From the Magazine
October 2017 Issue

How Will History Judge the Trump Presidency?

Donald Trump may be a radical break from the past, but history will have its say. Six scholars of the presidency—A. Scott Berg, Robert Dallek, Jon Meacham, Edmund Morris, Stacy Schiff, and Garry Wills—put the current occupant of the Oval Office into perspective.
Illustration by Barry Blitt.

The Strength of Humility

By Jon Meacham

As interviews go, it wasn’t exactly a model of clarity. In May 2016, on assignment for Time, I called on the putative Republican presidential nominee at Trump Tower to talk about presidential literacy—the core knowledge, including a sense of the history of the office itself, that our greatest presidents have brought to the highest levels. Trump’s mind, however, was fixated on the present and on himself, chiefly polls and the number of Republican rivals he’d knocked off.

We did talk about his criticism of NATO, which he said he had given little thought to before being asked a question by Wolf Blitzer on CNN. His answer—that the alliance was obsolete and that other nations weren’t pulling their financial weight—had, he admitted to me, come “off the cuff,” adding, “I’m an intuitive person. I didn’t read books on NATO—you do.” (In an interview with Megyn Kelly last year, Trump professed to being Too Busy To Bother With Whole Books, insisting, “I read passages. I read areas. I’ll read chapters.”)

Presidents don’t need to be professors, but experience tells us that reading the odd book or two (or even three—a man can hope) can make a significant difference in the Oval Office. Thucydides said he wrote his histories for “those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will at some time or other and in much the same ways be repeated in the future.” If the Greek historian was right—and he usually was—Trump’s historical illiteracy may wind up being as costly as John F. Kennedy’s grasp of the past was beneficial.

When the news came on the morning of Tuesday, October 16, 1962, Kennedy’s first reaction was personal. “He can’t do this to me,” the president said as he was briefed, in bed, about Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba—an act that put nuclear weapons less than 15 minutes away from Washington, D.C. In those first moments of one of the most perilous weeks in human history, Kennedy called his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy with the news. “Oh shit. Shit! Shit!,” R.F.K. said, when he saw the photos of the missiles.

The options, as the Kennedys saw them? A naval blockade. An invasion. Immediate air strikes to try to take out the weapons, though no one knew whether they were armed with warheads (they were), how many of them the U.S. could actually hit, or whether the Soviets would immediately strike back. No choice was good; all risked escalation.

Kennedy’s successful resolution of the crisis was rooted in two things that, to put it charitably, are not notable Trump traits: humility and history. Eighteen months earlier, J.F.K. had authorized an ill-conceived invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. He was horrified by his failure to see the flaws in the planning. “How could I have been so stupid?” he asked in the aftermath. To make sense of the botched incursion, he had turned to his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, a man whom he’d derided during the 1960 campaign but who suddenly proved to be a source of insight.

Eisenhower asked a crucial question. “Mr. President, before you approved this plan [for the invasion], did you have everybody in front of you debating the thing so you got the pros and cons yourself and then made the decision, or did you see these people one at a time?”

Kennedy’s answer was not reassuring. “Well, I did have a meeting. . . . I just approved a plan that had been recommended by the CIA and by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I just took their advice.” He would never do that again: decisions required care and questioning, and Kennedy was humble enough to learn from his mistakes. The haphazard planning of the Bay of Pigs would give way, in October 1962, to a crisis-management apparatus known as ExComm, the executive committee of the National Security Council. As the Missile Crisis unfolded, Kennedy resisted being seduced by any one faction of advisers. He knew that each came to the table with preconceptions and interests of his own. Only the two Kennedys—the president and the attorney general—had the ability to see the whole. Would Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, rise to such an occasion?

To resolve the standoff, Kennedy used history to augment his sense of the human nature of his foes in Moscow. The author of two books—Why England Slept, about appeasement, and Profiles in Courage, about valor—he was a man of the urgent present, intrigued by the past. History guided him hour by hour through the crisis. In September 1960, Kennedy had written a review of a book by the British historian and strategist B. H. Liddell Hart, Deterrent or Defense, and highlighted this observation of Hart’s: “Keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save face. Put yourself in his shoes—so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil—nothing is so self-blinding.”

