a yardstick then.

We did, however, get Barack Obama as one. No election in my life has made me happier than his landslide win in 2008, and no president in my life except maybe Reagan has been a finer speaker for the nation than Obama was over his two terms. And while Biden’s success at getting things through Congress underlines how Obama could have done more with the sizable majorities he had through 2010, abolishing the worst cruelties of the private health-insurance system with the Affordable Care Act remains a landmark accomplishment.

But as the leader of the Democratic Party, Obama was objectively disastrous, overseeing years of wipeouts in state elections that paved the way for gerrymandering abuses of power that continue today. And he has not gotten nearly enough criticism for his feckless reactions to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s brutality against his own people.

And then there is Trump. His first term was atrocious and his second seems to be off to an even worse start with such grandstanding exercises in vice signaling as an executive order claiming to rewrite the plain language of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship and another EO that cites scientifically-illiterate language to deny the existence of transgender and non-binary people. Unfortunately, we have almost four more years to see how low Trump can go.

But that will only be the end of the beginning of assessing Trump’s legacy. And that may not be a quick process.

As former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee wrote in his autobiography A Good Life about how he had come to see his friend John F. Kennedy after decades of revelations about the 35th president’s rampant infidelity and other character defects: “[T]he truth about Kennedy, like all truths, emerges slowly, revealing itself more to the next generation than the last, more to the last researcher than the first.”

#BarackObama #BenBradlee #BillClinton #DonaldTrump #GeorgeHWBush #GeorgeWBush #History #JFK #JoeBiden #news #politics #presidentialLegacy #RonaldReagan