The Learning Curve
The Learning Curve-Trump and History
Recently,
I’ve responded in horror over some of President Trump’s statements and
decisions. And, then I re-read James Hohmann’s April 14th column in the Washington Post. “Trump doesn’t know much about history. It’s
making his-on-the-job training harder,” pinpoints the major problem with the
new administration. There is no
historical knowledge at the top, and there is no institutional knowledge within
the presidential organization.
A
nation has to have internal leadership and portals of knowledge. For example,
there needs to be someone who knows the history of diplomatic dealings with a
particular nation or a member of the White House staff who can explain the
voting procedures in the House or the Senate. The president, for instance, needs
to know the depths of American health care, or the history of US-North Korean
relations, or the failures of past Israel-Palestine treaties to know that there
are no “easy” solutions.
However,
it is far more important that the president be a student of American history. Quotes
like: “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job
and is getting recognized more and more,”, “Have you ever heard of Susan B.
Anthony?”, that Andrew Jackson took on the “arrogant elite”, and that Henry
Clay “proposed tariffs to protect American industry and finance American infrastructure”
are mildly correct but are more certainly made out of context. However, President Trump’s comment about Abraham
Lincoln: “most people don’t even know that Lincoln was a Republican” reveals a
true lack of any significant historical knowledge. This coupled with Betsy DeVos’ statement that
Historically Black Colleges and Universities were the "pioneers of school choice", and Sean Spicer’s comments on Hitler
in his comparison to al-Assad reflect poorly on those representing the highest
levels of the nation.
Unfortunately,
the president’s most recent quotes focusing on Andrew Jackson are more than
ignorant, but border on racism. Although
Andrew Jackson is the subject of numerous fine historical works, any reason for his
popularity in the twenty-first century is questionable. President Trump has a fascination with strong
figures, and this is visible in his choice of historical leaders as well as
contemporary ones. He likes Jackson
because he allegedly represented the “common man.” Yet, even in a historical
context, this was far from the truth. President Jackson was arrogant and an elitist. And, in the minds of many northerners, he was
equally uncultured. In reality, Andrew
Jackson was a slaveholder and defender of the slaveholding South. He was also
the president that challenged the Supreme Court and sent Native Americans
westward in the famous “Trail of Tears” with smallpox in their blankets.
To
believe that Jackson would have prevented the Civil War is more than folly. President Jackson died 16 years before the war
began, and if one could speculate there is no reason that he could have stopped
the war or favored the abolition of slavery. Unfortunately, President Trump’s
statements: “He was really angry that-he saw what was happening with regard to
the Civil War…There’s no reason for this” is the best example of imaginary or fake
hero worship.
It
is these gaffs that highlight the larger issue facing the nation. Clearly if
the president, his press secretary, and his secretary of education don’t know,
how many Americans actually know? Perhaps, this fact more so than any other
explains why people voted for Trump. They simply voted out of an emotional
context rather than based on real analysis.
Hohmann
makes the point that the president’s limited knowledge shapes his world view
and that this perspective produces Trump’s dark image of America and the world.
While most of us still see America as great, Trump sees it as losing. His
belief that only he can fix things relies on a great sense of hubris.
Unfortunately, to fix the ills of the world requires an understanding of its
problems.
Trump
supporters naively believe that he can shake up things and fix them. But this
emperor is losing his clothes so quickly that he will be beyond naked. And it does not help the nation that his mantra
coincides with the views of those who lack employment or are
underemployed. However, to whine and ask
the government for help is not the Republican way, and it is causing problems
for those who voted for Trump and now cannot gain the support that they sought.
And
this is the biggest conflict in this presidency. President Trump is attempting to bend history
and contort it to his will. His mixture of fact and fiction distorts how
government truly operates, it alters the nature of political truths and realities, and also
how politicians should relate to the public. In the 21st century,
the president cannot be a 19th century strongman. The tough
personality of a Jackson is neither desired or acceptable. Nor is it possible
to sell populist ideas without having a populist agenda. The desire to be all
things to all people does not work. Trump cannot satisfy the poor and working classes
and also the extremely rich. Acting decisively does not mean firing the acting-attorney
general or the director of the FBI. The
president has to accept that there are consequences for firing someone in the middle
of the day because he dislikes the fact that a government employee has gained
too much publicity and media coverage.
The
president needs a strong dose of reality.
Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, for example, is not Trump’s
Republican Party. The current
Republicans see Ronald Reagan, not Lincoln, as its standard bearer. But if we are continuing this line of thought,
President Reagan also needs to be given the Trump critique. President Reagan also claimed to be the
representative of the “common man.” He was
the leader who criticized the poor and wanted the end of social welfare entitlements. His administration was involved in
characterizing African American males as the face of crime and black women as
“welfare queens.” It was the Reagan-Bush legacy that produced Willie Horton as
an illustration of the failure of the criminal justice system, and argued that
Republicans were tough on crime. (Hence, it should not be a surprise that as
the nation becomes less white that Jeff Sessions, the current attorney general,
favors this type of criminal prosecution)
Perhaps
as President Trump sees President Reagan as a strong leader, maybe he is trying
to duplicate or emulate some of his actions by stressing that Latinos,
particularly Mexicans, are the face of crime, and that he will correct the
failing justice system by building a great wall. Or, maybe, President Trump is
trying to one up President Reagan by also suggesting that Muslims are equally
bad and they also need to be deported or imprisoned.
However,
If President Trump wants to continue in his nineteenth century fantasies maybe
we should consider Ben Mathis-Lilley’s article in Slate. In “Who Had the
Better First 100 Day? William Henry Harrison, who died on Day 31 or Donald
Trump?”, Mathis-Lilley argues that its Harrison! His description of Harrison as
“the scion of a wealthy coastal family who’d received and elite education and
lived in luxury, but was sold to supporters, during his campaign, as a
rough-hewn straight-talker who emblemized the values of the rural common man.”
Harrison,
by description, has a great deal in common with Trump. However, the well-educated, Trump who is always
telling the nation how smart he is, fails as an intellectual. George Will, writing
in the Washington Post, describes the
president as “syntactically challenged” as well as “an untrained mind bereft of
information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.” He suggests that the
only way to keep Trump in check is to have the public “quarantine this
presidency by insistently communicating to its elected representatives a
steady, rational fear of this man whose combination of impulsivity and
credulity render him uniquely unfit to take the nation into a military
conflict.”
Sadly,
a large segment of the population is unprepared to fulfill this task. What is
obvious, and becomes so more each day, is that many Americans are supporting an
anti-intellectual and frequently lying president at a time when factual
information is widely available. It
tends to suggest that Americans, not just the president, lack a real knowledge
of their history and world events. That there are segments of the nation that
are rejecting the truth and are denying the historical past. As a result, for those that openly denounce
the president, there are core supporters who believe his every word-whether
spoken or tweeted.
What
makes the nation look so bad to the rest of the world is the lack of ideology
expressed by the president and his team. America has a president that likes to
“sell” ideas or “bully” others into accepting his will. But these options are based on skewed notions
of history. American presidents, for
example, have a long history in supporting the one-China policy, which the
president violated in his first week in office (just because he wanted to!). The result was an unnecessary political
crisis, and then it had to be shrugged off adding greater insult to injury. Similarly,
the Chinese cannot be labeled “currency manipulators” in summer and fall 2016,
but not in spring 2017. Yet, once the
president met with the Chinese president, he changed his mind and simply altered
his previously held belief. There was no
apology or rational answer for the retraction.
Nor
can the president name his Jewish son-in-law the ambassador to the Middle East
without expecting some negative responses.
Neither can the president afford to be pro-Israel and support moving the
US embassy to Jerusalem during the campaign (and while meeting with the Israeli
prime minister), but after a meeting with the Palestinian president decide that
Jewish settlements in the West Bank are wrong, that he shouldn’t move the
American embassy, and that he should become a strong supporter of the two-state
solution. Policies of this nature cannot
change within a season for any reason because it not only disrupts politics at
home, it equally does so abroad.
As
the president prepares for his first international trip, the government nor the
people can allow their president to ignore historical truths and realities. However,
they continue to allow President Trump to praise dictatorial leaders of very
repressive regimes (Russia, China, Turkey, Egypt, North Korea, and the Philippines)
and invite them to Washington as long as they seem to offer some token benefit
to America. Clearly then, “America
First” means being willing to overlook repressive violence and human rights
violations. Such actions make it hard
for the world to believe that they should support America in challenging the
regimes in North Korea and Syria or imposing sanctions on Iran.
Similarly,
“America First” politics also enables President Trump to attack allies like Australia,
Canada, Mexico, and Germany if we don’t get favorable trade agreements. Such
thinking also allows him to demand that NATO nations contribute more to the
organization and that Japan and South Korea should pay America for its defense.
No
nation can survive with a leader who lacks a grasp on history and international
affairs. It is hard enough stepping into the presidency with a firm
understanding of history and existing alliances. One can only hope that Trump,
like many of those who came before him, starts inviting historians and other
academics to the White House for some nightly lessons before he has his evening
tweeting spasms.
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