During those fateful 13 days of stalemate, Kennedy took his time, considered things from Khrushchev’s point of view, and resisted rushing to judgment. The stakes were existential: estimated casualties from a U.S.-Soviet nuclear conflict ranged as high as a hundred million Americans. J.F.K. believed the existence of the nation was in the balance, and a book he had read was very much on his mind: Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, which argued that the European powers had blundered into World War I through a series of misjudgments. (Scholars now debate this thesis, but it was the perspective Kennedy held at the time.) “The great danger and risk in all of this,” Kennedy told his aides, “is a miscalculation—a mistake in judgment.” To J.F.K., history taught that pride, emotion, and hurry were the enemies of the good. A crisis was not a time for a trigger—or a Twitter—finger. “If anybody is around to write after this, they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace and every effort to give our adversary room to move,” J.F.K. said at the time. “I am not going to push the Russians an inch beyond what is necessary.” In the end, reason trumped passion, and a deal—the removal of missiles in Cuba in exchange for the removal of missiles in Turkey—ended the crisis peaceably.

It could have easily gone the other way if not for J.F.K.’s sense of history, his ability to learn, and his capacity for empathy. This isn’t sentimental; it’s what happened, and Kennedy’s current successor has demonstrated precisely none of those qualities. Though the reference would likely be lost on him, Donald Trump is like Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the girl who grew up on a lonely island and, on seeing a band of travelers, cries out, “O brave new world / That has such people in’t!” Her father’s sly, even Kennedy-esque reply: “ ‘Tis new to thee.”

Unfortunately, just about everything in terms of American and global history seems new to Trump. From his confounding man crush on Vladimir Putin to his nuclear saber-rattling with North Korea, Trump has created more fear than hope—and hope is an essential element of presidential leadership. He comes to the office warped by self-absorption, conceit, and a narcissistic certitude that he is always right while the rest of the world, unless it is busy flattering him, is wrong, even hostile. Without historical context, without humility, without empathy, he’s what the author of the book of Proverbs had in mind when he warned that pride goeth before a fall.

Illustration by Edward Sorel.

Fever Swamp

By Stacy Schiff

When it comes to dismissing science as false or the news as fake, when it comes to torching history, America has not traditionally led the world. (Who was it who said, “The truth is the greatest enemy of the state”? Ah, yes: Goebbels.) When it comes to persecution complexes and conspiracy theories, however, our current president taps into a rich, rancid homegrown tradition. To borrow his phrasing, a lot of people have been saying that bad things were happening out there since before America was even America. The Puritans’ howling wilderness included a shadowy fever swamp from the start.

In establishing “a city on a hill,” New England’s settlers implied that others occupied a lower altitude. And by designating themselves “a flock in the wilderness,” they suggested they had an eye out already for predators, lurking just beyond their spiritual hedge. There were plenty to choose from: Native Americans, nefarious Catholics, and interfering British officials were all understood to be plotting against the New England saints. One Massachusetts minister lumped together Louis XIV, his Catholic confederates, and a sulfurous Devil, at least two of whom were nowhere in the neighborhood. The intrigues of those heathen adversaries moreover qualified as badges of honor. They proved the settlers’ exceptional mission. “Where will the Devil show most malice,” asked a celebrated Puritan minister, “but where he is hated and hateth most?” (Before another war waged in part to wipe out illusory weapons of mass destruction, George W. Bush suggested a corollary: “The more you love freedom, the more likely it is you’ll be attacked.”)

New England heard fervent warnings against those menaces weekly. Seeing is believing; at a certain point believing can also be seeing. Over a series of moonless nights in 1692, the farmers of Gloucester, Massachusetts, reported scuffling near the town garrison. It seemed that a dozen foreigners had emerged from a swamp to terrorize the town. The spectral visitors dressed nattily, alternately as French and Indians. They carried guns in their hands and guns on their backs. Sometimes they spoke English, sometimes a foreign tongue. Impervious to gunfire, they dissolved into bushes. They left no footprints. The panicked town called in a unit of 60 militiamen; they fired round after round but could not manage to land a single shot on the invisible invaders. (They seem to have evaporated later that summer, around the time witchcraft accusations exploded 20 miles away, in Salem.)

Conspiracy has its pleasures. There is a bravado to it, without which it deflates into opera buffa. It is exhilarating on what seems to be a rational level; the pulse quickens as the pieces click into place. As the New England ministers knew, intrigue suggests powers of higher discernment. It confers an air of self-importance. As it did in Gloucester, conspiracy draws a community close: the word literally denotes a whispering together. Perhaps best of all, one alleged perfidy diverts us from another. Conspiracy invites the arsonists to shout fire. It turns mobs into martyrs.

