One of the quandaries for presidential historians is that they sometimes have to actually speak to a president. If that president happens to be Donald J. Trump, they face an ever-widening spectrum of challenges, from spin and whining to exaggeration and outright falsehood.
Such was the dilemma faced by Julian Zelizer, of Princeton University.
Zelizer spent nearly an hour talking to Trump for a project that assesses the former president’s legacy in history. No gossip. No backstabbing. Just the facts about what Trump actually said — and did.
Zelizer is still trying to recover. Or as he told me in an interview this week: “It was surreal.”
Pointing out that Trump has been known to play games with the truth is a topic that pleases and provokes those on each side of America’s political canyon and its culture wars. Trump’s critics greet his exaggerations with upturned noses and a disdainful chorus of “I told you so’s” to those who voted for him. Trump’s supporters cry foul, claiming they are being scorned and mistreated by America’s media and liberal elites.
But how should historians treat Trump?
This is no small concern. Nor is it a recent phenomenon.
The truth conundrum that shadows Trump did not begin with his entrance into the White House. Here, in New Jersey and in New York City, Trump spent decades claiming — often falsely — that he had constructed the biggest, best, most modern of buildings, not to mention a billion-dollar financial empire. He promoted a line of steaks, clothing, even a university. His Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City was a “wonder of the world” — or so Trump thought before it went belly up.
But exaggerating your wealth or business accomplishments is one thing. Exaggerating presidential history is something else. And for most of his presidency, the issue of Trump’s manipulation of the truth lurked as the scholarly equivalent of Banquo’s ghost for historians.
To put it another way: When history is rooted in facts, what can be done with a president with a track record of twisting truth? And, in the end, who writes that history?
Zelizer, 52, the author of books on such diverse political figures as President Lyndon B. Johnson and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, has emerged in recent years as one of the most omnipresent of political commentators. When he’s not on CNN, his voice pops up in such magazines as The Atlantic — or, occasionally, in this column.
Last year Zelizer, who previously edited scholarly essay collections on the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, assembled 17 other historians to assess a wide variety of aspects of Trump’s presidency.
Think of this project as a first draft on Trump’s presidential legacy. Topics included the economy, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.
The collection has now been assembled into a book, “The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment,” which is scheduled to be published next week by Princeton University Press.
Trump heard that the essays were being written and asked for a chance to chime in. Hence the Zoom call, with historians connecting from across America and Trump, in blue tie, white shirt and blue suit jacket, seated in a leather chair and behind a wooden desk in an office at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
An American flag stood to Trump’s right. A water glass and a single sheet of paper sat on the desk. A day earlier, a poll of historians ranked Trump as one of America’s worst presidents — at the bottom of history’s dustbin with Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan.
“I’d like to see accuracy,” Trump began, his hands folded and his voice measured. Later, he added: “If you’re writing a book, it would be nice if we had an accurate book.”
Trump began with a nearly 30-minute monologue, then answered another 30 minutes of questions. The topics ranged from his handling of the U.S. economy to the NATO alliance to the coronavirus pandemic to trade with China. Along the way, Trump dropped several whoppers of exaggeration — that he “saved the steel industry” and created the “greatest economy in the history of this country.”
Asked how he chose experts for his White House team, Trump said: “I read a lot. I see a lot. I hear a lot. And I’m in a position as president where a lot of information is given to me.”
Regarding his handling of the COVID-19 threat, he said: “I really think we did a job like nobody could have done.”
Commenting on the Jan. 6 insurrection, he said the “real story” of what took place “has yet to be written.”
Trump claimed, for instance, that the crowd that assembled near the White House numbered more than a “million people.” (Not true, say federal authorities.) He further noted that the crowd was filled with “tremendous love.” (Maybe Trump missed those video clips of the crowd beating police officers.)
He repeated an unproven claim that the throngs that assaulted the Capitol building and disrupted the congressional certification of President Joe Biden’s election had been “infiltrated” by progressive activists from the Black Lives Matter and Antifa movements. He also blamed the police for mishandling the crowd. (Again, maybe Trump missed those scenes of the crowd mishandling the cops.)
Trump said the 2020 election was “rigged” and “robbed” and “stolen” from him — no surprise there. He’s been repeating that false claim for more than a year. But, perhaps realizing that he had overstepped the boundaries of fact in speaking with a group of historians who know how to research such claims, he slipped at one point and conceded “when I didn’t win the election.”
“He doesn’t want to be someone who lost,” Zelizer said in the interview with NorthJersey.com and the USA TODAY Network New Jersey. “And that is what a one-term president is. The idea that he is not one of the presidents who won reelection weighs on him.”
At the same time, Trump also wanted to burnish his legacy.
“He was trying to sell,” Zelizer told me. “He was telling certain stories that presented him as a very skillful, transactional president.”
Writing in The Atlantic last week, Zelizer added: “If anything, our conversation with the former president underscored common criticisms: that he construed the presidency as a forum to prove his deal-making prowess; that he sought flattery and believed too much of his own spin; that he dismissed substantive criticism as misinformed, politically motivated, ethically compromised, or otherwise cynical.”
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And one more thing Zelizer noted about Trump: “He showed little interest in exploring, or even acknowledging, some of the contradictions and tensions in his record.”
If you’ve watched and listened to Trump since he glided down the escalator at his Trump Tower office building in Manhattan in 2015 and announced that he was running for president, you won’t be surprised by what he now says.
Certainly, Zelizer isn’t surprised. As a historian, he has dealt with plenty of presidents who bent the truth, from Richard Nixon’s Watergate lies to Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War by falsely claiming that U.S. warships had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin and George W. Bush’s incorrect statements about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
“If you’re a political historian, you definitely spend time studying lies,” Zelizer told me. “But when you study those presidents, there is a sense they know they’re lying. They try to cover up and contain it. With Trump, he basically says what he wants and there are zero guardrails. I don’t know if he doesn’t have a sense of lying or he doesn’t care.”
Such a question may never be answered — even by our smartest historians.
For his part, Trump ended his talk with a Trumpian wish about the upcoming book. “I hope it’s going to be a No. 1 bestseller!” he said.
Several days later, Trump came forth with another Trump-like proclamation. He said he would no longer sit for interviews with book authors. He labeled the process a “total waste of time,” adding, “These writers are often bad people” whose work “has nothing to do with facts or reality.”
Welcome to the challenge for historians.
This is just the beginning.
Mike Kelly is an award-winning columnist for NorthJersey.com, a podcast and film documentary producer and the author of three, critically acclaimed non-fiction books. To get unlimited access to his insightful thoughts on how we live life in New Jersey, please subscribe or activate your digital account today. More background on Kelly can be found at mikekellywriter.com.
Email: kellym@northjersey.com
Twitter: @mikekellycolumn