History can't wait to get its hands on Donald Trump
Our assessments of even beloved presidents tend to worsen over time.
“Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, Redcoat general of British forces fighting the American Continental Army: Jobbery and snobbery, incompetence and red tape. I have just learnt, sir, that [Redcoat commander-in-chief] General Howe is still in New York.
Major Swindon: Good God! He has disobeyed orders!
Burgoyne: He has received no orders, sir. Some gentleman in London forgot to dispatch them: he was leaving town for his holiday, I believe. To avoid upsetting his arrangements, England will lose her American colonies; and in a few days you and I will be at Saratoga with 5,000 men to face 16,000 rebels in an impregnable position.
Swindon: (appalled): Impossible!
Burgoyne: I beg your pardon?
Swindon: I can't believe it! What will history say?
Burgoyne: History, sir, will tell lies, as usual.
—George Bernard Shaw, The Devil’s Disciple, 1897.
Donald Trump will soon graduate from griping about fake news to griping about fake history. The passage reprinted above demonstrates what a complicated progression that can be. Written a little more than a century after the events described, it’s a pronouncement about historical truth that appears within a fictional depiction of the American Revolution that’s festooned with made-up colorful characters. Burgoyne was real, but he never predicted that history would tell lies about him. Who would say such a thing? Historical figures typically assert the opposite—history will redeem me. In subverting that cliché, Shaw embeds within his artifice a witty dose of truth.
Which is fine as far as it goes. But as a practical matter, history—however imperfect—does better than journalism at capturing truth. Tempers cool, consequences become more evident, and additional evidence becomes available. Even journalists acknowledge that through their dutiful repetition of another cliché, this one attributed widely to Washington Post publisher Philip L. Graham, that journalism is the first rough draft of history. (The attribution, my friend Jack Shafer has noted, is itself a rough draft; there’s evidence Graham pinched it from Post editorial writer Alan Barth.)
My latest, for the Atlantic, describes the sort of information that we acquire about presidents only after they leave office—Richard Nixon being, for reasons explained therein, the gold standard—and also about the outstanding questions that history will likely confront about the Trump administration. I don’t pretend my catalog is comprehensive, but it’s a start.
My piece also describes some of the mechanisms by which we’ll learn more about Trump’s presidency, and the ways Trump has tried, sometimes successfully, to subvert these mechanisms. For a fuller account of how presidential archives have been maintained, or not maintained, throughout American history, I refer you to this excellent Nov. 16 New Yorker piece by the terrifyingly gifted and prolific Harvard historian Jill Lepore.
But if you have time to read only one piece, read mine.