Eighty-seven years before the American Revolution, the New England elite lost their patience with overreaching British officials. They wailed that their royal governor intended to deliver them to a foreign power. He colluded with the Native Americans. He distributed Catholic propaganda. Privately, they alleged, Governor Edmund Andros sneered that the Puritans “were a people fit only to be rooted off the face of the earth.” To counter his “deep design,” Boston’s civic leaders staged a coup. They were hardly the first to pass off self-interest as self-preservation, persecution as piety. They warned that the French and Irish were en route to Boston to destroy it; that Andros had bribed the Native Americans with jewelry; that together those fiends intended to butcher the settlers. An Andros associate wrote off the charges as hysterical, “so apparently false and strangely ridiculous” that no one could conceivably believe them. He was wrong. The coup’s leaders had a great deal invested in that narrative. They were a familiar breed of thin-skinned men, the kind who—as John Adams would later say of Elbridge Gerry—“would risk great things to secure small ones.”

Setting the stage for the American Revolution, Samuel Adams took a page from that playbook when in 1768 he linked a later Massachusetts governor to a so-called Papist plot. Adams had not a shred of evidence. But he knew a thing or two about stalking horses; Jesuits would be said to prowl menacingly through much of the American 19th century. Ultimately the Catholic specter gave way to the Communist one: between the Puritan hedge and Trump’s Mexican wall came networks of subversives, the watchtowers of the nation, and the reckless cruelty of Joseph McCarthy. The fevered imaginings remained the same. Each group served its purpose, threatening, as an eminent cleric warned in an 1835 anti-Catholic tirade, to “decide our elections, perplex our policy, inflame and divide the nation, break the bond of our union and throw down our free institutions.” Always a convenient demon can be found to plot against America, to remind a chosen few that they are the elect, that our way of life is in peril, that time is short, that we are precariously poised between a sun-dappled past and an apocalyptic future. The language has evolved very little since the 17th century. The judge sentencing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage in 1951 termed theirs “a diabolical conspiracy to destroy a God-fearing nation.” That fiery 1835 cleric could have been selling this administration’s Muslim ban.

By definition the contest is stark and absolute. The insinuations alone are vague. “There’s something going on that’s really, really bad,” our current president has reminded us. “A lot of people are saying,” he hints, broadly, vaguely. The fearmongering works, as does the cheap call to arms, Patriotism Lite. To connect Ted Cruz’s father with J.F.K.’s murder, to invent Kenyan births or Trump Tower wiretaps, allow you to avenge and aggrandize yourself while defrauding the truth. It divorces the rest of us from reality. It dangerously obscures the evidence at hand. It moves the club from the hand of the slogan-spewing white supremacist to that of the peaceful protester. Reason takes a holiday; in rush the phantom Frenchmen. Conveniently, a fake enemy can’t return fire. Better yet, he will continue to wage battle only so long as he is needed, after which he disappears into thin air.

In 1964, the liberal historian Richard Hofstadter observed not only that the conspiracist assumes the qualities of those he derides but that the enemy becomes in many ways a projection of himself. Nothing could be more true today for a commander in chief who has made a career of averting creditors, unsubstantiated claims, and the truth. Emitting clouds of squid ink all around, he sees only scammers, hoaxers, fakers, liars, frauds, obstructionists, and conspiracy theorists. In each case the road leads inexorably back to him. The alleged Comey tapes mutate into Oval Office wiretaps. A reliable network issues fake news. Suddenly Trump is the hunted and Obama the Russian colluder. To address a clear case of campaign tampering he offers a phony Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. In the president’s perverse staging he gets to have it both ways. He is our invincible leader. He is at the same time our victim in chief.

Having won a victory “the likes of which the world has never seen before,” Donald Trump seems to believe himself exempt from history. He may prefer to skip, snarl at, scorn, and scramble the past, to occupy a sanitized present, scrubbed of context and consequence. You only get to hold the truth hostage for so long, however. After a while it turns out that McCarthy was wrong about those 205 State Department-infiltrating Communists, that Johnson invented the “unprovoked attack” in the Gulf of Tonkin, that Richard Nixon was a crook, and that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were as real as the Gloucester Frenchmen. Like the rest of us, facts tend to look more like themselves as they age. That truth is lost on our president, borne back ceaselessly to himself. There is a catch, though, and—for some of us—a consolation. One day, this cruel, reckless man will also be history.

Illustration by Ross MacDonald.

Powers of Separation

By Robert Dallek

We are well into the first year of Donald Trump’s term, and the country remains badly divided. An unprecedented low of only 35 percent of the electorate approve of his presidential performance. About 60 percent of those surveyed believe he is falling short of how a new president should behave. Worse yet, unlike earlier presidents, he doesn’t seem to care about winning majority support or may be under the illusion that it already exists. He seems to have talked himself into believing that three to five million illegal votes gave Hillary Clinton a popular majority.

