When historians rank the greatest American presidents, they usually put Franklin Roosevelt right behind, or even ahead of, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.
Woodrow Wilson claimed fourth place in Arthur Schlesinger’s 1962 ranking. Teddy Roosevelt often makes the top three. In C-SPAN’s 2017 survey of historians, Lyndon Johnson cracked the Top 10.
Wilson, Johnson, and the Roosevelts earn their high ratings for being wartime presidents who made massive impacts on the country. But not all change is good, and one should not conflate impact with effectiveness.
Conservative presidents get mistreated by these surveys. Calvin Coolidge, for instance, is typically dumped into the bottom quartile of “greatest presidents,” often below Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and Richard Nixon.
And those “great” liberals? Sure, Johnson did a lot, but was it good? He was a wartime president, and we lost the war after he quit halfway through. He declared a war on poverty, but by any reasonable measure, he lost that war too.
Wilson was more ambitious. His war was even bigger and possibly even more imprudent. He remade the civil service by resegregating it. He tried to forge a new republic by expanding federal power and bringing industry and government together in a clammy, collusive embrace.
FDR made the presidency much bigger, aggregating power to the extent that he was able to intern American citizens, punish farmers who ate their own crops, crack down on Jewish deli owners for working too many hours, and set up entitlements that are driving the country toward fiscal ruin today.
Historians go for the big, the loud, and the audacious. So on President’s Day 2018, we ask, what will these historians think of President Trump?
He entered office with the most ostentatious promises, pledging to leave behind the largest monument ever, a big beautiful wall, but, ironically, his tenure could end up remembered more like Silent Cal than like Rough Rider Teddy.
If you filter out the noise of his tweets and clangers and of the resistance, if you set aside the justified or unjustified speculation about investigations, and the personal scandals, and focus on policy actions, we are looking so far at a president taking modest but meaningful conservative actions.
Imagine some historian, who, 200 years from now, instructs one of his assistants to read the Federal Register and the Congressional Digest. That future researcher would come away from at least the first year of the Trump epoch with a very different impression than we have today about what it is and portends.
Neil Gorsuch, for instance, is an excellent and very typical pick for the Supreme Court. Deemed “Well Qualified” by the American Bar Association, with years of appellate law under his belt, Gorsuch is a careful writer and a legal scholar who will make an impact, not through memorable phrases or breaking barriers, but through meticulous reasoning consistently applied.
Trump’s foreign policy seems to some contemporary observers terrifying or dizzying. Is he too cozy with Russian President Vladimir Putin? Is he threatening war with North Korea? Does his anti-terrorism rhetoric bleed into bigotry?
But look at the military and diplomatic actions, and everything is well within normal bounds. An acute and sharp missile strike on Syria sent a message of seriousness whilst avoiding escalation. So far, there has been some saber rattling with Kim Jong Un, but there has been neither any conflict nor any solid reason to expect it, and at the same time, there may be some reason to believe that his tougher approach has some chance of doing better than the past 20 years of appeasement.
There have also been quiet successes. The Islamic State is widely understood to be withering, thanks to Trump’s intensification of Barack Obama’s methodical military operations to destroy the terrorist organization.
On the domestic front, Trump has been modest, too. If he gets a wall, it won’t be the dramatic monolith he suggested, but mostly an upgrade of the existing walls, fences, and other security arrangements at the border. His tax legislation was not a generational reform, but instead a welcome lowering of rates and curbing of deductions. Instead of repealing Obamacare in one sweeping move, Republicans under Trump are incrementally chipping away at it.
While we have hoped for bigger actions from Trump at times (such as a more drastic simplification of the tax code) and smaller words, we look around at the concrete policies of this White House, and we see something very different than Trump’s personality would suggest.
All of this is preliminary, of course. Trump has nearly another three years in office, perhaps seven. But if he continues on his current path, he could be a president who by historians’ standards doesn’t count as great, but that’s good.
