I read a lot history books and biographies. Perhaps that’s why I find myself speculating about the histories that will be written about Donald Trump’s time as president of the United States, and in particular the period from Election Day 2020 to Inauguration Day 2021. I have no doubt that entire books will be written about these 78 days, during which a sitting president of the United States for the first time actively and openly attempted to subvert the outcome of a presidential election and discredit the American democratic process.
Historians will delight in recounting the ham-handed legal challenges. (How many of them will be able to resist including a photograph like this one of Rudy Giuliani?) They will relate jaw-dropping tales of brazen mendacity on the part of the president and his lackeys. They will shake their heads at the collusion-by-silence perpetrated by Republican leaders, and the nihilistic conspiracy mongering by right-wing media blowhards. And they will speculate at length about what it says about human nature and American culture that so many U.S citizens could witness the events of these eleven weeks and be hoodwinked by the demagogue in chief into believing that the election was stolen.
But these histories will not be primarily the story of how Trump and his minions failed to subvert an election. More than anything they will be the story of how he succeeded at shattering Americans’ faith in democracy. These books will belie two centuries of assumptions about what America is, how it works, and what its leaders can be counted on for. As they absorb the story of how Americans salted the earth of their own democracy, readers will ask the kinds of questions we might ask as we read The Guns of August: What were they thinking? How could they have been so self-destructive?
If Donald Trump had vanished from the scene when Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, we would be asking how many years it would take for America to recover from his malign influence on our country’s politics. But he didn’t, and by the time he’s done he will have so thoroughly undermined Americans’ faith in our democratic traditions that we must now ask how many generations it will take for the country to recover.