When we consider how other modern presidents began their administrations, the current divide is particularly shocking. Polling data going back to the 1930s reveal a vastly different landscape. Every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt—even those who won the office by the narrowest of margins, as John F. Kennedy did in 1960 and George W. Bush did in 2000—have enjoyed general, if not always strong, approval at the start of their terms. Three months into the Kennedy administration, for example—and even after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba—J.F.K.’s approval rating stood at an impressive 83 percent. “The worse I do, the more popular I get,” he observed.

No president was more successful in winning public backing than Franklin D. Roosevelt. When he took office, in 1933, he inherited a country in dire economic straits. Unemployment stood at roughly 25 percent of the workforce. Poor prospects for an upturn in hiring along with the near collapse of the country’s banking system combined to raise fears of a total smashup of America’s capitalist system.

If these miseries—dividing the country between haves and have-nots—were not enough, there was also a cultural rift between rural fundamentalist America and multi-ethnic urban modernists. There were divisions over Prohibition, immigration, and evolution. The famous 1925 Scopes trial, in Dayton, Tennessee, pitting Chicago’s Clarence Darrow against Nebraska’s William Jennings Bryan, and the split at the 1924 Democratic convention that forced the party into 103 ballots to choose a nominee, remained very much a part of the national political memory in 1933.

But Roosevelt, unlike Trump, who defends neo-Nazis and white supremacists, reached across cultural and political lines to remind Americans that they were one nation joined in a common struggle—first to save the country’s economic and political institutions from collapse, and then to save liberal democracy from assault by Germany and Japan.

Roosevelt’s ability to bring the country together was built, first of all, on a series of New Deal measures—Social Security, unemployment insurance, guarantees to bank accounts, rural electrification, minimum wages and maximum hours, and conservation of natural resources—that went a long way toward humanizing America’s industrial system. These measures did not themselves bring an end to the Depression—industrial mobilization for global war accomplished that—but his administration’s reputation for easing the perils of economic collapse made F.D.R. and the New Deal enduringly popular. In addition, through his appointments to high office Roosevelt brought previously marginalized groups—Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Catholics, Jews—into the mainstream of the country’s life. African-Americans never received the same sort of overt support from F.D.R.—Eleanor was another story—and he courted southern segregationists. An executive order by Roosevelt prohibited racial discrimination by private businesses with government contracts, but it was Harry Truman who de-segregated the armed forces. American blacks did benefit from the New Deal’s economic and social measures and abandoned the Republican Party for the Democrats.

Nothing was harder for Roosevelt to overcome than the division between isolationists (a majority in terms of public opinion) and internationalists convinced that the United States could not turn its back on mounting turmoil overseas. The situation was most challenging in the two years after the outbreak of World War II, in September 1939. Mindful that major involvements in foreign affairs that cost blood and treasure had to rest on a durable national consensus, Roosevelt skillfully led the country step-by-step toward participation in the conflict until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, secured national determination to fight the Axis powers.

Nothing demonstrates Roosevelt’s effectiveness as a national unifier better than his four successful presidential campaigns. Without the war, there would surely have been no third or fourth terms. Nonetheless, it was majority support for his policies, both domestic and foreign, that made the difference in giving him four election victories. This is not to suggest that he had few (or ineffective) political opponents. National demagogues on the left such as Huey Long and Dr. Francis Townsend enjoyed substantial support from millions of Americans. The American Liberty League, on the right, attacked Roosevelt’s alleged abuse of traditional institutions, and was a formidable opponent. But his deft appeal to all segments of the country ensured his hold on power. His public pronouncements using evocative language endeared him to millions of Americans.

Eight months into Donald Trump’s presidency, it is impossible to imagine him unifying the country behind his leadership. To be sure, the issues today are vastly different from those Roosevelt faced. Indeed, the calmer waters Trump sails on as president—calmer by any measure, for all the challenges—should make the task easier. He inherited an economy that was in decent shape and a country that faced no existential threats from the outside, whatever the ongoing dangers posed by terrorism. Instead, Trump offers a master class in how not to be president. He has deepened skepticism about his suitability for the highest office by raging at opponents, decrying the media as enemies of the American people, dismissing as disloyal those who are in any way critical, and offering distorted versions of reality on virtually every subject, starting with the claim that the first 100 days of his administration were the most successful in history. His ignorant and offhand approach to foreign policy—first and foremost, his seemingly deliberate attempts to weaken and even threaten NATO—has dismayed America’s allies and emboldened its enemies. A special counsel has been appointed to investigate Russian interference in the election, reminding americans of the process that drove richard nixon from office.

Trump would do well to study Roosevelt and, surely, lincoln, along with other presidents, to grasp how they sought (or failed to seek) broad popular unity. It says something fundamental about the man that no one imagines he would actually do this. The problem is not just that it would take work. The larger problem is that he has no interest in the goal.

Illustration by Darrow.

