The forgotten man

It's difficult to keep perspective on historical events while one is living through them.  The events of the present moment always seem to be of epic significance, the current personalities to be giants whose names will echo through the generations to come.  Every president, king, and prime minister in history probably seemed like an imposing figure during his term in power, even though the vast majority of them are hardly remembered today.

Our own era is no different.  People today assign to current events in general, and Donald Trump in particular, a historic significance wholly unwarranted by reality.  I've seen people make claims like "our country has never been so divided as it is today" -- a country which, within its relatively short history, has seen a civil war that left six hundred thousand dead and one-third of our territory in ruins.  Trump's abuses and attacks on freedom are held by some to be of historic magnitude -- in a nation which has seen slavery, the mass deportations and expropriations of the Indians, the Jim Crow era, the military draft, and the Vietnam war.

Many today seem to assume that Trump will be remembered as a major historical figure, for good or evil.  I just don't see it.  There's nothing about Trump or his deeds that will make him particularly memorable or important in the long term.

People remember presidents who achieved things.  Washington won our national independence.  Jefferson played a huge role in creating the institutions and norms that make the US what it is.  Lincoln crushed the Confederate insurrection and ended slavery.  FDR ended the Great Depression, won World War II, and built the beginnings of the (still threadbare by modern standards) social safety net we have now.

Trump has not achieved anything comparable.  His sole major positive accomplishment was Operation Warp Speed in 2020, to accelerate the development of covid vaccines; while praiseworthy, this is hardly comparable to ending slavery or crushing Japanese imperialism.  Trump has mostly created problems, not solved them.  He has damaged trade and the economy with his tariffs, defunded science, put ignorant anti-vaccine quacks in charge of the federal health system, consolidated political polarization and the dominance of party loyalty, prioritized his personal vendettas over policy, attacked democracy by supporting gerrymandering, polluted our political discourse with gross, toddler-level vulgarity, antagonized our fellow democracies by threatening and picking fights with them, undermined NATO, weakened US support for Ukraine and (more recently) for Israel, emboldened dictators by cozying up to them, and on and on.

His great achievement was supposed to be dealing with illegal migrants.  A solid majority of Americans want mass deportation of all illegals, not just the criminals, but ICE's flagrant violations of due process and core Constitutional rights, its thuggishness and cruelty, and its inclusion of US citizens in its dragnets have rightly turned the public against it; the real solution to this problem will have to wait for another president who can handle it properly.  He had another chance to achieve greatness by attacking the Iranian theocracy and helping the Iranian people overthrow it, but instead seems to be repeating the classic error of US Middle East policy -- stopping military action before the job is done, thus allowing the enemy to recover, re-arm, and (in this case) re-assert its tyranny over Iran.

Trump can't even serve as an inspirational figure.  Everything about him is small -- petty, mean, spiteful, squalid, boastful, and vulgar.  There is no greatness in him, not even great evil.  He cannot even claim authorship of some epic crime to match, say, the Trail of Tears.

On some level he seems to be aware of this.  Surely knowing his remaining time is short, he is frantically trying to slap his name on important buildings and his face on commemorative coins, a $250 bill, and anything else he can think of.  He is obsessed with defacing DC with monumental kitsch like his arch and ballroom.  But leaders are not actually remembered for such things.

o o o o o

Time has a way of filtering out the chaff and preserving what is truly important.  Look at history.  What is remembered today?

Pretty much everybody today remembers the name of Galileo and knows something about his great achievements.  No one except specialist historians knows the name of the pope who persecuted him.  Everyone knows who Darwin was, but almost nobody could tell you who was the king or prime minister of Britain in Darwin's time.  Chaucer, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley are better known today than the rulers under which they lived.

Two or three centuries in the future, who will be remembered from our own time?  Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins, almost certainly.  Jane Goodall and Steven Pinker, quite likely.  JK Rowling and Guillermo del Toro, possibly.  Maybe even Taylor Swift.  Trump will be forgotten, except among the kind of people who actually, seriously know who James K Polk and Millard Fillmore were.

What we remember is the great achievers.  Rather rarely, political leaders rank among them. We also remember the great criminals.  Rather more often, political leaders rank among those.  Trump will not, in either case.