I’m just thinking about Nixon. He’s primarily remembered as the guy who resigned because he was so corrupt. And thus he became a joke. Certain Nixonisms are still done today to make people laugh. I don’t actually don’t hear any talk about anything good Nixon did.
Trumpisms are even more plentiful. He’s just very imitable and thus can make for easy caricature and parody. People will be paintting their faces orange, wearing a wig, and doing his accent and speech mannerisms.
But Nixon just has the one thing. Trump has so many. His entire presidency was full of shocking moments, and shocking moments are remembered. None of them are positive, either. Sure, he has supporters, but none of them have really any things he did that were big. Y’all mention his win, but he won while losing the popular vote, so that’s probably what will be noted. He won because of clear advantages in the system for Republicans.
In the digital age, there’s very little information lost anymore. While the media the information is on can die, the information lives on as long as it’s being used and moved around. While there’s some early Internet stuff that’s gone forever, everything else has pretty much been preserved forever. Maybe not a particular site, but there’s data about that site. The information the site contained is available.
The main way I could see some of Trump’s stuff being forgotten is not that we’ll lose records of it. It’s that we’ll have faced something worse. It’s that a lot of his stuff won’t be a priority. Like, sure, he’ll be remembered for bungling our first major pandemic in modern times, but most people are just going to remember how badly that pandemic went and hopefully how much better we are with them now.
As long as we keep out anyone worse, I could see him becoming the go-to for bad presidential actions. Nixon is sorta already there—he’s constantly used as the trope of “bad president.” But I think Trump eclipses him easily.
And I do think he might borrow a bit from those who weren’t completely failures at becoming dictators, and gets used just generally for “bad person” or “bad leader.” It’s already happened now, and it will spread as the negatives remain so much more memorable.
People support him now due to a feeling, but feelings fade while the facts will still be there. The more interesting, the more they’ll be remembered, and he lacks anything good that was interesting.