Ghosts Writing

By Edmund Morris

Our 26th and 40th presidents have long been absent from the national scene, but they retain a lively (if that’s the right word) interest in current affairs. Their biographer, Edmund Morris, interviewed them recently on the subject of Donald Trump and found them willing to forgo the usual discretion of comment that obtains between former commanders in chief. The discussion took place in Mr. Morris’s study, where both men have long been a ghostly presence. Their words, including expletives, are reproduced verbatim from cards kept on file in this repository. The questions are Mr. Morris’s.

EDMUND MORRIS: I’m not sure what honorific to use when addressing you both. “Messrs. Presidents” is kind of hard to pronounce.

RONALD REAGAN: My oldest friends still call me “Dutch.”

E.M.: That sounds overfamiliar, sir, like calling Mr. Roosevelt “Teddy.”

THEODORE ROOSEVELT: (Stiffly.) An outrageous impertinence.

E.M.: I was wondering what you each think of our current leader.

R.R.: Well—

T.R.: He is an ill-constitutioned creature, oily, with bristles sticking up through the oil.

E.M.: Gosh, I’d forgotten how inhibited political language was in your day.

T.R.: The White House is a bully pulpit.

E.M.: Can you describe Mr. Trump in words that at least acknowledge his good intentions?

T.R.: Certainly. A well-meaning, pinheaded, anarchistic crank, of hirsute and slab-sided aspect.

E.M.: Not as hirsute as you might think. That coiffure is—

T.R.: Unqualifiedly and atrociously false.

E.M.: I was going to say, an example of his redistributive policies.

R.R.: Never dyed mine.

E.M.: (to T.R.): From the moral standpoint of your own era, how do you view Mr. Trump?

T.R.: Of course, it is a little difficult for me to give you an exact historic judgment about a man whom I so thoroughly dislike and despise.

E.M.: Yes, but please try.

T.R.: I think that he is a man without any real principle; that though he is posing as a radical, he is in reality no more a radical than he is a conservative.

R.R.: Well—

T.R.: He preaches the gospel of envy, hate, and unrest. His actions so far go to show that he is entirely willing to sanction any mob violence if he thinks that for the moment votes are to be gained by so doing.

R.R.: Now, wait a minute—

T.R.: He of course cares nothing whatever as to the results to the nation, in the long run, of embroiling it with any foreign power, if for the moment he can gain any applause by so doing.

E.M.: (to R.R.): Maybe he’s just out of his depth?

R.R.: (Sympathetically.) It’s hard, when you’re up to your armpits in alligators, to remember that you came here to drain the swamp.

E.M.: What about his record so far in domestic affairs?

T.R.: I am heartsick over the delay, the blundering, the fatuous and complacent inefficiency, and the effort to substitute glittering rhetoric for action.

E.M.: (to R.R.): As somebody who got his first standing ovation at 17—

R.R.: (Chuckling.) It was heady wine.

E.M.: —please give me your opinion of Mr. Trump as an orator.

R.R.: He’s no embarrassment to me.

E.M.: Do you think his populism is sincere?

T.R.: It is mere empty beating of gongs.

R.R.: You’d be surprised by how much being a good actor pays off.

E.M.: Are you agreeing with Mr. Roosevelt? That Mr. Trump is nothing but a performer?

R.R.: (Annoyed at the implication.) Forgive me if I say, Hell, no.

E.M.: His core supporters believe everything he says about the eastern establishment.

T.R.: A taste for learning and cultivated friends, and a tendency to bathe frequently, cause in them the deepest suspicion.

E.M.: Well, what about their polar opposites, the young urban liberals who voted last year for Bernie Sanders?

R.R.: A bunch of no-good lousy bums.

T.R.: A small bunch of shrill eunuchs.

R.R.: It’s not that liberals aren’t smart. It’s just that so much of what they know isn’t so.

E.M.: Mr. Trump seems sincere in promising to make America great again.

R.R.: As the Russians say, Doveryai, no proveryai. “Trust, but verify.”

E.M.: Which brings up the subject of his foreign policy.

R.R.: Well—

T.R.: (Laughing.) You can’t nail marmalade against a wall.

E.M.: If I may borrow one of your coinages, sir, he doesn’t pussyfoot around our European allies. Did you see the video of him elbowing aside the prime minister of Montenegro?

T.R.: It always pays for a nation to be a gentleman.

E.M.: I don’t think that last word is understood anymore. (Both former presidents sigh.) What about Mr. Trump’s ban on travelers from certain parts of the world?

R.R.: A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.

T.R.: We should aim to exclude absolutely not only all persons who are known to be believers in anarchistic principles—

E.M.: He refers to them as Muslims.

