Presidential Historian Michael Beschloss did not mince his words as he made it clear that there’ll be no Trump rehabilitation, unlike other presidents.
Historian excoriates the president
The host, Mehdi Raza Hasan asked Michael Beschloss if presidents are concerned about their legacy. He said they are. How?
“They do it in terms of, you know, what can I do to make this country better so that 50 years from now people will say this is something that this president did that was distinctive, and maybe he did it against his own selfish political self-interest,” Beschloss said. “Hard to think of the case where Donald Trump has ever done that. “
Beschloss then went on to ridicule the president for his ignorance.
“Harry Truman once said he couldn’t imagine a president who does not read history because the only way a president, he said, can get any benefit from all the successes and failures of earlier presidents and earlier citizens is to know where they succeeded and failed in history,” Beschloss continued. “He said that every reader would not be a leader, but every leader must be a reader. If Truman came back and saw a president as completely ignorant and indifferent to history as Donald Trump, I think he would have been shocked.”
Later the host would balk at the historians not already considering Trump the worse ever. Beschloss edged but confirmed in his own way that Trump is, in fact, the worse by itemizing his failures.
“Well, a historian has to always account for the possibility that 50 years later, a president would look better in some ways than he did to his own generation,” Beschloss edged. “That having been said, Donald Trump is not going to change the record. He was largely responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans who did not need to die, millions of others who suffered from COVID who did not need to suffer, an economic calamity that is afflicting people tonight in a way that is not going to be alleviated by six hundred dollars or two thousand dollars, while the president sits in Palm Beach and the vice president sits in Vail on a ski slope, and the secretary of the treasury is in Cabo San Lucas in Mexico. This is really Nero’s fiddling while Rome burns.”
Enough said.