How will history judge former President Trump?

this past week marked one year since the closing chapter of donald trump's presidency the january sixth insurrection at the capitol this morning rita braver talks with some historians trying to assess the trump years and their impact on america there's at least one thing that donald trump's critics and supporters congratulations mr president can agree on about his presidency he came in to be a disrupter and of all his accomplishments i think it's very easy to say that he accomplished that one jeffrey engel director of the center for presidential history at southern methodist university is one of a group of historians from leading universities around the country who convened via zoom last march his concept of the national interest was identical with his concept of his own interest trump inherited a mess uh it was not that he created a mess the middle east was in very bad shape their mission assessing one of the most unusual presidencies in american history this presidency has now ended one of the most unstable unconventional julian zelizer of princeton assembled the panel which will soon publish a book of essays on the trump presidency one thing that historians who have lived through the moment have that historians 200 years from now won't have is a sense of what it felt like to live in the moment it will be the third volume in a series which offered mixed assessments of george w bush and barack obama but unlike his predecessors donald trump requested to meet via zoom with the historians they shared the video of that session with us i have great respect and i thought if you're writing a book it would really be nice if we had an accurate book in fact we spoke with four of the historians who all agree that history's judgment of donald trump is likely to focus on two major events his response to the coronavirus pandemic it's going to disappear one day it's like a miracle it will disappear and his role in the insurrection at the u.s capitol we fight like hell and if you don't fight like hell you're not going to have a country anymore we'll get back to those in a moment but first during his one hour session with the group former president trump focused on what he sees as his administration's major accomplishments this will be one of the largest jobs ever built in the world for example generating a strong economy early in his term prior to the pandemic we were setting records in every way he touted his building of at least part of a wall between the u.s and mexico we did a great job on that and we got we did a very we did the wall that border patrol won and he proudly talked of upending u.s policy toward china china was very bad on trade you know that i did tariffs and everything else and really had a big impact it's a policy shift that president biden has continued trump i think helped most americans recognize that china needed to be stood up to and then there were mr trump's three supreme court appointees likely to tilt the court to the right for decades but when it comes to the full assessment of the trump presidency historians point out that his accomplishments were often eclipsed by behavior never before seen in a u.s president i can name kung flu he frequently commended himself i'm like a really smart guy then there was his use of social media people were fired or their appointments announced on twitter yeah and major policies were announced on twitter often causing real confusion and chaos nicole hemmer of columbia university also points to mr trump's extensive record of making false claims beginning when he insisted he had record-breaking crowds at his inauguration it looked honestly it looked like a million and a half people hemmer says not all presidents tell the truth all the time but this one had a singular strategy it is about lying as a test of loyalty everyone can see that the crowd size is smaller but if you are a trump supporter you have to side with him and that's a very different use of lies previous presidents sought to unify the country republican and democrat we are all americans but the historians point out much of president trump's rhetoric encouraged a divide his people versus everybody else you work harder but you are indeed smarter than them let's call ourselves from now on the super league with the super league on the one hand you had him speaking to people who legitimately felt like they'd been forgotten and on the other hand you had people say that he emboldened white nationalists and racists with this very same rhetoric which was it was absolutely both um that he was able to speak to people who didn't feel heard but was true but as somebody who studies white nationalist and white power movements those movements also heard something in what donald trump was saying that appealed to them the historians say that connection with white nationalists was on display after they clashed with counter protesters in charlottesville virginia in 2017. very fine people on both sides it was a march fueled by this white rage and white backlash and the president was unable to firmly just announce it still many voters were willing to overlook mr trump's provocative behavior then covet hit and polls showed disapproval of his handling of a pandemic that has now killed more than 800 thousand americans we have a totally under control it's one person coming in from china in his talk with the historians former president trump acknowledged no mistakes instead lauding his own handling of the crisis and so we got to work and we did an incredible job we had to go buy from everybody all over the world and it was tough because everybody else wanted to buy too the masks and all of it how did donald trump do with answering the challenge of kovit overall i think donald trump not only didn't do bad he did pretty terribly there were many opportunities where he could have taken decisive federal action and passed them up merlin chao kuan yen a historian at columbia university school of public health says that despite mr trump's claims he failed the country in major ways including on the rhetorical stage where a president gets to use the pulpit he instead used it to flout scientific expertise and then i see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute one minute and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or chokhuanyan acknowledges that mr trump does deserve some credit for the quick development of covet vaccines there are some people that say my greatest achievement was getting the vaccine but he adds that his follow-through on promoting and distributing the vaccines was weak if you had to give this president a grade on how he handled covid could you give him one probably go with a d you get that extra letter grade for some of the vaccine contributions but yeah a d and with the country reeling from covid donald trump lost his bid for reelection that's when he started down the path that historians say ultimately led to the other defining moment of his presidency insurrection and assault on the u.s capitol as his followers responded to his repeated false claims of fraud believing what's come to be known as the big lie that was a rigged election but we're still fighting it this is a president who did not like the results of an election did not like the fact that he was being voted out and decided that his personal interests were more important than the constitutional process nicole hammer says it was part of a pattern that began with lying about those inaugural crowds i think that when historians look back over the course of the trump presidency they'll say that little lie at the beginning was buy-in for the big lie at the end because that insurrection seemed to be the culmination of so many of the things that we saw as unique bizarre bad about his presidency we will never give up we will never concede it doesn't happen you don't concede when there's theft involved it was terribly destabilizing and dangerous to have members of congress and the vice president under threat in part of a a mob that's being instigated by the president mr trump denied that allegation it was very modest in many ways and it was a very peaceful speech but there was a lot of uh and there was a lot of love out there there was tremendous love mr trump did not discuss the fact that he was impeached for his role in inciting the riot becoming the first president in history to be impeached twice the first for his efforts to pressure ukraine into investigating the bidens though he was never convicted he's not the first president with a troubled term in office but still in the listing of american presidents is donald trump going to be at the bottom the middle the top yeah many people believe he's closer certainly to herbert hoover or james buchanan president of the ranking who left the country in a bad moment and the presidency did end with the economy incredibly fragile and unstable it ended with the pandemic raging and it ended with the country more divided than united from when he started if you had to give him a grade what would it be i don't think that a presidency that ends without a peaceful transfer of power can be considered anything other than a failure because of donald trump's culpability in that moment but mr trump still has strong influence in the republican party while teasing a possible white house run in 2024 nevertheless the historians we spoke to along with those in a recent c-span survey predict that in the long run donald j trump will be relegated to the bottom tier of american presidents jeffrey engel of southern methodist university donald trump has a unique distinction it's the only president who refused to honor democracy stop and think about that sentence it makes my mouth say how can you say these words and yet i don't think they're wrong

Channel: CBS Sunday Morning

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Keywords: CBS Sunday Morning, CBS News, news, former, president trump, donald trump, historians, essays, accomplishments, failures, trump administration, first time, rita braver, princeton university, julian zelizer, panel, academics, 45th president

Id: Q-HB0_94hMk

Length: 12min 9sec (729 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 09 2022