T.R.: —but also all persons who are of a low moral tendency or of unsavory reputations.

E.M.: Mexicans, Mr. Trump would say.

T.R.: Quite right. (He dislikes being interrupted.) And, please, let this now be as much of a monologue as possible.

E.M.: Excuse me.

T.R.: We should require a more thorough system of inspection abroad and a more rigid system of examination at our immigration ports, the former being especially necessary.

E.M.: Getting back to domestic policy, how do you rate Mr. Trump’s command of economics?

R.R.: If I could find a way to dress up in his tax program, I could scare the devil out of people on Halloween.

T.R.: (Teeth clicking audibly.) This is merely the plan, already tested and found wanting, of giving prosperity to the big men on top, and trusting to their mercy to let something leak through to the mass of their countrymen below—which, in effect, means that there shall be no attempt to regulate the ferocious scramble in which greed and cunning reap the largest rewards.

E.M.: G.O.P. leaders in the House don’t have any problem with that.

R.R.: (Chuckling.) Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the Democrats believe every day is April 15.

E.M.: Sir, when you left the Democratic Party long ago—

R.R.: I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.

E.M.: Right. You said then you were afraid it was stifling individual initiative. Do you feel the same way now?

R.R.: (Nodding his still-glossy pompadour.) The most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

E.M.: The Smoking Gun says Mr. Trump has changed parties at least five times in his career. Is he really an independent?

T.R.: (Laughing.) Nothing is as independent as a hog on ice. If he doesn’t want to stand up, he can lie down.

E.M.: There’s concern among pro-choice advocates that Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court appointments will lead to the repeal of Roe v. Wade.

R.R.: I’ve noticed that everybody who’s for abortion has already been born.

T.R.: (Getting very red in the face.) It may be very well to restrict some species, but I won’t discuss with anybody the thought of restricting my seed.

E.M.: Moving right along, I suppose you’ve heard that President Trump may ease restrictions on uranium mining near the Grand Canyon.

R.R.: Oh, no.

E.M. (to T.R.): If you could advise him on that, sir, what would you say?

T.R.: Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. Keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you. (Long pause.)

R.R.: Well, I guess that’s enough of a history lesson for today.

E.M.: I must say you both sound rather gloomy about current affairs.

R.R.: There have been times in the past when people thought the end of the world was coming, and so forth, but never anything like this.

E.M.: Do neither of you have something supportive to say to Mr. Trump as he faces three-plus more years in office?

T.R.: I wish him well, but I wish him well at a good distance from me.

E.M.: How will you feel if Mr. Trump is re-elected?

R.R.: Well—

T.R.: I shall feel exactly the way a very small frog looks when it swallows a beetle the size of itself, with extremely stiff legs.

Illustration by André Carrilho.

Profile in Discouragement

By A. Scott Berg

Two hundred years ago last March 4, James Monroe became the fifth man, and the last Founding Father, to take the presidential oath of office. He spoke with authority that day of the government’s institutions, knowing how they had held the new nation together during its earliest days of extreme partisan hostilities and later during the War of 1812. Through that conflict, the Star-Spangled Banner yet waved; and the United States (still employing the plural) took its place on the world stage.

Winning two-thirds of the popular vote and an electoral-college victory of 183-34, Democratic-Republican Monroe’s election marked the collapse of the Federalist Party. His inaugural address called for “harmony,” which this Virginian promptly demonstrated by naming John Quincy Adams, a northerner and the son of the nation’s most prominent Federalist, his secretary of state. Within months, Monroe took a “unity” tour, deliberately venturing to cities filled with opposition voters—particularly Boston, the last bastion of Federalism. There he exuded such modesty and charm, the leading Federalist newspaper, the Columbian Centinel, declared on July 12, 1817, that the country was experiencing the end of partisanship, what it christened the “Era of Good Feelings.” This exuberance redounded directly upon the president himself—arguably the best-prepared man in history to hold his office, before or since.

Monroe had devoted his entire life to public service—starting at age 18, when he left the College of William and Mary to fight in the Revolution, crossed the Delaware with Washington, and survived a near-fatal musket ball at Trenton; he befriended Lafayette, bunked at Valley Forge with future Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall, and returned to school, where he read law under Jefferson himself. Subsequently, his state and then his country kept endowing him with greater responsibilities—electing him senator from Virginia and then its governor for three terms, before Jefferson sent him on a mission to France to help negotiate the largest real-estate deal in American history, the Louisiana Purchase. President James Madison appointed him secretary of state and, during the War of 1812, asked him to serve as secretary of war as well. As president, Monroe advocated greater national defense and an infrastructure of roads and canals; and despite postwar economic turmoil and the incipient troubles that slavery was wreaking upon the nation (which Monroe quelled for a time with the Missouri Compromise), he ran for a second term virtually unopposed, receiving every electoral vote but one. Partly to curtail the expansionist ambitions of Russia, Monroe developed the country’s first significant foreign policy, a doctrine that bears his name and warns the European empires to stop colonizing in the Americas. For one brief shining moment, the United States had only one party; peace prevailed; art and literature thrived; and even when a recession interrupted the prosperity, the Era of Good Feelings continued to suffuse daily life in the developing nation, mostly because the citizenry shared unshakable confidence in its leader—a gentleman of extraordinary valor, vision, and value to the new republic.

