Opinion: Trump is about to be history. How will history treat him?

Richard Nixon and Donald Trump may both be symbols of corruption and power-mania in the White House, but whereas some Nixon-era policies have been rehabilitated with the hindsight of history, it's unlikely the same will happen for Mr.

Then Donald Trump incited a riot at the Capitol that did more than transform the most sacred ground of American democracy into a crime scene.

Trump – entrusted with insuring domestic peace, but sowing civic conflict – embodied social disruption, political transformation and cultural contradiction.

He was the promoter of law and order who provoked the most serious political riot in American history.

He was the peddler of blatant untruths who accused the press of promoting “fake news.” He was the president who repealed the laws of courtesy that animated the American capital, who annulled decades-old customs of politics, who mounted a dangerous assault on the peaceful transfer of power that for 150 years was an emblem of American democracy and who allowed his darkest thoughts to come to blazing light in late-night tweets until even those became intolerable to consume and, eventually, with action from high-tech executives, impossible to transmit.

Trump.

But no president until the current occupant of the White House – not the feckless James Buchanan who sat by as the storm of the Civil War gathered, much the way Mr.

Trump in office – combined all those characteristics.

He alone had the signature mix of bluster and bombast, insults and imprecations, defiance and hard-headedness that he brought to the presidency, practised in the White House and seems ominously poised to be part of his years in the political wilderness.

He alone was impeached not once but twice, with the vote against him Wednesday the most bipartisan of any presidential article of impeachment in American history.

Trump prepares to leave office – his departure itself a fraught phenomenon, with no presidential precedent – the radioactive fallout of his four years shows no signs of dissipating.

“No one has seen anyone quite like him, and I am not sure we ever will again,” said Rafael Jacob, a political scientist at Concordia University and the University of Ottawa, who said that none of the President’s successors “will behave as a human being the way Trump has.

Trump speaks to a rally of thousands of supporters near the White House, and at bottom, the mob masses outside the Capitol Rotunda before storming inside.

Trump and his effort to retain office in defiance of the centuries-old tradition of the peaceful transfer of power very likely will present a puzzle to historians, who will come to their judgments long after the echoes of rancour and the shouts of passion of our own era have stilled.

Barring a surge into the academic ranks of a corps of scholars and writers who share his discrete set of attitudes and instincts – an unlikely eventuality, given the predispositions of the profession – the Trump years will be assessed by men and women who respect internally consistent political doctrines, who revere personal introspection and who prize public truth-telling, three character elements that Mr.

As a result, he faces an even more daunting task for rehabilitation than Richard Nixon, who left office in disgrace 46 years ago.

“Trump won’t be forgiven, as Nixon has not been – he has utterly no notion of the Constitution or democratic traditions – but at best history eventually may recall that he was an innate, gut politician with a good feel for the frustration a lot of Americans have.”.

Trump and his tumultuous passage, particular elements of the Trump record – separated from other parts of his presidency, shielded from the vulgarity and insensitivity of his personality, and isolated from his inflammatory rhetoric and his impulse to ignite insurrection – may seem congruent with some of the main currents of Western political life.

“He was vulgar and coarse,” said Lester Spence, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist, “but he brought together a coalition of white people who were dispossessed, the way FDR and Reagan did.”.

The scholars of the future may see antecedents of the Trump background – a man reared in elite circumstances whose appeal was among those with less polished an education and less comfortable financial circumstances – in FDR, but also in the British prime ministers Robert Peel, whose father was a Manchester cotton manufacturer, and William Gladstone, who came from a line of Liverpool merchants who, in the 18th century, dealt in enslaved people in the Caribbean.

In office they, as historians often put it, favoured “the masses over the classes,” with Peel’s support of the repeal of the Corn Laws infuriating the landed classes and with Gladstone – once described by the great British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay as “the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories” – emerging instead as “the People’s William.”.

Trump favoured, “simply, on his word, fell in line with him: they said, Gladstone right or wrong, we follow him.” So it was with Mr.

Trump confronted and confounded the political establishment with the way Margaret Thatcher upset both London’s left and right.

These historians of the future may consider the calculated, even contrived, populism of the Trump movement and find antecedents in the President’s hero Andrew Jackson, who in the contemporary racial reckoning is regarded less as a rusticated sage than as a ruthless killer of Indigenous people.

Heidler – that descended on the White House for his inauguration.

Trump’s putative allies did not say to him what Benjamin Disraeli wrote to Gladstone: “Don’t you think the time has come when you might deign to be magnanimous?” And, in examining his battle to claim victory in an election he decisively lost, future scholars might consider the remarks of the American historian James MacGregor Burns, who wrote that “the place that a great man holds in history” is “largely determined by the manner in which he makes his exit from the stage.” In that reckoning, Mr