Maybe my thread title is bad, but let me explain; I am wondering how Trump will be OFFICIALLY remembered if, after 20-1-2021, it turns out that he was every bit as awful as suspected. Suppose that in 2021 it comes out he was in dutch to Deutschbank and various Russian gangsters, committed a large number of crimes, and then, after two years of him committing acts of near-sedition as he riles up violence against the government, he’s indicted on a raft of counts and flees to Russia or Saudi Arabia or some other dictatorship that likes him. It takes 5, 10 years at least to undo the social fabric damage done by Trumpism. Really bad, but short of actual treason or espionage.
Now, what I’m wondering is what happens to him being OFFICIALLY remembered. The USA has had some bad Presidents before, but all are at least respectfully remembered. They have portraits hanging in the White House. The recent ones have libraries. They have statues in their home town. Nixon resigned in disgrace but he is respectfully memorialized (in fairness he did good things too.) Franklin Pierce was inebriated for most of his Presidency, but no one took his portrait down. Harding was amusingly incompetent, but same thing. I’m sure there’s a statue of him somewhere.
Will they hang a nice portrait of Trump, given the assumptions above? Will he get a library with many copies of “The Art Of The Deal” and Ivanka’s books? Will there be a statue hoisted in Queens?
An obelisk with the names of the 150K people or so (so far) he personally caused the deaths of by willfully mismanaging the Covid outbreak would be nice.
Maybe his headstone could have a public urinal incorporated?
Honestly though, he should be remembered as a broken, weak man plagued with pathetic insecurities. And the GOP should be remembered as the people who propped him up, even in the face of torturing children, and needlessly killing over a hundred thousand Americans. He should be what Nixon was x10, an example of wretched corrupt failure and the people who supported him and wore the hat should be remembered like the racists in the 60s pouring milkshakes on people at lunch counters.
Nixon was forced to resign from office in the face of being impeached (and this was after his Vice President was also forced to resign). But he was still officially memorialized as one of our Presidents. So Trump, who managed to finish out his term, will get at least as much.
He’ll probably even get some statues. He has a surprisingly enthusiastic following who, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, think he’s done a great job.
He’ll be remembered with respectful paintings, marble statues and murals in heavily Republican areas and when the Republicans next control either House of Congress.
How SHOULD he?
Memorials to the COVID dead and a cautionary tale in schools everywhere.
I’m guessing that there will be a Trump Presidential Museum in Florida. They won’t call it a “library,” because Trump doesn’t read books. It will be privately funded and run; NARA (the National Archives and Records Administration) won’t be involved. It will essentially be what the Nixon Library was before it was transferred to NARA: a museum of presidential awesomeness and a gift shop.
He’ll be remembered respectfully with a portrait and library and what not. Probably even if he were prosecuted and convicted for something, which probably won’t happen anyway. I hate to see any additional money spent on him for anything (haven’t we paid enough?), but it will be.
If they invite him to a ceremony to dedicate his whatever (assuming he is still alive at whatever point that happens, of course) he will attend and make a big deal out of it as if he’s the only president that ever got a library or portrait.
But maybe they do a library only posthumously. I’ve never paid attention.
It’s actually common for the work to start on establishing a presidential library while that individual is still in office, or soon after departing office. Barack Obama started the plans for his library in 2014 (two years before he left office), and it took a number of years for the site and design to be finalized. It’s going to be on the south side of Chicago, near the University of Chicago campus. (I don’t think that construction has started yet, as there was a multi-year legal fight over the site, which is currently a Chicago park.)
That’s a fascinating case. The Obama Presidential Center in Chicago isn’t technically a presidential library; it won’t house Obama’s presidential papers and the National Archives won’t be running it. Instead, NARA and the Obama Foundation are digitizing the papers to create a purely virtual Obama Presidential Library.
In regard to Trump’s papers, there have been reports that the Trump administration has not been adhering to the Presidential Records Act, and Trump has a habit of tearing up documents his is legally obligated to preserve.
The date is January 20, 2120. No, that’s not a typo, this is speculating on what will happen 100 years in the future. The new president is being inaugurated, and she mentions some previous presidents she will want to live up to. One of the reporters asks her about the semi-mythical President Trump. She laughs and says “nobody can live up to him”.
I don’t know if current electronic records will be usable a century from now. None of us will be alive to correct the record, either. So somebody resurrects Wikipedia, and sees that it’s user-generated, but also requires links. Historians reading the article on Donald J. Trump’s campaign will see some startling information, backed up by reputable sources such as Associated Press and Reuters. Information such as the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference, part of the social media civil war between 45 and 46. The historians will put their heads together and decide that nothing written about the semi-mythical president can be true. It must have been a huge prank. He failed in the fight against COVID-2019, said it wasn’t serious, and then caught the very same disease? This is unbelievable writing. He was accused of collusion to win an election, then accused the next president of collusion with Venezuela?
Many tales told about Roman emperors Caligula and Nero aren’t fully believed, even though many of these tales were written by people who survived those reigns. These people had a bone to pick with these bad emperors, after all. Certainly they must have exaggerated their claims, etc. I think the same thing will happen to Trump.
In the shorter term, social media companies will probably be heavily regulated, and opinion might be further separated from news. I hope so, anyway.
I think a lot will depend on this. If in a short time, Republicans denounce him, or are generally critical of him, I think there could be some move to, say, not keep his portrait up in the White House, or make his presidential library hold him up as a cautionary tale. But more likely, they’ll continue to revere him, and deny that he was ever that bad. And the standard memorials will stand, because otherwise it will be seen as petty partisanship just like Trump refusing to hang Obama’s portrait.
Where will they do his library? Typically they’re affiliated with a university or some sort of historical foundation. Trump doesn’t seem to have much in the way of affection for any particular schools or even areas of the country like past presidents have. I mean, I suppose it might be in New York, but just as easily in Florida.
I kind of wonder if it’ll even be affiliated with a university, or if it will be, but some fundamentalist one like Liberty or Oral Roberts University.
I think the main thing he will be officially remembered for - and it is, in, fact highly memorable - is that he was a total political outsider who won a shocking upset victory against a heavily-favored, lifelong political insider. This applies to both the general election and the primary. He was a non-politician who spoke crudely and threw out all the old books about how someone running for office is supposed to act - attributes that probably will be summed up in official commemorations by the phrase “highly unorthodox” or “idiosyncratic” - and astonished the entire world by becoming President. This is, essentially, a neutral assessment of the situation.