Supreme Court justice David Davis warned in an 1866 ruling that the nation had “no right to expect that it will always have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution. Wicked men, ambitious of power, with . . . contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln.” And Monroe, he might easily have added.

The 45th president, Donald J. Trump, is our fifth chief executive not to have won the popular vote—though he is the only one to maintain that he did win the most votes and that his inaugural crowd was the largest ever. In addition to this fake history, Russian meddling in last year’s election now warrants some special distinction—an “explanation required” asterisk.

Nobody’s path to the White House was less like Monroe’s than that of 45*. Indeed, nobody has ever arrived at the presidency with so little experience in politics, government, or the military (though he claimed he “always felt I was in the military” because he had attended a military preparatory school). During the Republican primaries, he vanquished a phalanx of Republican competitors with divisive insults that suggested he was beholden to nobody; and in the general election he turned his opponent’s lifelong commitment to public service into a liability, suggesting that only a Washington outsider could “drain the swamp.” Without ever offering a detailed program for doing so, he claimed he could Make America Great Again. Even more than the gold-plated name that crowned buildings and was branded on steaks and a for-profit university, he banked on his being a television celebrity, the hard-nosed entrepreneur who hosted The Apprentice, a game show in which he abrasively dismissed a player each week with his trademark—“You’re fired!”

Television begat Trump, a vainglorious mountebank who evidently channeled Howard Beale, the “mad prophet of the airwaves” in the 1976 film Network who declaimed that he was as “mad as hell.” Last November, 46.09 percent of the voters said they too were not going to “take it anymore,” and they elected him. Since then, people keep discovering there was nothing remedial in Trump’s bumper-sticker bromides and hashtag philosophy. It was all just snake oil, a way to promote his personal interests, really, not to unite this terribly divided country.

While 45* heads the government, he lacks the essentials to lead it. Catering only to his narrowing base, he has cultivated no friendships in Congress: he offers little consistent support to the Republican legislators who could help, and he simply dismisses the Democrats, degrading everybody in the process. Like the large number of political amateurs whom he has cast in supporting roles, Trump wallows in his own ignorance, as a transcript of any of his unscripted remarks would reveal; even worse, he lacks curiosity, the one cure for his lack of facts; worst of all, he fills the void by just making things up, saying whatever pops into his head, no matter how incendiary. With several bodies investigating ethical (and possibly criminal) matters surrounding his White House, a Congress fraught with infighting flounders, and American prestige abroad founders. Transactional in his thinking, 45* is a checker player in a chessboard world. Almost single-handedly, President Trump has made Russia great again!

Excited more by competing than actually governing, 45* blasts reveille at dawn with provocative tweets and then lets the din of disputation rage all day and into the night. Because of his trickle-down pugnacity, railing against treasured institutions and confronting trivial enemies, 140 characters at a time, the populace lives in a perpetual state of frazzled nerves and grave concern. Trump’s self-puffery has almost become comical, but his exclusionary policies and constant humiliation of others—fill in your own blanks: women, Muslims, Mexican-Americans—have not. The president himself routinely throws his Cabinet members, the intelligence community, and his own press secretaries under the bus; he demonizes journalists; he shoved the prime minister of Montenegro, because the man stood between him and the photographer. He fires people as recklessly as he hired them. This White House still can’t answer a single challenging question without blaming Barack Obama or shaming the Clintons. He evidently missed Harry Truman’s lesson on where the buck stops.

Donald Trump did not create the ruthless partisanship and ethical lapses that have periodically plagued Washington since the halcyon days of Monroe, but he exacerbates them—with a vengeance. Mired in incompetence and sleaze, he has already re-pitched the tone of our times—with dog whistles and bullhorns—creating our current Era of Bad Feelings.

Illustration by Steve Brodner.

The Nixon Question

By Garry Wills

Sometimes a soaring rate of cockamamieness can leave us clueless about what to make of it and therefore unable to do anything about it.

Those are the times when we seek out something—anything—with enough similarity to the new person or thing, to guess what we are dealing with. We see that in the current search for something Trump-like in our past, to help get a handle on the Trump in our present. Some have been wild enough to compare him with Hitler—which is simply absurd. Comparisons with lesser figures are not very helpful, either. Some dredge up bragging demagogues like Senator Joe McCarthy and Governor George Wallace. But neither of them rose as high as the presidency. And both of them had some concept of law, of which Trump is oblivious. (Both McCarthy and Wallace not only were lawyers but had been judges.)

Thus the default comparison has become with Richard Nixon. Rumors (or hopes) of impeachment have brought back onto the stage the whole cast of surviving players from the Watergate affair. There are some superficial resemblances between Trump and Nixon. Trump, like Nixon, has bottomless reserves of self-pity. Nixon, like Trump, was contemptuous of the press. But the dynamics in their cases are entirely different. Nixon pitied himself because the press fawned on the Beautiful People—jet-setters of the time. (How is it fair that fate made John Kennedy handsome and left me looking goofy?) Trump pities himself because the press will not pay unanimous homage to the most beautiful person in the world (who has the biggest jet of all). Trump openly loves himself as much as Nixon secretly loathed himself.

Another resemblance is their humorlessness. Senator Al Franken, an expert on laughter, noted early on that Trump does not laugh easily, if at all. He can sneer at Lyin’ Ted or Crooked Hillary, but others, not he, are supposed to laugh at this. Nixon, who was not spontaneous at anything, could not laugh spontaneously. Esquire magazine ran an annual feature with the caption “Why is this man laughing?” next to an awkward picture of Nixon in mad cachinnation. Nixon was too guarded to laugh (“Are they laughing at me?”). Trump is too pompous to break his mien of majestic superiority. There is a kind of rough equality in laughter, a sense that we are joining the club of humanity.

The worst thing journalist Murray Kempton could say of any man was that “he has no sense of sin.” Nixon knew he had sinned but pleaded that it was in self-defense against all the anticipated sins of his enemies. Trump admits the Bible is a good book, but he cannot read it, since his name is not in it. A friend of mine used to say of an acquaintance that he had “an overdeveloped instinct of self-preservation.” That was true of Nixon. He had to mount defenses against anticipated attacks from all sides. In Trump, the need for self-adulation has overwhelmed his sense of self-preservation. He will do things to assert his magnificent magnificence, which only exposes him to greater peril (including the peril of looking ludicrous). He sees things no one else does: Muslim crowds cheering the Twin Towers down, record crowds at his own inauguration, all the “illegal” voters bussed into New Hampshire, the many blacks and Muslims who like him. He erases from his mind anything that does not please him at the moment. He promised to give up all his business ties, as so much “peanuts” compared with the office of the presidency. (He has given up nothing; in fact he is busily adding to his riches.) He would, we were told, be so hard at work in the White House he could not go near a golf course. He would release his tax returns—but only when an elusive audit was completed or when Hillary released all her e-mails. Apparently we are to learn the full horror of what we have put in the Oval Office only when he leaves it.

He claims a right to insult anyone or anything with impunity—whether it is women like Rosie O’Donnell, or war heroes like John McCain and Humayun Khan, or institutions like our “so-called” judges, or generals (he knows more than all of them), or NATO or the U.N., or scientists bringing off the “hoax” of climate change. It is tragically easy to think a man so petty he cannot be a deadly threat. But his is a monstrous pettiness, one of many anomalous combinations he pulls off—joining flashiness and furtiveness, from a man constantly on display yet hiding key dealings. He is a reticent blabbermouth. How to tally up the lies, to pick apart all the conflicts, to curb with the letter of the law a moral blindness on this scale? The truth is gradually dawning that there is no parallel to this thing we have lodged in our sacred Oval Office. He is that rarest of things, a true nonpareil.

Where will it end? The different legal procedures being explored—indictment, impeachment, mental disqualification—run up against his popular support. He has only a third of the country behind him, but its members have heavily invested their pride in his untouchability. They are a fierce and focused third of the country, against a diffuse and distracted two-thirds. Perhaps the only way an unparalleled menace can be countered is with an unparalleled and massive wave of moral revulsion. More people are growing ashamed of what we have done.

What did we expect when we let a man of dicey business dealings enter the White House without revealing his tax returns? How could we? People who have crawled to him are feeling the sickness of shame. Many do not want to work for him. He has a government of empty offices. Formerly reputable Republicans are wearying of the strange defenses they have felt bound to invent for him. Marches against him must increase in size and frequency. More people must resign from office on principle. More people must explain why they refused his offers of government positions. He degrades women. He degrades races and religions. He degrades us. The nation needs purification. May it come before it is too late.